have become so sensitive about toilet behaviour that it would have been nearly impossible for us to proceed with steadiness without the feeling of a professional behind us.
Not that professional support gave us any remarkable solution, here or elsewhere; it merely helped us to adjust to a modus vivendi in which we avoided absences and trouble. The profit I got from my sessions with the analyst lay less in the recommendations she made for affecting Elly’s behaviour, or the occasional interpretations she made of it, than in the general atmosphere of her approach.
She told me at the beginning that I should expect her to make mistakes. For that I respected her most of all. She gave much good advice. Mixed with it was much that turned out to be inapplicable or irrelevant, and some that was wrong. How should it be otherwise? If there is to be trial, one must expect error. In our common groping for a forward way, what reassured me was exactly this: to find pragmatic flexibility where I had anticipated dogmatism, allegiance to fact where I had expected applications of theory. I had thought I would be led among the verbal mazes of Freudian analysis, but ‘ego’, ‘id’, ‘complex’, and ‘libido’, are words that occur more often in the course of a New York cocktail party than they did in my months with the analyst. It is true that there was a bit of ‘oral’ and ‘anal’, but considering our particular problem that was not surprising. I soon found that it translated down to ‘let Elly play with stoves and refrigerators and let the bathtub and potty toys go’. That seemed good enough. Elly in fact paid lukewarm attention to cooking toys, none to potties, and there was no possibility of cooling her interest in tubs. I never did find out to what extent ‘oral’ and ‘anal’ applied. But my friend the analyst’s interest was clearly not in matters of theory. She brought forward few interpretations of her own and she was less than enthusiastic when we ourselves came up with ingenious hypotheses to explain the increasing complexity of Elly’s behaviour.
One of these concerned Elly’s new ability to count. Naturally, this delighted us. Yet it had queer liabilities. Instead of expanding, as a normal child’s will, so that the child learns to count higher and higher, it hardened into a fixation. She had to have four washcloths in the bathroom, four cookies on the floor. She had to have them; they were so important to her that we called them her status symbols. We knew that intuitively she could subtract, because if one or two were missing she would reject any but the right amount required to make up the number. This was a gratifying display of intelligence, but awkward if the Co-op ran out of the proper biscuits so that lost or broken ones could not be replaced; it was then almost impossible to comfort her.
Focusing on this behaviour, as perforce we all had to, we noticed that the week after Jill came to us Elly added one cookie-and one washcloth. A short time later, she added two more — chocolate biscuits this time, somewhat larger than the others. Then, on our Paris trip when Jill and the children were left alone, the two chocolate cookies disappeared and four Ritz crackers took their place. A total of nine, grouped as five and four, was now indispensable.
Psychology is a game any number can play. Our Cockney cleaning woman, who was extraordinarily good with Elly, had suggested already that the four biscuits represented the four children, raised to five at Jill’s arrival. From then on the interpretation burgeoned. Jill put her fine young mind to work; the exigencies of replacing cookies which got lost or stepped on kept the problem in the forefront of everyone’s attention. Might not the two chocolate cookies represent the two parents? When they left the family circle, the five were retained, but the original four were now added to represent the confusion in Jill’s status, since it was no longer clear whether she was functioning as a child or a surrogate parent.
This hypothesis afforded us all a certain intellectual satisfaction. Myself a gingerly theorist, I had had no part in it, but I thought it a handsome attempt and reported it in one of my sessions. It had the air of some of the things I had read in the psychology books, and I thought it was the sort of thing the analyst would like.
She didn’t care for it, however. She cautioned me ‘not to make constructs’. I was surprised; I had thought applied psychology to be more than the method of trial and error I had been pursuing, cautious, hesitant, guided more by action and reaction than by overarching explanations. I was startled and pleased to find professional sanction for playing it by ear, especially since it was the only way I knew how to play. Her caution against constructs helped me, not to reject constructs altogether, but to feel free to judge them by their correspondence with the facts and not by the glories of their internal consistency. There were few constructs indeed, however probable, that made much difference to what I actually
So we were back to specifics again: what to do with Elly, how to fill her empty days, how to encourage such spontaneous play as she originated, how to supply new and usable experiences where she originated none. As before, I learned best by watching. Twice the analyst came to our house — further evidence of her flexibility, for many children are treated by people who never see them at home. She was thus able to check out some ideas of her own in a direct way that would otherwise have been impossible. She could satisfy herself that Elly’s fastidiousness did not reflect compulsive orderliness at home (one look at the living room took care of that!), and that her low performance was not a reaction to the inappropriately high standards of a middle-class family. And while she observed, I was able to watch her play with Elly. It was an impressive sight, for she was one of those people who could involve her in action without making demands on her. Most people tried to talk to Elly. This therapist, though highly articulate, was an expert in nonverbal communication. She played the piano for Elly. She got out the cups and saucers she had brought and got her to play tea- party. She sat down on the floor beside her to paint. Elly, used to my drawing sessions, tried to get her to do the drawing herself. She did not refuse, but kept her markings as crude as Elly’s own, so they could set no unattainable standard. A year before, when I had begun drawing with Elly, I had deliberately made my drawings as realistic as I could to aid her uncertain recognition. The technique had had considerable effectiveness,but I could now see its drawbacks. Elly was more likely to draw for someone else than for me.
The analyst had brought a flower pot. She tried to interest Elly in filling it with earth. She had little success beyond satisfying herself that Elly could take dirt or leave it, but I saw something that might be usable later. As I watched the therapist I had the impression of an enormous reservoir of skills, most of them as yet inapplicable to this very simple system, yet still something I could learn from for the future. I wished I could watch her with other children. That was impossible, but she was willing to tell me about some of them. The children she described seemed much less severely afflicted than Elly; even those who didn’t talk had shown that they
She was growing all the time. We led a quiet life in England; inside the walls and fences of our neat suburb children played, but there was no way I knew to get Elly near them. Even at home, on the open lawns full of children, she had done no more than run beside them. Here, except for her own siblings, there were no children to run with. Yet I sensed a frail new readiness. I often took her to the village green, where she would swing unseeingly among strong wiry boys and girls who paid her no more attention than she paid them. But one day, as a squad of children marched out of the adjoining school yard, she did an unexpected thing — she suddenly shifted direction and ran directly among them. I reported this to the analyst, and other incidents that tended in the same direction. It was then that she made the move that has benefited Elly more than any other single thing that has been done for her. It was she who made the contacts that made it possible for Elly to go to nursery school with normal children. That Elly, from that time to this,has been able to go to school is largely due to the intelligence and devotion of the teachers at the extraordinary school the analyst found for her.
They too were professionals. The school was no plushy private foundation, but run with tight public funds as a demonstration school for the local teacher’s college. The analyst did not think a place would be found there for Elly — our best hope was that the principal would see her and recommend some tiny, mother-run class where Elly could at least see other children. We were foreigners. We did not even live within this school district. There was every administrative reason to send us on our way and none to welcome us. Yet the principal took us in — both of us, for the way she found to reconcile regulations with need was to invite me to come in with Elly, so that her
