When Silvia Rayces (we are married) gave the above a first reading, it reminded her of her perception and conception of her childhood past. She told me the story as she remembers it, and it shows the tension between our original vision and the way the external world sees through meaning perspectives we have not adopted.
When she was very young, her vision kept its freshness and originality. The forms she made from common objects differed from that which others saw. Silvia saw what made sense to her directly, and the others, including parental figures, saw what meaning perspectives they had learned and through which they saw. Silvia loved a doll and held this doll a great deal of the time. Her mother bought a baby crib for the doll for Silvia to use—as a baby crib. However, Silvia saw the bed as a perfect kind of couch or love seat for herself to sit on and hold her doll that way. She sat down on the love seat, and her mother corrected her when she saw what Silvia did. Silvia explained what she saw and why she sat. The mother explained in return that she bought that crib, and it wasn't meant for sitting, it was meant to serve as a bed for the doll to lie down on and take a nap or sleep through the night. Silvia nodded, and she might have laid the doll down as her mother watched, but when alone, she went back to sitting comfortably on her loveseat and lovingly holding the doll as closely as she could.
Silvia went through the same sort of tensions between her vision based on her way of seeing and her way of feeling the world and the meaning perspectives others knew that she should see. When Silvia received a doll house, she saw it and used it as a car while lovingly holding her the doll she cared for. Later, Silvia heard her mother talking to someone and the mother made this definitional statement about Silvia and her outside the conformist meaning perspective behavior: "Silvia always seems to find a way to turn her toys into something else."
The tension between a personal vision, the vision of the self and the meaning perspective defined perception and conception of the world happens to children and to all of us at any age a good deal of the time. People often ask us to "see it my way." So long as they ask for understanding in that way, it works. When they mean us to surrender to their perception and conception of the world, it doesn't work—not for us. Seeing, perceiving, conceiving all function as an essential learning tool and eventually motivate choices and actions. In this case, Silvia felt her own perspective profoundly. She wanted to hold the doll and give it the unconditional positive regard she wanted for herself. She showed our desire for the unconditional comes along with a desire to give the unconditional and feel it received without threat or conditions of acceptance. The doll, other toys, blankets and all manner of objects offer themselves to children and adults for such attention. In that way of seeing, separation from the doll made no sense. Putting the doll in a crib, an act of separation, made no sense. Putting the doll in a house also meant separation, not something that promotes that feeling of the unconditional Silvia very much wanted to express with and through the doll. The mother held a meaning perspective that wanted normative or conformist behavior. The crib said "Doll Crib" on the box with a picture of a little girl putting a doll in the crib. It cost money, and the receipt read, "Doll Crib," so that was its purpose. She paid for that purpose, and she meant Silvia to fulfill that purpose. Silvia did not do so, and in that way, the mother felt some level of disturbance and disappointment. She turned that into something humorous about her child, but this would feel like a condition for regard or a withdrawal of regard to Silvia. She could not feel accepted for what her becoming self wanted in the world, and she began to learn the lesson of meaning perspectives: learn them, do them, integrate them, become them, and conform.