The Siege

by Clara Clairborne Park

  It is not easy. Her first weeks in the public school required manifold adjustments and imposed severe tensions on teacher, pupils, and administration — tensions that were absorbed with a flexibility, imagination, and good will that quite literally pass belief. That I do not describe them here at length only illustrates that there is never space for all the important things. Elly’s new teacher knows that Elly’s very difficulties show that she is now ready to profit from what no home care and no one- to-one relationship, however devoted, can give her; the opportunity to be led, step by step, with imagination and understanding, into minimal interaction, not with a sympathetic adult, but with her peers.

  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.

  Her manual dexterity, once so remarkable, appears so no longer. She has not increased it over the past four years and normal children have caught up with and surpassed her. Her letters were good at age five; they are as good today, no better. They are clearly good enough for her; she puts them down, fast and casual, and makes no further effort. At school, if her work is good, she gets a star. At first that delighted he
r, but now she is equally pleased with a zero or an 80. It is not that she doesn’t know the difference; she does. But any notation pleases her, and the star is no longer novel enough to motivate sustained effort. In fact, Elly will sustain effort only within the framework of a stereotyped task, and even there she does so only faute de mieux. She herself will type out the numbers from one to fifty, but she would much rather have me do it.

  Elly types easily now, but two years ago she was as weak with the typewriter as she had been at three with faucets and switches. At first she used my fingers, then I used hers. It was weeks before she would press a key hard enough to make a mark of her own. The process repeats itself with each new skill. Certainly I can teach her to tie her shoes if I try hard enough. Perhaps this year I will do it, or perhaps her teacher will, as Elly in the service of weakness mobilizes the vanished blindness and deafness, ignoring instructions, averting her eyes from the task, even closing them. We can teach her one new skill, or five, or ten; we can insist, ignore her protests; we can batter down her resistance. But there are hundreds of such skills inherent in the condition of a normal eight-year-old, and how much expense of spirit can we — or she — afford?

  It is of course impossible to separate this physical inertia from the mental and emotional inertia which accompany it. Again, it is characteristic of the condition, not unique to Elly. Rosalind Oppenheim[35] describes her son’s inability to sustain any activity-this of a child who at four endlessly rolled a ball across the floor but who at six, still speechless, could read and answer questions in writing. Unlike Elly, he read stories, if mother or teacher shepherded him through page by page, asking questions at the end of each. He enjoyed the stories too, but though the book was left temptingly available week after week he never once picked it up on his own. And so it is with Elly. Whatever she does, no matter how well it begins, peters out. There is no forward motion, no self-sustained expansion of mastery — in play, in self-help, in drawing, in reading, even in the numbers she finds so fascinating — except in completion of a routine, or sustained by someone else with a support that is in constant danger of becoming a substitute for her own activity or — if it lures her into activity that is too successful — of causing her to abandon it altogether.

  Of how many remarkable feats, experienced with how much hope, have I had to record that ‘She did this only once’, or ‘twice in six months’, or ‘no longer shows interest’? Her liking for letters and her memory for their combinations is still remarkable. Another child who possessed the ability to memorize a new word overnight would have been reading within a month. Elly reads voluntarily not at all — unless we count the OFF-ON on switches or the NOPARKING signs whose non significance she embraces with delight, perhaps because it does not threaten her with further progress. Elly can understand spelling too, or so I infer from the fact that for days she has been writing VAKE and GAKE and correctly pronouncing them. But when I suggested she add TAKE and LAKE she said ‘No?’ I knew better than to insist, but she avoids them as if I had drilled her in them daily.

  Even in the area of learning where she is more at home, inertia holds her back. It would be possible, by proper selection, to make Elly appear extremely precocious mathematically. When I was still diffidently showing her that 1 + 1 = 2, she assembled two six-inch blocks and a seven-inch one from her set and remarked, without counting them, that 6 + 6 + 7 = 19. Yet today in school, six months later, she makes all the usual mistakes in performing far simpler three-digit sums. This summer, when someone said we needed thirty hamburgers for a picnic, Elly, who had seemingly been paying no attention, volunteered that 15 + 15 = 30. When she was given a box of 48 crayons to add to her set of 64, she knew by some process of her own that she had 112, although she had not yet learned to perform addition that involves carrying. Watching such isolated feats, it is hard not to speculate on what she could do if she would. Yet they remain isolated, and if one tries to elaborate on them Elly resists. Inertia and passivity take new forms but they do not disappear. They ensure that Elly remains a very imperfect idiot savant.

  To sum up: what seems impaired is not only the capacity for affect, but another capacity perhaps even more fundamental, the capacity for undertaking exploratory behaviour and sustaining it. We know little about what we still call by its old-fashioned name of curiosity, still less about the qualities we describe, with more sophistication, as ‘motivation’ or ‘drive’. All of us know, however, that normal individuals vary enormously in the degree to which they possess these qualities. We know that curiosity, motivation, and drive are affected by the stresses of the environment, but we know also that even babies differ markedly in their desire to explore the world around them, for no apparent environmental reason. There are those from whom no medicine bottle is safe, who pull every light cord, who poke into every drawer to see if something interesting might be hiding there, and others (like my three normal children) who are much less interested in physical exploration. And there is Elly, who is not interested in exploration at all.

  Families can reinforce curiosity and drive in their children, or discourage them. Societies can do the same; we all know that three thousand years of Egyptian intelligence is a very different thing from three hundred years of Greek. But however it is reinforced or discouraged, all normal human beings exhibit the drive to learn and to explore — indeed all animals do, our cousins the apes most of all. Years ago W. I. Thomas listed ‘a desire for new experience and stimulation as one of the instincts’,[36] and indeed it must be so. What if it were not? If animals were born without that positive enjoyment of new experience which leads them to explore and master their environment, neither they nor their species would survive. Curiosity and drive are essential to evolutionary survival, and if we can expect any characteristics to be built into animal biology it would be these. One day we may know how such things are built in — into brain impulses, into nerve structure, into blood chemistry, into mechanisms we cannot yet suspect. Even now we — not neurophysiologists only, but all of us — know how will and motivation can be reduced, even temporarily annihilated, by physical causes such as ageing, sleeplessness, or drugs. Most of us feel such a reduction as unpleasant, but it need not be. Suppose a child felt always the detachment that in certain people is produced by LSD? Such a child would not initiate action, would welcome the limits that made it unnecessary, would, as its irreversible growth engaged it inevitably with the world’s complexity, seek out and enjoy the unchanging patterns that affirm stability in a world of Becoming.

  The inertia of such a child might affect even cognitive functions, so that ideas that normal babies associate without apparent effort would be connected only with difficulty, and past experience would be only minimally available for use in new situations. All the autistic child’s deficiencies could be seen as converging in this one: the deficiency which renders it unable or unwilling to put together the primary building blocks of experience. It affects the senses, it affects speech, it affects action, it affects emotion. The autistic child does not move naturally from one sound to another, from one word to another, from one idea to another, from one experience to another. Yet reality, as human beings experience it, is a web of connections to be made. The reality of persons and emotions is the most complex web of all. The baby who can make little sense of the simpler interconnections will make even less sense of these complexities; it will be ‘deficient in affective functions’. Because this deficiency is more conspicuous than the others, it will tempt us to consider it as primary. But if over years we watch this deficiency steadily diminish, while others simply change their faces, we will begin to wonder.

  Not all individuals possess all the characteristics of the species — even the essential ones. By imagining an individual born with the capacity to explore the environment, but with whatever it is that determines the drive to do so absent or grossly impaired, we can arrive at all the characteristics of the autistic child. Because of the negative survival-value of the trait, such individuals would be uncom
mon — as autistic children are. But such a hypothesis would explain much that other explanations leave untouched.

  I have deferred discussing one last deficiency of Elly’s until now, almost at the end of the story, because it is so pervasive and difficult to catch hold of that the appreciation of it has need of all that has gone before. It is directly related to the lack of exploratory drive, for it concerns Elly’s signal lack of interest in future experience. My husband thought of the word for it — one day, watching as Elly moved with agonizing slowness through the hundreds of motions that were necessary before she could reach the enjoyable experience of school, he exclaimed, ‘It’s the sense of purpose that’s missing!’ We began then to think about purpose and what it entails, and to relate it to a lack in Elly we had long felt without being able to give it a place in the total picture.

  Purpose entails drive and the capacity to sustain. But it entails another capacity as well, one which itself plays an obvious part in motivation — the capacity to imagine, to bring to mind and take seriously what is not, or not yet, present to immediate experience. The middle-class boy does not need much imagination to see himself as a stable and prosperous professional man; the boy from the ghetto, to sustain the same vision, must possess imagination to a remarkable degree. I return to Elly’s simplicity of mind, the emptiness of her horizons.

  She is curiously matter-of-fact. The Institute, long ago, told us she had many fears, and at the time we were quite ready to assent. Fuller experience has made us less so. Fear is not mere anxiety, such as Elly exhibits daily when some trivial thing goes wrong. Fear envisages; it imagines; it is anxiety in anticipation. It is fear, not of what is visibly present, but of what may be going to happen. If this distinction is granted, I cannot recall a situation in which Elly seemed to feel fear, and I can recall many in which fear seemed natural and she exhibited none. She could not, for example, be brought to fear traffic. She knows about looking both ways before crossing a street, but she never does it unasked, and if asked she looks without looking. The idea that a car might really hurt her seems to defy communication — and this though at five she was actually knocked down by a truck. I have tried to make use of a certain three-legged dog in this connection, but he conveys no realization of danger, although he provides an occasion for ritual joking. ‘Dog hurt! Only three legs! Go hospital!’ It is not that Elly does not know what cars can do. It is that she cannot imagine it.