Skilled therapists do wonders without talk, working with objects and with direct play. But they must come to words at last; if the child is to move into a speaking world, they must acquire his language with him until he can speak the common tongue. When I took Elly, at five, to her present psychiatrist, he recognized how far he was from understanding her and how long it would take him to begin to do it. This was, in fact, an important reason why he left me on my own. In so severe a case the process was long, he said, and the advantage doubtful. And-as neither of us had to remind the other — psychiatry is a well- paid profession. Which brings me to another advantage of using parents as therapists. They work for nothing.
It would be more graceful, perhaps, not to press this point, particularly since we were fortunate enough so that for us it need not be decisive. But for many parents it is — for us it would have been if Elly had been born when we were younger. To overlook it would be unrealistic and unfair. Children with severe afflictions — call them psychoses, defects, or what you will — need intensive therapy if they need any — if not in a residential school, then daily. But the price of intensive contact continued over years is beyond the resources of all but the well-to-do, and even they cannot absorb it without strain. The family that cannot afford therapy, or enough of it, has one recourse. The parents are going to be on hand anyway. Every family can afford the services of its mother.
The last advantage possessed by parents, and by other amateurs with them, may well be a certain humility. This humility will grow out of their very consciousness that they are not professionals, and still more out of their sense, daily and hourly reinforced, of the mysteries and ambiguities of the condition which confronts them. Again and again they will have reached some explanation which has seemed plausible until the fact comes along which contradicts it. Living their lives among questions, not answers, they are natural empiricists in a field that — they may be pardoned for suspecting — is not yet ready to press beyond empiricism. They have learned to feel their way; they have learned it not only from their experience of abnormal children, but from normal children too. Years before Elly was born, in the course of one of those mother-to-mother chats by which parental expertise is spread, a friend told me a story. It contained a lesson, and since it has become as sure a part of my education as anything I have read in a book, I must tell it here.
My friend and her husband, travelling with their children, had arrived in Germany. They had come to visit an elderly relative, the husband’s great-aunt, never seen before and barely known through infrequent correspondence. His parents had left Germany sixty years before; these young Americans were nervous about the visit, aware that the free-wheeling spontaneity of modern academic children might not pass muster among German ladies of an earlier generation. So when they arrived they were relieved at the old aunt’s suggestion that they sit inside while the children played in the garden. After a few minutes the mother went out to check and found to her consternation her four-year-old son standing beside a broken sundial. A mother both permissive and understanding, she gently explained that everybody knew that accidents happened and that little boys made mistakes and that it was very much better to own up to a thing than to pretend you hadn’t done it. Hand in hand they went inside and the little boy told his aunt how sorry he was he had broken her sundial. The old lady looked at her young relatives with amused puzzlement and told them that the sundial had been broken for years.
Elly’s comprehension is still too primitive to tempt me to offer her any interpretation of her behaviour; the ‘why’ and ‘because’ of human motivation are words and realities she does not yet understand. But even if she did, I would think carefully and long before I told her why she did a thing, remembering this story and knowing how easy it is for an admired adult to convince a child of his own interpretation. Not all therapists are as cautious as the English analyst who warned me against ‘constructs’. In the case histories I have read I have come across interpretations both brilliant and ingenious, and the more ingenious they are the more they frighten me. An interpretation must be pretty obvious if it is to be safely offered. I have read of a little girl, no older than Elly and talking no better, whose psychiatrist guessed from obscure words and actions that she feared she had injured her mother. And so she may have. No one ever found out, for she did not get well. But it is well to be humble in the face of facts; for a therapist to verbalize that a child, for example, feels guilt may liberate it from an oppression it cannot face, but it may also suggest a responsibility that was never felt and create guilt where none existed. A parent, seeing so much more of a child than does a professional therapist, will be chary of interpretations, both because he has not been trained to make them and because he feels his immersion in a complex reality which at any time may prove them simplistic, or harmful, or wrong. One can know too much as well as too little.
Yet I am far from denying that parents know too little. I do not mean to make ignorance a virtue; it is one only under the rather special circumstances that obtain when specialists know — as Mark Twain remarked of the human race in general — ‘so many things that ain’t so’. Yet although many of them may know — about castration-anxieties, masturbation, rejecting parents, and the like — many things which in particular cases are not so, they also know an immense amount that is, and that a parent will have to learn. One of the most famous of child psychiatrists, whose therapy for disturbed children depends on a complete separation from their parents, has written that Love Is Not Enough, and he is right. One must know how to love as well. Far from denigrating the knowledge of psychotherapists, I only ask that they let parents share it.
I learned what I had to from Elly, slowly and painfully, she and I together. But I would have learned faster, and with fewer gaps, if I had been in contact from the beginning with skilled and sympathetic professionals (the plural is deliberate). People whose profession is working with children — I do not limit my statement to psychiatrists — possess a great arsenal of the techniques of siege-warfare. Lacking access to it, I had to develop my own, with difficulty and duplication. I had nothing to guide me but common sense and a till then unverbalized knowledge of three normal childhoods, to which I could add the imperative that an eminent mathematician has given as a two-word definition of the scientific method: ‘Try everything.’ When I came to read case histories, it comforted me to find that was what the professionals were doing. They might indeed have theories to guide them, but they led to no agreed-on therapeutic regimen. Qualified, trained people dealing with children like Elly were trying everything, drugs and shock treatment, massage, all kinds of play therapy — even love. [15] But they were in contact with each other and with professional literature, while we were alone. No one person, trained or untrained, will think of everything, or even everything in the limited range of possibilities relevant to one particular case. It was for this reason that I profited from those case histories, lacerating as I found them, and that I was glad of the chance to observe the Institute people and the English analyst operate with Elly. Four hours at the Institute, four with the analyst — that was my training until Elly was four and a half. Then fifteen hours or so at the Blankshire Nursery School — if only they had come earlier! Later, Elly’s present psychiatrist suggested I visit Dr Carl Fenichel’s League School for Seriously Disturbed Children, where I was welcomed and acquired in a day suggestions for months of work. These experiences were the most valuable help I could have had, but only the last was planned and recommended. The others occurred almost by accident and there were not nearly enough of them. Professionals conscious of the problem could have helped me to have many more. Far from underrating professional knowledge, all I wanted was for the professionals to let me watch them work. But this desire was so unorthodox that it took years for me to reach a point where I could articulate it. I was, at the time I needed to, quite unable to make it known, and I am afraid I can guess what would have happened to such a request at the place where I was told that case histories were bad for me. Yet with all the expertise about, it is strange that in the mid-twentieth century a mother should be left to her own devices and such assistance as she can get from Saturday Evening Post articles[16] and biographies of Annie Sullivan.
15
For a suggestion of the range of therapeutic techniques (and nomenclature!), see Caplan,
16
Rosalind Oppenheim, ‘They Said Our Child Was Hopeless’,