But I had had another baby and the baby needed help and so did we. We had sought expert medical advice and taken it. Yet how can one be sure one has done all one can? There are so many possibilities of help. An acquaintance stopped me in a supermarket; she knew of a man in Philadelphia who prayed with the parents of abnormal children and had remarkable success. A good friend wrote of a friend of hers, a theosophist and clairvoyante who was working with doctors in New York; she read auras. Later, others recommended the work of the rehabilitation Institute in Philadelphia; no one understood how, but by a demanding programme of physical therapy it was apparently possible to restore a large measure of function to the brain-damaged of all ages. Perhaps Elly could crawl her way to health. It is not with irony that I record these suggestions. Irony comes easier when you’re not in trouble. I have Catholic friends who pray for Elly, and I, who cannot pray myself, can use their prayers. If the friend who read auras had lived within convenient distance I might well have taken Elly to visit; I knew already that some individuals had powers with Elly that seemed near-magical. In a desperate case one thinks carefully before one rejects any course of action that responsible people think holds out some hope.
Many responsible people thought Elly should have psychiatric attention. One of our dearest friends actually knew a psychiatrist at a renowned children’s institute; they cared enough about us to discuss Elly’s case with her and tell us what she said.
Extraordinary things, it seemed, were being done with children like Elly, especially if you got them young enough. Time was passing. Elly was three and a half. Every month counted. We listened, and knew that we could never justify it to ourselves if we did not find out what possibilities psychiatry held for her. In the climate we lived in we could get by without crawling, or auras, or prayer. It was clear, however, that whatever Dr Blank said or Kanner reported, if we did not try psychiatry we would never be able to feel we had done all we could for Elly.
Once the decision was taken I was eager. I would no longer have to work alone. Desperately I needed helpers; at last I would have them. As I told my psychologist friend, ‘After a while my mind just gets exhausted. There are times when I can’t think of anything new at all. They have so much experience — they know so many play techniques they could show me .’
‘Oh, I don’t think they’d do that,’ she answered. Later I remembered those words.
We wrote Dr Blank. Noncommittally he agreed. I suppose he knew that the intellectual parents of a strange baby would not long be allowed to accept the irrelevance of psychiatry. We got in touch with the renowned children’s institute, in a city not impossibly far from our home. In treatment and research it was one of the most active in the country. We wanted the best. This was another decision we did not intend to appeal.
So began an experience as penetrating as our sojourn in the cancer ward, and more far-reaching in its effects.
The Institute’s approach was reassuring in its thoroughness. For a proper diagnosis, Elly should be observed over a ten-day period, and both my husband and I should be interviewed at length. For us to get away for so long was not going to be easy. The interviews would have to be scheduled in the short period between teaching semesters, and well in advance so we could get my mother to come stay with the other children. Knowing this, we had got in touch with the Institute early in December.
They were very understanding; they would get in touch with us to give us an appointment soon, very soon. We need not contact them. And then it began. We waited, with increasing anxiety, as December stretched into January and our semester break drew nearer. If we missed this chance we would have to wait four more months, and did not every month count? No letter came. It was six weeks before we were frightened enough to telephone. We got our appointments on three days’ notice. Luckily my mother was coming on the chance, or we could not have got away.
We were learning what we could never have guessed; that the Institute, although theoretically aware that human beings exist in social contexts and that family life is complicated, was not interested in visualizing any detail of the life that went on outside their large, comfortable building. They had no concern with the difficulties of providing for our children in the longest absence from home we had ever had. They had scarcely more interest in what we were to do with Elly during our first interview. We learned with some astonishment that we were not to bring her. Not to bring her? Where could we leave her? Surely at so well staffed an institution there were people with whom she could stay while my husband and I were interviewed? Apparently not. It was not their practice to allow parents to bring the child at the first interview. Luckily we were staying with kind friends who knew Elly a little; we could leave her with them without too much uneasiness. But we wondered about the other desperate parents who had brought children here from all over the country. Did they all have friends who were capable of baby-sitting for small psychotics?
But we were reassured all over again as we walked in the door of the Institute, a huge old house in a run-down section, shabby and pleasant and not at all slick. We waited with a group of mothers whose children were in therapy upstairs. ‘It’s all very well for them,' one said, ‘but I wonder if they know what it’s like, never to even be able to go to the toilet without him in there with me.’ We’ve come to the right place, I thought. These people are in the same boat with us, and if this place is helping them it’s where we belong.
My husband and I separated for our interviews. It was not their practice to interview parents together, where they could supplement, support, and correct each other. My interviews were with the social worker, his with the psychiatrist. So it began.
The social worker explained first what the procedure would be: three interviews for Elly with the psychiatrist, the same one who was seeing her father, an intelligence test, a session in the diagnostic nursery school, and a neurological examination. We would have to discuss what time would be best for the electroencephalogram.
‘The electroencephalogram?’ I remembered the disoriented baby, hair still coated with jelly, I had taken home from the hospital eight months before. Must Elly go through that again? ‘But she’s had an electroencephalogram! She’s had a lot of tests, she was in the Children’s Hospital for three days. Wasn’t it down in her history?’
Elly need not, then, repeat the electroencephalogram. But it was not their practice, she explained, to look at the history until they themselves had assessed the case. They had their own methods of finding out what they needed to know.
These methods are familiar enough, I found later, to those who know something of analysts and social workers. We, however, were quite unprepared. The situation seemed normal enough — two people alone in a room, one seeking information and help, the other able to give it. As teachers and as people, my husband and I were familiar with both positions. In spite of our shyness — perhaps, rather, because of it — we had learned much about bridging the gulfs between people. We were consequently slow to realize that the whole method of these interviews was so to set them up as to eliminate any possibility of a natural relationship between the two people in the room. The method was simple but rigid. We were not there to consult but to talk — to talk steadily, without guidance, without response, to an almost totally passive listener who was studiously careful to betray no reaction and volunteer no comment.