Sometimes we talked of words, more often of things. We began and ended with specifics. At the time our sessions began, I was in dire need of specific advice; Elly, whose toileting had never given any problems greater than those posed by minor clean-ups, abruptly began to withhold her bowel movement for days at a time. Controlled as she was, withholding was easy for her; what was hard was letting go. For months she had been urinating only two or three times a day, but that had bothered neither her nor us. She had defecated regularly every day or two, in pants by day, or diaper by night. (It had been years since we had put her on the pot.) But this changed suddenly when David and I, luxuriating in the freedom provided by the loving and intelligent girl who was now living with us, went to Paris for an unprecedented eleven-day trip. All went beautifully in our absence. Elly was cheerful all day, and some slight nighttime disturbances soon righted themselves. Everything was as usual, except that though she gorged herself on canned pineapple and imported American apple juice, she had no movement all the time we were away. Even when we returned she could not let go. She suffered extraordinarily little discomfort, but clearly the situation could not continue indefinitely. It was no simple matter to find a cathartic that Elly would take; Elly as a rule allowed no unfamiliar substance to pass her lips. When she rejected Ex-Lax, however, I wondered if she were clairvoyant; never before had she refused chocolate. Finally she accepted syrup of figs, only to become frantic at the realization that her movement, now artificially liquefied, was out of her control. She would soil the diapers we now had to put her in and cry inconsolably, as never before.
The analyst at this time was an invaluable support. She suggested that Elly’s withholding was a silent protest against our absence; she checked with paediatricians at her London hospital and found a less frightening cathartic, which prevented Elly from withholding her movement for more than four or five days at a time. Consulting the doctors, she was able to assure us that this could not harm her — an assurance we have had constant need of, for this was another of the sudden changes in Elly’s behaviour patterns that became permanent. We were lucky that this problem did not arise before we had help. It would have been hard indeed to ride it out alone. Modern parents have become so sensitive about toilet behaviour that it would have been nearly impossible for us to proceed with steadiness without the feeling of a professional behind us.
Not that professional support gave us any remarkable solution, here or elsewhere; it merely helped us to adjust to a modus vivendi in which we avoided absences and trouble. The profit I got from my sessions with the analyst lay less in the recommendations she made for affecting Elly’s behaviour, or the occasional interpretations she made of it, than in the general atmosphere of her approach.
She told me at the beginning that I should expect her to make mistakes. For that I respected her most of all. She gave much good advice. Mixed with it was much that turned out to be inapplicable or irrelevant, and some that was wrong. How should it be otherwise? If there is to be trial, one must expect error. In our common groping for a forward way, what reassured me was exactly this: to find pragmatic flexibility where I had anticipated dogmatism, allegiance to fact where I had expected applications of theory. I had thought I would be led among the verbal mazes of Freudian analysis, but ‘ego’, ‘id’, ‘complex’, and ‘libido’, are words that occur more often in the course of a New York cocktail party than they did in my months with the analyst. It is true that there was a bit of ‘oral’ and ‘anal’, but considering our particular problem that was not surprising. I soon found that it translated down to ‘let Elly play with stoves and refrigerators and let the bathtub and potty toys go’. That seemed good enough. Elly in fact paid lukewarm attention to cooking toys, none to potties, and there was no possibility of cooling her interest in tubs. I never did find out to what extent ‘oral’ and ‘anal’ applied. But my friend the analyst’s interest was clearly not in matters of theory. She brought forward few interpretations of her own and she was less than enthusiastic when we ourselves came up with ingenious hypotheses to explain the increasing complexity of Elly’s behaviour.
One of these concerned Elly’s new ability to count. Naturally, this delighted us. Yet it had queer liabilities. Instead of expanding, as a normal child’s will, so that the child learns to count higher and higher, it hardened into a fixation. She had to have four washcloths in the bathroom, four cookies on the floor. She had to have them; they were so important to her that we called them her status symbols. We knew that intuitively she could subtract, because if one or two were missing she would reject any but the right amount required to make up the number. This was a gratifying display of intelligence, but awkward if the Co-op ran out of the proper biscuits so that lost or broken ones could not be replaced; it was then almost impossible to comfort her.
Focusing on this behaviour, as perforce we all had to, we noticed that the week after Jill came to us Elly added one cookie-and one washcloth. A short time later, she added two more — chocolate biscuits this time, somewhat larger than the others. Then, on our Paris trip when Jill and the children were left alone, the two chocolate cookies disappeared and four Ritz crackers took their place. A total of nine, grouped as five and four, was now indispensable.
Psychology is a game any number can play. Our Cockney cleaning woman, who was extraordinarily good with Elly, had suggested already that the four biscuits represented the four children, raised to five at Jill’s arrival. From then on the interpretation burgeoned. Jill put her fine young mind to work; the exigencies of replacing cookies which got lost or stepped on kept the problem in the forefront of everyone’s attention. Might not the two chocolate cookies represent the two parents? When they left the family circle, the five were retained, but the original four were now added to represent the confusion in Jill’s status, since it was no longer clear whether she was functioning as a child or a surrogate parent.
This hypothesis afforded us all a certain intellectual satisfaction. Myself a gingerly theorist, I had had no part in it, but I thought it a handsome attempt and reported it in one of my sessions. It had the air of some of the things I had read in the psychology books, and I thought it was the sort of thing the analyst would like.
She didn’t care for it, however. She cautioned me ‘not to make constructs’. I was surprised; I had thought applied psychology to be more than the method of trial and error I had been pursuing, cautious, hesitant, guided more by action and reaction than by overarching explanations. I was startled and pleased to find professional sanction for playing it by ear, especially since it was the only way I knew how to play. Her caution against constructs helped me, not to reject constructs altogether, but to feel free to judge them by their correspondence with the facts and not by the glories of their internal consistency. There were few constructs indeed, however probable, that made much difference to what I actually did with Elly. I could refrain from flushing out dirty diapers in her presence, as the analyst had told me to do, because the bowel movement is ‘the child’s first gift to its mother’. But since she continued to pay the process no attention, whether the change in routine reassured her or hastened toilet training I could not see that I would ever know. ‘Constructs’, whether our own or the work of professionals, were certainly interesting. In other cases, their applicability might be verified by the child’s positive response to changes in routine which they suggested. In this case, if there were such constructs we did not light on them. The only construct working here was one so obvious and so deeply shared that we did not need to talk about it: that all children, sick and well, feed on love, and that the job of the lover is to love, not in ways satisfying to herself, but in ways the child can accept and use to grow.