We felt, moreover, that any explanation must reach beyond a single symptom. We had learned it was no lack of strength or coordination that prevented Elly from using her hands. We could suspect that what limited her use of her eyes was no physical disability, but the same mysterious defect of will. As she did not reach out with her body, so she did not explore with her eyes. Those who attach no significance to what they see are in their own way blind. The task we had before us was not to improve Elly’s vision, but to extend the range of what she found worth looking at, to help her find meaning in what we were reasonably sure she saw.
For what Elly thought significant she seemed to see well enough. If she didn’t notice dogs or cows at a distance, she didn’t notice them up close either. She ignored our cat even more thoroughly than she ignored her siblings. But there were things she did not ignore — colours, abstract shapes. There was no question that she saw these.
One day — she was two years and eight months old — I was putting on her snowsuit. Ordinarily she was eager to go out, but today she acted oddly. Instead of submitting passively to being dressed, she tried to get away, and as soon as the suit was on she headed upstairs. I waited, and when she didn’t return, went up and found her absorbed in a set of parquet shapes I had put out on a bureau, in hopes of getting her interested. She had caught sight of them while I was carrying her downstairs and had clearly decided she wanted to play with them. Hence the resistance and the return.
The set is of a common type, composed of diamonds, right triangles, and squares of four different colours, which may be assembled in various ways. Elly, as I watched incredulous, selected four diamonds and combined them into a larger diamond, rejecting in the process a couple of right triangles that came to hand. She did this twice more, then began on the squares, working with a concentration that is difficult to describe. For twenty minutes her whole attention was focused on the task. The abstract, meaningless shapes seemed to have intrinsic importance for her. Discriminating between them was easy. Yet this was a child of whose intelligence we were in grave doubt, whom it seemed impossible to interest in the usual toys, whose ordinary play was little more than sifting sand through her fingers or arranging blocks in parallel lines.
I put the set away when she had finished. I did not want this play to degenerate into sterile perseveration any faster than it had to. I got it out two weeks later and she arranged the pieces by colour as well as by shape. A week later, on another toy, she discriminated stars, octagons, and hexagons as well. But the fine concentration was gone. This was too easy to be interesting. There seemed no place to go from here. Once she had mastered them, I could think of little to be done with shapes.
There were of course puzzles. These involved shape-discrimination, and might lead to the recognition of pictures, but so far I had only minor success with them. Six months before — she was only a little over two — I had got out the easiest of the children’s wooden puzzles. It represented Puss in Boots. There were seven wooden pieces, one for the head, one for the body, two arms, two booted legs, and a tail. Elly was able, unprompted, to put in the easier pieces, but others presented physical difficulties; to get them in she would have to adjust them slightly or exert a small physical pressure. This was too much to ask. She became frustrated and I put in the other pieces myself. She showed no sign she recognized the pieces as head or boots, or ultimately as cat.
I kept on with puzzles, off and on, but Elly rarely put in a piece herself. She would look on while I did one, without enthusiasm but with more attention than she showed most things. To involve her in the play and to test her knowledge of the puzzle I would place a piece wrong. Unerringly her hand would touch mine to indicate the correct position. By two and three-quarters, the age when she discovered the parquet blocks, she had, so to speak, a passive mastery of three puzzles at or above her age level. I suspected she could do more, but had not yet thought of a way to manage it.
It was not for some weeks that the breakthrough came. Elly was nearly three. Two weeks before, in Boston while she was hospitalized for testing, we had shopped for toys and found a very much simpler puzzle than those she was used to — only five pieces, each of which fitted unambiguously into a slot of its own. With this I hoped to tempt Elly to use those hands and eyes that could do so much more than they would — to complete a puzzle for herself.
It worked. Elly showed her usual unwillingness to pick up the pieces, but it was so easy that apparently she couldn’t resist. Problems like reversal of pieces that had frustrated her in harder puzzles she solved immediately. She liked the easy puzzle. In the next couple of weeks she did it often — often enough so that I knew she would soon lose interest in it, as she had already lost interest in the others.
I put the new puzzle away, and when I brought it out again the next week I brought out the three old ones with it. I put the pile in a new place in a different room to provide a new context, since she had ceased to be interested in them in the old one. The easy puzzle was on the top. For the first time in a week she rapidly assembled and disassembled it, but she did not stop there. The cat puzzle was on the bottom of the pile. Elly got it out on her own and started to do it. She put in the easy pieces with her own hand, without hesitation. The cat’s two boots, however, are similar but not interchangeable; it is easy even for an adult to confuse them. When they would not fit, Elly whimpered and took out all the pieces she had put in. I helped her with the boots, and we finished the puzzle together. When a piece resisted, I took her hand and made it pat the piece into place. The following day, while I looked on unknown to her, she found the cat puzzle and did it completely, boots and all, patting down the pieces exactly as I had shown her.
The easy puzzle was what had done the trick. Again the principle was illustrated: in teaching Elly a new skill, it was not enough to be sure it lay within her demonstrated capability. It must be well within; it must be so ridiculously simple that it could present no challenge, afford no threat, make no apparent demands on future performance. Only then would Elly dare to commit herself. I knew that. I had learned it with the spoon, the cup, the rings on a stick. But what seems clear now was groping then. I was not so different from Elly. Like her, with her, I had to learn the same things over and over again.
Now Elly could do puzzles. She could grasp a new puzzle in no time at all. Most children, doing puzzles, are guided by the picture, not by shape alone. But Elly saw the shapes so exactly that she needed nothing more to clue her. She could do a puzzle face down — picture invisible, shapes reversed. The pile grew call. The cat was joined by a fish, an elephant, a fire engine. Elly would amuse herself by dumping out all the pieces of all the puzzles It made a fine mess. But when we picked them up Elly could classify the pieces according to their puzzles of origin better than I. Her discrimination of shape and colour was astounding. But did she see the picture itself? In assembling the ca did she make the slightest use of the fact that the boots belonged at the bottom of the puzzle while the head belonged at the top?
Apparently she did not. Five months afterwards she still could not master one piece of the simplest puzzle of all — another five-piecer we’d got after the success of the first. This piece represented a yellow sun, its shape and dimensions virtually identical in every direction. The only clue to its proper orientation was not its shape or colour, but its painted eyes, if the piece was placed so these appeared at the top, it would fit in easily. This simple cue Elly could not learn to recognize. Eyes — faces — were simply not within her scheme of relevance. That piece continued to frustrate her when ostensibly far more difficult puzzles did not.