Elly is learning a great deal in the new school. Slowly and reluctantly she moves through the primer. With eager enthusiasm she fills out the exercises in visual perception that the other children find so hard. Stage by stage she advances in arithmetic. But all this is secondary; the teacher does not need me to tell her so. For Elly, for whom each interaction must be learned separately and again and again, the important subject is Deportment. To speak in greeting, face up, voice audible, while standing neither so close as to embarrass nor so far that the greeting goes unnoticed — to share attention — to respond to an overture — to take part in a game — to listen with patience and ultimately with comprehension to a storybook or to a schoolmate’s simple account of the rabbit he keeps in his backyard — these are Elly’s lessons. She may be solving quadratic equations before she learns them all.
The ten retarded children in her class are good teachers. They are more tolerant of deviant behaviour than normal children would be, knowing their own behaviour leaves much to be desired and has not always met with acceptance. The wise and loving young woman who teaches them knows how to show them that they can help Elly and feel good about themselves at the same time. As one boy said in the first bad days, with satisfaction and surprise, ‘Elly can do arithmetic better than me but I behave better.’ And it is behaviour, in its fullest sense, that Elly has now to learn. The private school, even as they excluded her, expressed dismay that she had now to be put into a class for the retarded. ‘She’s really a bright little girl.’ I do not know what ‘really’ means in this context, but I know that these retarded children, far from holding her back, are light-years ahead of her in adequacy and function. Taking my semi-weekly cafeteria duty, I listen astonished as these supposedly backward children assert their full humanity. ‘Hey, what’re we having for lunch? You want to know what I did yesterday? What’s this stuff? I hate prunes, don’t you? You want mine? Will you play with me after? We need the ball, Johnny’s got it. Come on, don’t be mean, Johnny! He’s always like that. Do you want me to pop you one?’ I listen in wonder. This is retardation, these pronouns, these prepositions, these verbs, with their auxiliaries and their tenses, this mastery of verbal and social idiom? Yet some of these children, at thirteen, cannot learn without constant repetition mathematical relationships that to Elly at eight are intuitively obvious. Her disabilities are no more mysterious than theirs. How can they miss these clear simplicities, when they can learn so well the infinitely more complex modes of social interaction? What have they that Elly lacks, and why do her abilities not interconnect and ramify to allow a comprehension of wider experience?
However clearly one recognizes such questioning as useless at worst, at best as premature, one is forced back on it at last. I have earned the right to my speculations and I present them here, hygenically cordoned off and plainly labelled for what they are.
It is not up to me to decide between the various labels that are offered to describe my child’s condition, but there is one that I have come to think is clearly inapplicable. My child is not, I think, a ‘disturbed child’. Now and then things happen that are too much for her capacities, and these disturb her. But the longer I watch her, the better I know her, and the more there is to know, the more I am convinced that what we are concerned with is not a disturbance but a lack. The screw is not loose, it is missing. I dredge up crude terms from the innocent past when those who took it upon themselves to describe aberrant human beings did not yet veil their uncertainties under precise terminology. These crude terms still suggest an important distinction. Elly is not crazy. She is not feeble-minded; her mind, for those aspects of the world she can make sense of, is sharp and retentive. She is simple-minded — and whatever the progress she has made, she is simple-hearted as well. Watching as Elly slowly refines her capacity to feel, I remember what Jacques May told me — and this doctor, whose fruitless search for help for his twin autistic sons[34] led him and his wife to found a school for others like them, is a sensitive and experienced guide: ‘Autism is only a symptom,’ he said. ‘As the child grows, if it is sympathetically handled, the autism recedes. But the child does not thereby become normal.’ It does not, and this leads me back to what may have seemed the least significant of the four categories under which I described the baby Elly. I now wonder if the clue to Elly’s abnormality may not be found, not in her blindness and deafness, which are gone, or her isolation, which can now be breached by anyone who tries, but in the phenomena I described under the heading of ‘willed weakness’ — in her overwhelming unwillingness to affect the environment.
Over the past five years we have watched Elly’s passivity change to hyperactivity, leading us to reflect that one must be very conscious, in reading case histories, of the case as history, for it is not always recognized that the same child — or condition — may present totally different aspects at different stages. Depending on Elly’s state of mind, her activity may be relaxed, or tense and excited, but more likely it will be the latter, and the more she is enjoying herself the tenser it will be. Because she is so active, it takes sensitive observation to notice how rigidly circumscribed is that activity and how much energy and imagination it takes to enrich its content or extend its range — energy and imagination which normal children themselves supply but which Elly must still, for the most part, take in from outside. Spring-tight, vigorous, and wiry, Elly is in effect still weak.
Elly has learned to do most of the things she did not do when she was four. She turns knobs, she opens windows, she puts her zipper together and zips it, she unbuttons buttons if there are not too many, she will button one. She goes downstairs foot over foot as normal children do. She jumps down one step — she was seven before she became willing to do that — and recently she has jumped two. Carefully she climbs alone up snow banks and fences, if the person who is with her stays out of reach of her searching hand. She dresses herself in a finite time, if her clothes are laid out for her and she is constantly spurred on to take the next step. She toilets herself, not on impulse, but by a self-established routine night and morning. This month she took the brush and brushed her hair. Occasionally she has even come out with the proud, impatient ‘Elly do’ so familiar to mothers of normal three-year-olds, as she mails a letter or pushes open a heavy door.
But she is eight years old. She does not ride a tricycle. Unless encouraged to do so, she does not pull a wagon, and she does not manage a sled. She will not climb a ladder or go down a slide, though she did both at three and though this summer she climbed without protest down a twenty-foot ladder into a boat in order to go sailing. She cannot snap a snap or operate a safety pin or untie a knot or tie her shoes. She still takes your hand to effect what she wants. It is no longer a denial of you as a human being; she may be in close contact with you, talking and laughing. She may — she probably will — respond to a good-humoured ‘You do it, Elly.’ But it is six and a half years now and still she tries to avoid action on her own.