impossible for me, though someone trained to the work or more naturally gifted in the nursery might have been able to formulate a plan for progress. We lurched forward by accident. One day, weeks later, an idea came out of the nowhere where all my ideas come from. It came to me to put in the crib a doll that was too large for it. Its head stuck out at an uncomfortable slant; the whole set-up was clearly disproportionate, wrong. Elly saw the doll and as usual automatically removed it. But in a few minutes she returned. She looked straight into my face and laughed, and put the doll back in the crib — not the baby doll or the little teddies that fitted so nicely, but this outsize interloper that clearly didn’t belong there. For this doll she got blanket, spread, and pillow, laughing like anything, happy and delighted — as was I. Finally, laughing even more (the joke’s on you, I won’t give you the satisfaction) she dismantled the whole business.
This was the culmination of a process that, from the time she first caught sight of the crib, had taken fifty- seven days.
‘She doesn’t want to give you the satisfaction.’ The baby-sitter had noticed that Elly would sing, unnoticed, in the back seat of the car, but would stop if you looked at her. We had all noticed that when she heard a new tune she almost never sang it immediately afterwards. However difficult the intervals, however tricky the rhythm, she did not need to repeat it to fix it in her memory. Days afterwards, sometimes weeks, unpractised but perfect, the tune would appear. Yet she seemed completely to lose her ability to render a tune on the rare occasions when she requested one. She would stand by the piano, her voice moving vaguely up and down; she would put my hand on the keys and I would not know what to play. I recalled the way we had learned to ignore, not congratulate, when she first held spoon and cup. I remembered the circles she drew, but only the day after I had drawn them. I began to think about imitation. ‘Imitating is innate in men from childhood. Men differ from other animals in that they are the most imitative, and their first learning is produced through imitation. Again, all men delight in imitations.’ What had Aristotle ever remarked that was more just, more obvious than this? But my child did not imitate. What was there involved in the process of imitation from which Elly held herself back? It seemed clear that she could imitate — the few words, the tunes, the figures, the rare activity were proof of that. Why wouldn’t she? What is the difference between copying a circle immediately after your mother has drawn one for you, and reproducing it after a day or a week has gone by?
The obvious difference is that the latter is much harder to do.
Many children could not do it at all; it was remarkable that Elly could, not that she did not do it often. The time to imitate an action is immediately after it has taken place. Elly was handicapping herself by this delay. What function could the time lag serve?
It could, it seemed to me, function to preserve isolation. If you draw a circle immediately after someone, you are acknowledging that the two of you are in contact. Someone sends, you receive. If you wait, the connection is successfully obscured. Your action can seem to come from yourself alone.
I began to focus on the problem of imitation, but it was a long time before I thought of anything to do about it. When I did it was not much — nothing more than that I should do what she would not. If she would not imitate me, we would make the current flow the other way. I would imitate her.
I began the fall that she was three. There seemed to be a general readiness to move forward — the first exercises in picture recognition began then, the work on switches and faucets, the play with dolls. Elly was not silent. Her words were rare, but she often made noises — ordinary, relaxed baby sounds. These I imitated as closely as I could, not systematically but on occasion.
I had been doing this about four months when one day Elly happened to make five little sounds, ending with a rising intonation — ah-ah-ah-ah-A H! That was easy to imitate, and I did so. But this time, unlike all the others, Elly imitated me again. I imitated her back. She laughed. I tried two more sounds, choosing the explosive ba-ba and la- la she had learned from Joann and never forgotten. She imitated them at once. I then risked all and said ‘eye’, the word she’d learned so well and then abandoned. She repeated that too, full of gaiety and amusement.
We were in contact — not by means of touch, which is hard to ignore, but by sound, which is easy. It seemed a great leap forward, but by now we knew that Elly did not proceed by leaps. We kept the game going, and Elly continued to enjoy it. She herself made more complex sounds, almost as if she liked to hear me imitate them. She imitated more nonsense syllables. But she did not say ‘eye’ again. Nor, after that first day, could I bring her through noises to any other words, either abandoned or in current use.
But all this — head under the blanket, doll play, practice in imitation — was for one purpose: to bring her into contact with people. The evidences of progress were small, but they were beginning to accumulate. In the weeks before her third birthday, all these things happened. In the course of a tickling game, she poked me with her finger, to her great amusement. (It did not happen again for six months.) She fed me a candy, as she did a little later at Dr Blank’s, putting it into my mouth herself, not merely pushing my hand to do the work. When an elderly gentleman had held her hand and tickled it, she held out her hand to invite him to begin again. She even clowned a little for him, as a normal baby would. One memorable afternoon she spontaneously hugged her sister. Three or four times she pushed the children, not with the detached don’t-bother-me attitude we were used to, but with the first anger and hostility she had ever shown. It may seem strange to mark down anger as a sign of progress, but it too is a way of relating. It is better than indifference.
Yet it poses problems, especially when it occurs, not at home with one’s own children, where it can be mediated and explained, but with others.
From the very beginning I had gone out of my way to introduce Elly into social situations — to take her to stores and into crowds and to friends’ houses, particularly if they had children. It seemed the obvious thing to do, and it had not been difficult. Elly was too withdrawn to cause any trouble. She sat and walked about and sometimes played with unfamiliar toys, while I visited and hoped that her mere presence in a social milieu was doing her some good. But as Elly came a little way out of herself, her progress presented difficulties. On one such visit she actually noticed a friend’s baby; instead of looking straight through him as she had done before, she gave him a block. We were delighted, of course. But were we to be delighted when later, without provocation, Elly pushed him over with unmistakable hostility? I could welcome hostility in theory, but in practice, if we were to continue to go into society I could not encourage it. I had to say no-no and slap her hand. A week later when the same baby pushed her she did not push back. She slapped her own hand instead. From that time on she paid no further attention to babies.
Yet there was a general forward motion that helped us bear setbacks. As Elly approached four she abandoned doll play altogether and resisted all attempts to lure her back to it. But other things took its place. The new ability to joke and tease did not disappear. She spilled water on me on purpose, and laughed. She turned the light off while we sat at supper. Teasing is not an autistic activity.
We were able to establish a few reciprocal games — ones in which Elly too must play her part. Elly, who six months before would lackadaisically roll a ball back to you from twelve inches away, would now retrieve it with enthusiasm if you threw it several yards. Out on the wide college lawns, I could now do as I had delighted to do with the other children — crouch down and hold out my arms while a small, laughing creature came running from fifty feet away to end in my embrace. At two, Elly had played ring-around-the-rosy with me alone, for I could take both hands and make her dance; at three she would accept other members of the family in the circle; eight months later she included strangers — indeed, she accosted passers-by and peremptorily forced them to join the game. It was no longer difficult to introduce her to baby-sitters. I would place her in her swing, station the new girl to face her, and myself stand behind and push. The repeated, predictable approach and retreat seemed to operate as a model of a manageable human relationship, one from which she could always withdraw, as the swing would always swing back. For years I made sure that there was always someone in front of her when she swung. I looked for activities that could be made reciprocal. Elly looked on while I made beds. She liked to see me cover the pillows; she would motion me to pick them up. It was not hard, it turned out, to move her hands and so teach her to pick the pillows up herself and bring them to me — a beginning of training in giving which inside a year would make it possible for me to say ‘bring me’ and expect a response. Everything worked together. Speech, comprehension, use of the hands, social relationships developed inseparably. Everything fed into everything else. As time went on, Elly remained strange. In some ways she got stranger. But she lived more nearly among us than ever before.
One day, the month she was four, her brother flopped down on a bed. Elly — who had not put a doll to bed for six full months — gently covered him over with a blanket. My eyes filled. That was what all that had been for.
A few weeks later we were back at the drawing work. I made a circle and gave the crayon to Elly. With faint yet certain strokes she put four marks inside it: eyes, nose, mouth. Casually yet unmistakably she made a body and
