about people aren’t in the same ballpark as putting two socks on the same foot (she cried and made a book about that), or a mistaken box number. It doesn’t occur to her that a failure in recognition might hurt someone’s feelings. She knows about feeling bad and feeling good. She knows about feeling hurt, in your head, your stomach, your foot. But a mental or emotional hurt — that’s a metaphor, that’s not so obvious.
What are hurt feelings, anyway? She tells me loudly, «You hurt my feelings!» Her voice proclaims anger. Or she exclaims, «My, my feelings are hurt!» This time it’s sadness; she’s misbehaved, and her friend won’t take her out to breakfast. Or she asks what she’s learned to call a «rhetorical question», as she so often does when she’s annoyed at somebody else’s mistake. As when her father dropped something on his foot. He said, «Ouch!» loud and sudden, and Jessy, loud and sudden, asked angrily, «Why do you drop it?» But now her father’s annoyed; his foot hurts, and this is a question she knows requires no answer. So he says (loud and sudden), «Don’t ask me that!» And Jessy notes in her journal, «Discouragement. I am discouraged about hurting my father’s feelings». She knows it’s a feeling, at least, and she knows it’s not about his foot. It’s a bad feeling. That’s as close as she comes. «Discouragement» is a bad feeling too. Desperate? Disgruntled? Dismayed? Let the d-words go; just call it «sad».
What is the right word to use in those social contexts she is increasingly aware of? «Is it an insult when I scream? Is it hurt your feelings?» Or when she has been reproved because she accused a guest at table of stealing her napkin: «‘Who stole my napkin?’ Is it an insult?» Well, it's almost an insult. It depends on the tone of voice, it depends (I discover as I go along) on the value of the object — «Who stole my money?» is different — it depends on the context. «Is it an insult when I say, ‘I heard you making that noise?»’ «Is it an insult when I say someone died?»
How do we learn the right words for these slippery social concepts? Nobody teaches us. Jessy had waited patiently to vacuum the room while her father looked over his slides. He’d said he’d be finished in a minute, but then he looked at some more. Jessy has grown much, much better at waiting, but a good job of patience is hard to extend when you thought it was finished and then it wasn’t. She reports to me, «I told my father he lied. Is that an insult?» It’s an insult, all right, but is it a lie? Jessy begins her bizarre creaky-door noise, once so familiar, now uncommon — because she’s insulted her father, because she’s been corrected, because she’s gotten things wrong. She cares about being corrected now, as she didn’t in the long, unsocial, indifferent years when she only shrieked about lights and clouds and bells and gongs and the other phenomena of her autistic world. She didn’t care then about the niceties of social behavior, or, indeed, whether she could get her shrieking under control, which she does, on this occasion, in less than ten minutes. She really wants to learn, now, to navigate on this mysterious planet of ours, but it’s so hard, and it’s so hard to help her, and so sad when she fails.
Eric Courchesne writes: «The development of normal social and language skills depends upon the comprehension and use of attention-directing gestures and the coordination of attention among objects and people». In order to comprehend a situation and respond normally within it, the child must be able to detect «salient changes in the environment», stay focused on «channels anticipated to provide relevant information», and effect «smooth, accurate, and rapid shifts of attention in response to attention-directing stimuli such as facial, gestural, and vocal signals during social interactions».[32] If this ability is impaired, the child — and adult — must make do with what we might call «behavioral echolalia», learning behavior as she initially learned speech. Both are learned through imitation; both are delayed in autism; and both are «echoed» exactly, not altered according to the situation. From such rote learning, we should expect strange results. What is relevant information for Jessy may well seem, by non-Martian standards, disconcertingly irrelevant.
So hear Jessy as she mulls over our near accident last week at a dangerous intersection. She was getting a cold that day, or thinks she was — she’s very interested in the exact time of onset of colds.
«That means I would have been hurt or killed as well as having a cold». I’m used to it, but even to me this sounds bizarre. It brings back, once again, a day from the long ago, watching my daughter, not yet two, crawling serenely away from us all. «There’s nothing the matter with Jessy», I told my neighbor. «She just has a distorted sense of what’s important». Words like that are hard to forget.
What’s important? What’s unimportant? How do we know? How dots she know, when what’s «salient» for her isn’t salient for you and me? One Sunday I tell her not to cook me any bacon. Jessy knows why; she knows all about cholesterol. «Because I don’t want you to have a stroke». So far, so good — very good. But then: «Does it count for taking a personal day?» It does, I assure her. And she thinks it over, working out the rule. «Even if not dead. Just in the family».
She picks up on the news now; that too is progress. When a local girl died in the bombing of Pan Am flight 103, Jessy took in the whole story — the planned Christmas dinner, the empty place, the wrapped presents under the tree — concrete, wrenching details that would be significant to anyone and are significant to Jessy too. She reaches for an appropriate response. «I shall use the big worry doll for grieving». Then she considers; she has smaller worry dolls, and there are hierarchies of grief. «I shall save it for if there is a death in the family». And finally, «But I’m sure it is much worse than if the kitty gone». Who can say she hasn’t got it right? Another time the news shows a terribly burned child. We’re told it was a nurse’s error. Errors, of course, are something she understands. It’s harder, though, to work out which of them are important and which unimportant when they’re all important to her. «This is an error that I [ought to] get upset. Never mind that typo on the computer!»
Over the years I’ve come to understand these episodes better. Of course she knows about important and unimportant; we’ve been working on that since she was able — at fifteen, maybe — to understand the words. She knows, too, that she isn’t sure which is which. So, with that busy mind of hers, so good at inferring the rules of numbers, at systematizing hierarchies, she’s trying to work out these rules. She reviews them again and again, trying to get them clear. There are rules for work — there are (a new word) priorities. There are priorities at home, priorities everywhere. They may not be Jessy’s own. They rarely are. But she has learned to accept them, if we give her time, if we take her through them gradually, step by step. It’s a process of negotiation, between us and her, between family needs and her own desires, between herself and the world. I’ve given striking examples, odd enough even to seem funny. Mostly, though, it’s a matter not of weird contrasts but of ordinary, everyday living.
As when, unexpectedly, we can’t go for our regular Saturday shopping. Daddy needs the car to visit his stepmother, a shut-in he hasn’t seen for months. Jessy, of course, is distressed, though now, mostly, she can control herself. This time there are no tears or screams, only the familiar, insistent questioning. If we can’t go to the supermarket, if we can’t get all the things on the list, what will happen?
I walk her through it. We do need a great many things, but we can get them at the downtown market. It becomes clear, however, that the particular items that Jessy has in mind, Stella D’oro cookies and Orville Redenbacher popcorn, are not available downtown. Considerable talk, then, about this, as I present the possibilities: we can do without cookies, we can do without popcorn, we can buy another brand. Jessy acknowledges these alternatives, which she knows well enough. Reluctantly, repetitively, she acquiesces. But that is not the end of the process. Finally, she repeats to herself (in question form, but she knows the answer) the correct priorities: «Is it more important to go see Winifred than to get popcorn and Stella D’oro?» I have, of course, spent the last half hour telling her exactly that, that Winifred is lonely, that she hasn’t seen Daddy for months. Though her question is «rhetorical», I answer, «Yes». And Jessy is now ready to affirm the principle no normal seven-year-old needs to have made explicit: It is more important to go see a shut-in relative than to get popcorn.
Jessy was nearing twenty when one of the young companions set her a new goal. Taking a sheet of paper, Joann wrote at the head of it, THINKING OF OTHERS. She helped Jessy think of a few things that might consist of. They listed them. The formal layout helped focus Jessy’s attention; the examples gave the social abstraction specific, concrete meanings. Jessy has spent the ensuing twenty years extending those meanings into something that may be called a general concept.
At first it was a behavioral category, its instances specified and rewarded. Then, as Jessy got the idea, she began to come up with her own examples. Not that she had miraculously acquired insight into other people’s
