I put the set away when she had finished. I did not want this play to degenerate into sterile perseveration any faster than it had to. I got it out two weeks later and she arranged the pieces by colour as well as by shape. A week later, on another toy, she discriminated stars, octagons, and hexagons as well. But the fine concentration was gone. This was too easy to be interesting. There seemed no place to go from here. Once she had mastered them, I could think of little to be done with shapes.
There were of course puzzles. These involved shape-discrimination, and might lead to the recognition of pictures, but so far I had only minor success with them. Six months before — she was only a little over two — I had got out the easiest of the children’s wooden puzzles. It represented Puss in Boots. There were seven wooden pieces, one for the head, one for the body, two arms, two booted legs, and a tail. Elly was able, unprompted, to put in the easier pieces, but others presented physical difficulties; to get them in she would have to adjust them slightly or exert a small physical pressure. This was too much to ask. She became frustrated and I put in the other pieces myself. She showed no sign she recognized the pieces as head or boots, or ultimately as cat.
I kept on with puzzles, off and on, but Elly rarely put in a piece herself. She would look on while I did one, without enthusiasm but with more attention than she showed most things. To involve her in the play and to test her knowledge of the puzzle I would place a piece wrong. Unerringly her hand would touch mine to indicate the correct position. By two and three-quarters, the age when she discovered the parquet blocks, she had, so to speak, a passive mastery of three puzzles at or above her age level. I suspected she could do more, but had not yet thought of a way to manage it.
It was not for some weeks that the breakthrough came. Elly was nearly three. Two weeks before, in Boston while she was hospitalized for testing, we had shopped for toys and found a very much simpler puzzle than those she was used to — only five pieces, each of which fitted unambiguously into a slot of its own. With this I hoped to tempt Elly to use those hands and eyes that could do so much more than they would — to complete a puzzle for herself.
It worked. Elly showed her usual unwillingness to pick up the pieces, but it was so easy that apparently she couldn’t resist. Problems like reversal of pieces that had frustrated her in harder puzzles she solved immediately. She liked the easy puzzle. In the next couple of weeks she did it often — often enough so that I knew she would soon lose interest in it, as she had already lost interest in the others.
I put the new puzzle away, and when I brought it out again the next week I brought out the three old ones with it. I put the pile in a new place in a different room to provide a new context, since she had ceased to be interested in them in the old one. The easy puzzle was on the top. For the first time in a week she rapidly assembled and disassembled it, but she did not stop there. The cat puzzle was on the bottom of the pile. Elly got it out on her own and started to do it. She put in the easy pieces with her own hand, without hesitation. The cat’s two boots, however, are similar but not interchangeable; it is easy even for an adult to confuse them. When they would not fit, Elly whimpered and took out all the pieces she had put in. I helped her with the boots, and we finished the puzzle together. When a piece resisted, I took her hand and made it pat the piece into place. The following day, while I looked on unknown to her, she found the cat puzzle and did it completely, boots and all, patting down the pieces exactly as I had shown her.
The easy puzzle was what had done the trick. Again the principle was illustrated: in teaching Elly a new skill, it was not enough to be sure it lay within her demonstrated capability. It must be well within; it must be so ridiculously simple that it could present no challenge, afford no threat, make no apparent demands on future performance. Only then would Elly dare to commit herself. I knew that. I had learned it with the spoon, the cup, the rings on a stick. But what seems clear now was groping then. I was not so different from Elly. Like her, with her, I had to learn the same things over and over again.
Now Elly could do puzzles. She could grasp a new puzzle in no time at all. Most children, doing puzzles, are guided by the picture, not by shape alone. But Elly saw the shapes so exactly that she needed nothing more to clue her. She could do a puzzle face down — picture invisible, shapes reversed. The pile grew call. The cat was joined by a fish, an elephant, a fire engine. Elly would amuse herself by dumping out all the pieces of all the puzzles It made a fine mess. But when we picked them up Elly could classify the pieces according to their puzzles of origin better than I. Her discrimination of shape and colour was astounding. But did she see the picture itself? In assembling the ca did she make the slightest use of the fact that the boots belonged at the bottom of the puzzle while the head belonged at the top?
Apparently she did not. Five months afterwards she still could not master one piece of the simplest puzzle of all — another five-piecer we’d got after the success of the first. This piece represented a yellow sun, its shape and dimensions virtually identical in every direction. The only clue to its proper orientation was not its shape or colour, but its painted eyes, if the piece was placed so these appeared at the top, it would fit in easily. This simple cue Elly
There was something frightening about those bright eyes of Elly's that discriminated minutiae we could not see, yet were blind to everything that was obvious. How could we give Elly’s shapes a human meaning? Elly was three years old, and I was still trying to find out whether she recognized that a doll had a human shape. Sculpture, which reaches touch as well as sight is one degree less abstract then painting. We sit on the floor with a small doll girl. It belongs to Elly's sister; it has many outfits. I dress it. Elly pulls the clothes of, chooses another costume, we begin again. The game holds her interest over several weeks. Can I assume that it shows she knows the dolls represents the human body? Testing, testing. In the absence of other evidence I cannot be sure. I try to put the doll into interesting situations, but of course they are not interesting to Elly. One day, however, an idea floats into my mind, which most of the time is vacant — I play this little piggy’, which Elly knows, not on Elly’s toes but the doll’s. Elly shows no interest, but in her bath that night I surprise her counting over the doll’s toes, ending with the delighted squeal that for her signals the climax of a tickling game. It seems unmistakable that she is tickling the doll, that it is safe to conclude at last that she sees the doll has toes like her own.
I can make explicit, now, the principle that I then perceived so dimly that I made use of it only by accident: in reaching the eyes and ears of such children, and later on their minds, one must begin with sensations their bodies can recognize. From Elly’s toes to the doll’s. It is not for three full months that it occurs to me, as mechanically we turn the pages of
From her own body to the abstract representation. Later in the same month Elly becomes interested in her brother’s kindergarten workbook. She turns the pages as always, looking with attention but without recognition. But now I have an inkling of how to proceed. As we pass a large, realistic picture of an ice cream cone, I take her hand and make her pat it. Next time she looks at the book there is a pause in the mechanical turning; that picture, at any rate, she sees.
This book was full of usable sights; for the picture of a school playground I made her fingers walk up and slide and go ‘whee’ down, I made them ride the seesaw and the swings. I no longer wondered about her comprehension; her delight left no doubt of it. When we came to that picture, if I omitted to move her hand Elly herself put my hand on hers, silently requesting me to make her fingers walk up the slide. She would not go so far as to move that hand herself. But there was no doubt that she was happy at this new extension of her world.
Yet that did not mean she was ready to pursue it on her own. She continued to look at the bulk of her picture books exactly as before. It seemed that each new picture, like each new switch and faucet, must be a separate conquest. One day, two weeks later as we looked at a picture of a small girl, Elly took my hand in the peremptory way that meant ‘Do something.’ I assumed she meant, as often, ‘It’s time to turn the page,’ but that did not satisfy her. Instead she made my hand take hers and pat the picture. She was asking me to do for her what she could not yet do for herself. She wanted me to make her see. Progress indeed. But I could not help noticing that she did not seem to care whether she touched the girl, or the blank space around her.
I did not do at this time what it seems obvious I should have done — plan out a programme. I am not good at that, and besides, I had only the vaguest notion of where we were headed. I had no idea how powerful the tool we were working on would turn out to be, that within a year I would be communicating with Elly through pictures in ways I could not yet do in words. Perhaps it was as well — a glimpsed goal might have imparted a sense of urgency that would have done no good to either of us. At any rate, I kept on almost at random, using the materials the
