There was no confusion or ambiguity in this usage. My experience does not support the conjecture of some psychiatrists that this phenomenon is a sign of the weakness of the ego and the vagueness of its borders. Elly knew who she was. She was ‘you’. The usage was exact, denotative, certain. The whole family understood it. It simply reversed the usual meaning.
It is perfectly logical, when one considers it. Elly thinks her name is ‘you’ because everyone calls her that. No one ever calls her ‘I’. People call themselves ‘I’, and as a further refinement Elly began to call them ‘I’ herself. The reversal of meaning seems nearly impervious to teaching; now, at eight, when Elly says ‘I like that’ it means not that she herself likes it but that her interlocutor does. What can I do? I can tell her to say ‘kiss me’ and reinforce it by kissing her; I can refuse to give her a shove in the swing until she says ‘push me’. But these rare ways of dramatizing the correct usage cannot hold their own against the hundreds of incorrect reinforcements that every day provides. ‘You made a mistake.’ I say, and Elly replies, ‘You made a mistake!’ ‘No, I didn’t make a mistake, you made a mistake.’ ‘You made a mistake!’ Everything one says makes it worse. Twice — on occasions a year apart — Elly has used ‘me’ correctly, to refer to herself. ‘Becky gave me a book,’ she said recently, the book in her hands. Hurrying to encourage her, I caught myself saying, ‘Yes, she did give you a book,’ thus destroying the effect I had meant to reinforce. I have come to wonder how it is that ordinary two-year-olds can grasp anything so subtle. Yet they do. As mothers know, many of them have this same difficulty as they begin talking, but it rights itself spontaneously in a few weeks. How? As a psychiatrist — not one of ours — remarked to me at a party, the correct use of the first- and second-person pronouns [20] cannot be grasped by logic. The social sense must take over and straighten things out — the sense, or complex of senses, that assesses the relations of people in a given situation, how they think of themselves, and consequently what words they use to identify themselves. Elly’s usage is rigidly consistent, severely logical. What it lacks is that social instinct which guides even the dullest of normal children in the labyrinth of personal relations.
This lack affected Elly’s acquisition of all the parts of speech. She learned nouns more easily than verbs simply because there are more nouns whose meaning does not depend on surrounding situations. On the veldt, in the zoo, or in an A B C book, a giraffe is a giraffe. ‘Go’ or ‘come’, however, is something else again. It is harder to draw a picture of a verb, as you will find if you try it. Since action requires an actor, and often an object acted upon as well, there is more than one meaning to be abstracted from the simplest verb-picture. Unlike a noun, a verb implies a situation. From it, Elly must draw out the right thing-right not in her terms but in ours. The Dick-paint episode illustrates the ambiguities inherent in pictures — themselves so much simpler than real situations. We soon discovered that the drawing by which we tried to teach ‘play’ might teach ‘swing’ or ‘girl’ instead.
But in spite of this difficulty, verbs slowly followed nouns into Elly’s speech. ‘Walk’, indeed, had been one of her first words, used though not comprehended, before she was two. Four years later it was joined by ‘look’, ‘jump’, and ‘run’, and later, in her seventh year, by such words as ‘give’, ‘move’, ‘push’, ‘open’, ‘shut’, ‘cut’, ‘hurt’ — words easily illustrated in pictures or in action. The children, my good co-therapists, taught her ‘cough’, ‘laugh’, ‘cry’, ‘scream’, and ‘burp’; she and they took a mischievous delight in testing, usually at the dinner table, her ability to perform these actions on command. ‘Die,’ they would say, and Elly, gagging and choking, would collapse on to the floor. Other verbs were more immediately useful. By the time she was eight she responded to ‘say’ — ‘Say “butter”, not “buh-buh”,’ — and within a few months she used the verb herself. I found no way of illustrating ‘see’; Elly was seven before she acquired it, as a kind of tributary of ‘look’, which by that time she could both understand and recognize in print. ‘Hear’ is even worse; I’m not sure she comprehends it even today, and she does not use it. ‘Know’ and ‘understand’ are as yet beyond her grasp, although for three years I have responded to an unintelligible pronunciation with ‘I don’t know’ or ‘I can’t understand that’. Such nearly indefinable words as ‘have’, put’, ‘take’, and ‘get’ are only now coming into use, and their boundaries overlap in distorted ways. She may suggest, if Daddy is sick, that ‘Daddy ha’ broken arm’, using ‘have’ correctly — only to follow it up with ‘Daddy gi’ temperature hundred’. And by another strange reversal of normal learning order, these simple words, which children absorb from the environment long before they can manage the symbolic representation of them, Elly has learned only when she was shown them in writing. The visual experience of recognizing letter-combinations has focused her attention on words of which, although she heard them constantly, she seemed unconscious. She had never spoken the word is until she was seven, when her kindergarten teacher asked her to write it. Her statements were (and for the most part still are) of the form ‘Becky girl’, ‘cup broken’ Once she saw the word written, however, she began to hear it, and now will use it if she is asked to. The word ‘equals’, however, which functions as a restricted form of ‘is’, she learned with ease and uses freely, volunteering such relatively recondite statements as ‘seven plus five equals twelve’. She has much more difficulty with ‘seven and five are twelve’, although ‘equals’ and ‘plus’ come from a set of words proper to age six while ‘is’, like ‘and’, should appear much earlier. The meaning of ‘equals’ is absolute and clear, however, not dependent on the multitudinous shifts of situations.
It is not surprising, then, that Elly made do for years without the verbs that cluster around the ideas of affection, desire, and need. The words ‘I wanna’ characterize the small child, but this child who at two wanted nothing was six before she spoke the word ‘want’ — of course without the ‘I’. In those long intervening years, her desires, never numerous, were conveyed, first by gesture, then — in the expansion of speech at age five — by naming what she wanted. That she should be able to ask for some-thing in words seemed great progress; we hoped — I think we expected — that the realization that language was power would bring with it further appreciation of the joys of communication. And it is true that now, nearing nine, she has a new flexibility in requests; at a single recent mealtime she used four different patterns, not only the primitive ‘Peanut butter?’ but also ‘Eh’ [Elly] ha’ vanilla yogurt?’ — ‘Nee[d] egg?’ — and ‘Wan’ pie?’ If words fail to communicate, as with her indistinctness they often do, she will occasionally, if asked, pronounce them better; more likely, she will do as she did at two and a half — lead you to the wanted object, or make your hand approach it. Certainly there is progress here — but the reader who reflects how many ways there are to ask for something, and how often children make use of them, will realize how far there is to go.
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For the record, I should say that Elly did not become conscious of third-person pronouns until she was nearly eight, when she spontaneously picked out ‘they’ from a pile of word-cards as the one she wanted to learn next. The same week added ‘he’ and ‘she’. But though she can recognize them, she has said them only once or twice, and is only beginning to comprehend them securely. Ultimately, it seems plain she will acquire them, but there is nothing natural about the process.