7. Willed Isolation
As I describe, I articulate. I divide into parts, I imply relationships, I put one thing first and not another. I cannot avoid doing this; I must articulate to write things down at all. I must analyse, and as I analyse I falsify. Experience as analysed is no longer experience as lived. Weakness, blindness, deafness, isolation: I have divided one thing four ways, but it is still one thing. This chapter will deal explicitly with Elly’s remoteness and the methods we devised for affecting it, but it is a new chapter, not a new subject. Elly’s inability to relate — to use the psychological jargon I have had to learn the knack of — has been implicit in all the phenomena I have described so far. If I say Elly was reluctant to use her hands, or if I say she used other people’s hands as tools without regard to their existence as human beings, I am giving two alternative descriptions, but of a reality that was not divided but single. Elly did not see, but most of what she did not see was people. She did not hear, but most of what she did not hear was people’s voices, most of what she did not under-stand was their words and their concerns. She did not speak; it would have been extraordinary if she had. A child reluctant to use even her hands as a tool is hardly likely to trouble to acquire the master tool of speech, which has its inception in an acknowledgement of other people — of need, of contact, of interdependence.
Of all Elly’s inabilities, which should be taken as primary? Should we do what seems natural and emphasize the most striking symptom, the isolation-in-self which gives the autistic condition its very name? Or do the phenomena call for deeper scrutiny? Should we posit some defect profounder than all these which would explain them all — some inability of the brain, perhaps, to decode its perceptions or render them usable? Might the new individual, faced with a world in which an unreadable welter of impressions obscures even the distinction between objects and human beings, wall itself up as a defence against the anarchy outside? Psychologists formulate the question in their own language: which is primary, disorder of affect — roughly, feeling or emotion — or dysfunction of cognition? But even for psychologists the answer is years away.
It is fortunate, then, that one needs no answer in order to go to work. Which is primary? It is an analytical question. In the living whole, nothing comes first. Work done on any one of Elly s inabilities affected the others. Every game we played, every exercise we devised to extend Elly’s use of her body, her eyes, her ears, her voice, her mind, worked in addition to breach that jealously guarded isolation which for those who lived with her remained the most obvious and the most terrible aspect of her condition.
Other children are paralysed, deaf, dumb — not in effect merely, but in very truth. But these children feel, react, relate. Whatever their disabilities, some force within them drives them outside the wall raised by their handicap to make contact with the world. If blind, they explore with their fingers, if dumb, they grab for what they want or push out some inarticulate cry. What is one to think, feel, and do when confronted by a two- year-old — one’s own — who makes no exploration or approach, who expresses neither hostility nor anger, and who wants nothing?
The autistic child is complete in itself. Its every action — or inaction — functions to keep it that way. Elly’s consciousness seemed empty, her responses simple or nonexistent, her activities rudimentary. Yet as we lived with her at that time of her most extreme withdrawal, what impressed us was not, as one might expect, the inadequacy of this child, but rather the extraordinary degree to which her environment was within her control. Having found ways to keep her world one that she could cope with, she was the most undisturbed of ‘disturbed children’.
A normal two-year-old experiences in a day more of anxiety and frustration than came to Elly in a week.
Elly’s inabilities operated to tailor the environment to her needs. If you decide, at eighteen months, to spend the rest of your life sitting in the middle of the rug, who has problems?Certainly not you. When you take the risk of getting up, walking, wanting things, attaching yourself to people, exploring the world and acting in it — in short, assuming your humanity — then you have problems. As we all have. Perhaps we are naive to be surprised at Elly. Perhaps we should rather be surprised that the normal baby creature meets this tough world with such ready welcome.
But surely we are talking metaphor, not fact. At thirteen, fifteen, eighteen months, what could Elly have decided? To speak of a baby’s decision is preposterous. Yet as we lived with our baby, month after month, it seemed as if — as if — some such decision had been made.
Much later, when we began to know enough about our own situation to look beyond it, I found the exhaustive book we had needed so long. It hadn’t been written when our trouble came upon us. The field is as new as that. Elly was six when Bernard Rimland’s Infantile Autism[1] was published; we did not come upon it for several months. We read in it with wonder of child after child who could have been Elly herself. One of them, I remember, would eat ice cream with pleasure when placed in its mouth, but would make no effort to get it. It seemed to me that this could stand as the model of autism. It is this phenomenon that any explanation of the condition must elucidate, and this that any treatment must try to change.
Those who pay homage to an ideal of total self-sufficiency have never seen the thing itself. That secret smile may be the Buddha’s, but it is monstrous seen on a baby’s face. To conquer craving is indeed to conquer pain, but humanity goes with it. That Elly wanted nothing was worst of all. That was where we started.
It was bad, too, when she began — rarely at first, then more often — to want something, and to take your arm and throw it towards the object of desire. But it was better.
As weeks passed, the peremptory grab gave place to a touch of feather delicacy, a pressure exquisitely adjusted to attain no more and no less than the required response. This was easier to take. We could interpret this new gentleness as an emergent consciousness of people and their feelings. That was an encouraging way to look at it. But it was equally explainable as an application of a principle of which Elly had an intuitive grasp, the Principle of Least Effort. A mere touch, now, was enough to bring Elly what she wished. But that we were attuned to Elly did not necessarily mean that she was attuned to us. The rude touch and the gentle one were equally detached.
Another mother, writing of another such little girl,[2] has called her ‘the child in the glass ball’. What is the task of those who try to touch the untouchable, to reach those who have found reasons to keep themselves separate? How is one to render the world desirable to those who do not desire it? One holds out a flower, a soft doll, an orange candy. One points at a bird. All are ignored, this time and the next and the next. How does one convey that touch and sight and sound promise pleasure, that the world rewards those who interest themselves in its varied faces? How — most lacerating question of all — does one reach that walled entelechy with news that people exist, that they are warm and loving and have need of each other?
1
Infantile Autism: The Syndrome and Its Implications for a Neural Theory of Behavior, Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1964.