They had given me no hint of her positive powers, her ability to perceive the real world—the world of nature, and perhaps of the imagination—as a coherent, intelligible, poetic whole: her ability to see this, think this, and (when she could) live this; they had given me no intimation of her inner world, which clearly was composed and coherent, and approached as something other than a set of problems or tasks.
But what was the composing principle which could allow her composure (clearly it was something other than schematic)? I found myself thinking of her fondness for tales, for narrative composition and coherence. Is it possible, I wondered, that this being before me—at once a charming girl, and a moron, a cognitive mishap— can use a narrative (or dramatic) mode to compose and integrate a coherent world, in place of the schematic mode, which, in her, is so defective that it simply doesn’t work? And as I thought, I remembered her dancing, and how this could organise her otherwise ill-knit and clumsy movements.
Our tests, our approaches, I thought, as I watched her on the bench—enjoying not just a simple but a sacred view of nature— our approach, our ‘evaluations’, are ridiculously inadequate. They only show us deficits, they do not show us powers; they only show us puzzles and schemata, when we need to see music, narrative, play, a being conducting itself spontaneously in its own natural way.
Rebecca, I felt, was complete and intact as ‘narrative’ being, in conditions which allowed her to organise herself in a narrative way; and this was something very important to know, for it allowed one to see her, and her potential, in a quite different fashion from that imposed by the schematic mode.
It was perhaps fortunate that I chanced to see Rebecca in her so-different modes—so damaged and incorrigible in the one, so full of promise and potential in the other—and that she was one of the first patients I saw in our clinic. For what I saw in her, what she showed me, I now saw in them all.
As I continued to see her, she seemed to deepen. Or perhaps she revealed, or I came to respect, her depths more and more. They were not wholly happy depths—no depths ever are—but they were predominantly happy for the greater part of the year.
Then, in November, her grandmother died, and the light, the joy, she had expressed in April now turned into the deepest grief and darkness. She was devastated, but conducted herself with great dignity. Dignity, ethical depth, was added at this time, to form a grave and lasting counterpoint to the light, lyrical self I had especially seen before.
I called on her as soon as I heard the news, and she received me, with great dignity, but frozen with grief, in her small room in the now empty house. Her speech was again ejaculated, ‘Jack-sonian’, in brief utterances of grief and lamentation. ‘Why did she have to go?’ she cried; and added, ‘I’m crying for me, not for her.’ Then, after an interval, ‘Grannie’s all right. She’s gone to her Long Home.’ Long Home! Was this her own symbol, or an unconscious memory of, or allusion to, Ecclesiastes? ‘I’m so cold,’ she cried, huddling into herself. ‘It’s not outside, it’s winter inside. Cold as death,’ she added. ‘She was a part of me. Part of me died with her.’
She was complete in her mourning—tragic and complete— there was absolutely no sense of her being then a ‘mental defective’. After half an hour, she unfroze, regained some of her warmth and animation, said: ‘It is winter. I feel dead. But I know the spring will come again.’
The work of grief was slow, but successful, as Rebecca, even when most stricken, anticipated. It was greatly helped by a sympathetic and supportive great aunt, a sister of her Grannie, who now moved into the house. It was greatly helped by the synagogue, and the religious community, above all by the rites of ‘sitting shiva’, and the special status accorded her as the bereaved one, the chief mourner. It was helped too perhaps by her speaking freely to me. And it was helped also, interestingly, by dreams, which she related with animation, and which clearly marked stages in the grief-work (see Peters, 1983).
As I remember her, like Nina, in the April sun, so I remember her, etched with tragic clearness, in the dark November of that year, standing in a bleak cemetery in Queens, saying the Kaddish over her grandmother’s grave. Prayers and Bible stories had always appealed to her, going with the happy, the lyrical, the ‘blessing’ side of her life. Now, in the funeral prayers, in the 103rd Psalm, and above all in the Kaddish, she found the right and only words for her comfort and lamentation.
During the intervening months (between my first seeing her, in April, and her grandmother’s death that November) Rebecca— like all our ‘clients’ (an odious word then becoming fashionable, supposedly less degrading than ‘patients’), was pressed into a variety of workshops and classes, as part of our Developmental and Cognitive Drive (these too were ‘in’ terms at the time).
It didn’t work with Rebecca, it didn’t work with most of them. It was not, I came to think, the right thing to do, because what we did was to drive them full-tilt upon their limitations, as had already been done, futilely, and often to the point of cruelty, throughout their lives.
We paid far too much attention to the defects of our patients, as Rebecca was the first to tell me, and far too little to what was intact or preserved. To use another piece of jargon, we were far too concerned with ‘defectology’, and far too little with ‘narratol-ogy’, the neglected and needed science of the concrete.
Rebecca made clear, by concrete illustrations, by her own self, the two wholly different, wholly separate, forms of thought and mind, ‘paradigmatic’ and ‘narrative’ (in Bruner’s terminology). And though equally natural and native to the expanding human mind, the narrative comes first, has spiritual priority. Very young children love and demand stories, and can understand complex matters presented as stories, when their powers of comprehending general concepts, paradigms, are almost non-existent. It is this narrative or symbolic power which gives a sense of the world—a concrete reality in the imaginative form of symbol and story— when abstract thought can provide nothing at all. A child follows the Bible before he follows Euclid. Not because the Bible is simpler (the reverse might be said), but because it is cast in a symbolic and narrative mode.
And in this way Rebecca, at nineteen, was still, as her grandmother said, ‘just like a child’. Like a child, but not a child, because she was adult. (The term ‘retarded’ suggests a persisting child, the term ‘mentally defective’ a defective adult; both terms, both concepts, combine deep truth and falsity.)
With Rebecca—and with other defectives allowed, or encouraged in, a personal development—the emotional and narrative and symbolic powers can develop strongly and exuberantly, and may produce (as in Rebecca) a sort of natural poet—or (as in Jose) a sort of natural artist—while the paradigmatic or conceptual powers, manifestly feeble from the start, grind very slowly and painfully along, and are only capable of a very limited and stunted development.
Rebecca realised this fully—as she had shown it to me so clearly, right from the very first day I saw her, when she spoke of her clumsiness, and of how her ill-composed and ill-organised movements became well-organised, composed and fluent, with music; and when she showed me how she herself was composed by a natural scene, a scene with an organic, aesthetic and dramatic unity and sense.