The Siege

not have come at all in the analyst’s office, in the daily hour.

Parents are there. Because they are there they can act when the child is ready. In the first years of life, more often than not, one parent or another is on hand, in actual or potential contact with the child, twenty-four hours a day fifty-two weeks a year. Books on child therapy state that the experiences of bedding, feeding, and awaking are especially significant to a child: this is one of the reasons that many psychiatrists recommend residential treatment. Those out of reach of such treatment may reflect, however, that experienced parents do not need to be told when their child is most receptive. Their knowledge, transmitted through the generations, has been absorbed into the rhythm of family life, institutionalized in the family meal and the bedtime story. Even Elly smiled straight into my face when I got her up in the morning.

When you are in twenty-four-hour contact, every experience can be considered for potential usefulness. The fertile course of daily life offers you far more material than you could think of for yourself — a trip to the dairy (it was on one of these that Elly first climbed into the car under her own power), to the bakery where a lady’s kind hand provides a cookie and eventually Elly will begin to chirp ‘thank you’, a visit from a little girl who eats peanut butter so that Elly begins to eat it too. There are lessons in dustpans, sinks, pebbles, and bowls of cereal. And when you have known a child since birth you have as good a basis as anyone can for judging which of these experiences a child is ready to make use of and which he is not. Its withdrawal, or the edge in its voice, teaches you the difference between stimulation and pressure.

Growing out of this intimate knowledge is a curious advantage I have become conscious of only slowly. The parent knows his child, and he also knows his mate and his family. Individuals in a family differ markedly, and the parent is of course aware of that. But he is also aware of what is less obvious — of the ways in which they are alike, the patterns of behaviour that might seem strange to an outsider but are not so to parents, who see them in their normal children as well as in the deviate, and who also recognize them in themselves. My husband could recall that, like Elly, he had rocked his crib until it had to be nailed down. Elly’s relative passivity was not unfamiliar to us. We all shared her physical caution, though in us it stopped short of pathology. Looking at Elly, I could remember Sara, who even as a baby never put a foreign body in her mouth, and Becky, who cried when I pressed her to turn the faucet. Matt, apparently strong and well co-ordinated, was four before he learned to push the pedals of his tricycle hard enough to propel it forward. None of my children opened medicine bottles or explored unauthorized cupboards or jars, any more than I myself had as a child. All when excited waved their arms in a tense way unseen in other families. All were reluctant to apply pressure; long before Elly was born I had raged inwardly at three healthy children who cried ‘Mommy’ at a resisting door that my neighbour’s children would open with one energetic shove. We do not rush at life. The six of us have lived a total of a hundred and forty years (albeit most, concurrently, of course). The only bone that has been broken among us is one big toe, and there is no antiseptic in our medicine chest.

So that in a curious way Elly belonged in our family. She would have driven my energetic neighbour beside herself, just as the activity of my neighbour’s children would have been too much for me. Therapy begins in acceptance. We could accept Elly more easily, all of us, because we knew her in ourselves.

This deep knowledge of the child in context finds its climax in what is perhaps the most important of all the parents’ advantages: that they know the child’s language. The extreme difficulty of work with very young children, or those whose speech is defective or absent, is to a great degree one of language. Yet their difficulty in communication is a measure of how much they need help.

The parents — and their allies, their other children and their household helpers, who in some degree share in all these advantages — know this language. They have learned it the natural way, over months and years, gesture by gesture, sound by sound, word (at last) by word. Their understanding of it has deepened to intuition; their grasp of it is quicker and surer than any outsider’s can be. They hear the anxiety in the high squeal the outsider cannot distinguish from laughter; they understand that assent is conveyed by running across the room or jumping up and down. They will understand the new word in its fluctuating indistinctness because they first encounter it in the situation that brings it into being — and if it carries emotional or symbolic overtones they will know it if anyone does. It was not until her fifth year that Elly began to acquire words in any quantity, and what they gained in number they lost in distinctness. Who could expect a stranger to understand a child who says ‘buh’ for six different words from ‘baby’ to ‘fish’? That summer in Austria Elly would say ‘huh’ and cry with frustration if we could not guess from context whether she meant us to draw a house, hand, hen, hat, or horse. (If we said ‘huh’ in imitation she was never satisfied; she heard the little differences she did not reproduce. ) Might her frustration have led, in the skilled hands of someone who could not rely on basic understanding of her language, to attempts to speak so she could be understood? We tried that then, saying gently that we couldn’t understand and waiting for her frustration to produce a more refined pronunciation. But she wasn’t ready; communication didn’t interest her enough to provide a motivation. Now, four years later, it is begining — only beginning — to.

Had Elly gone into professional therapy at five (and even that would have been years after the onset of the condition) it would have taken months for a psychiatrist to learn her language, and even then it would have been as a tourist, not a native in her world. Even if he had by some miraculous philological instinct realized that ‘Ih-ih huh’ meant ‘England house’, he would hardly have recognized it for a request to draw a remembered building and he would have had no clue to the frustration that would have occurred when he failed to respond. How many interpretations go astray from lack of the knowledge that any parent has? The English analyst, when she learned that Elly had once said ‘pee-pee’, assumed that it must be a toilet word. I deserved no particular credit for knowing that Elly had said it only when she saw our neighbour’s child Peter, or that ‘pee-pee’ was a word she had never heard and so could not have used. It was merely that I knew her language.

Skilled therapists do wonders without talk, working with objects and with direct play. But they must come to words at last; if the child is to move into a speaking world, they must acquire his language with him until he can speak the common tongue. When I took Elly, at five, to her present psychiatrist, he recognized how far he was from understanding her and how long it would take him to begin to do it. This was, in fact, an important reason why he left me on my own. In so severe a case the process was long, he said, and the advantage doubtful. And-as neither of us had to remind the other — psychiatry is a well- paid profession. Which brings me to another advantage of using parents as therapists. They work for nothing.

It would be more graceful, perhaps, not to press this point, particularly since we were fortunate enough so that for us it need not be decisive. But for many parents it is — for us it would have been if Elly had been born when we were younger. To overlook it would be unrealistic and unfair. Children with severe afflictions — call them psychoses, defects, or what you will — need intensive therapy if they need any — if not in a residential school, then daily. But the price of intensive contact continued over years is beyond the resources of all but the well-to-do, and even they cannot absorb it without strain. The family that cannot afford therapy, or enough of it, has one recourse. The parents are going to be on hand anyway. Every family can afford the services of its mother.

The last advantage possessed by parents, and by other amateurs with them, may well be a certain humility. This humility will grow out of their very consciousness that they are not professionals, and still more out of their sense, daily and hourly reinforced, of the mysteries and ambiguities of the condition which confronts them. Again and again they will have reached some explanation which has seemed plausible until the fact comes along which contradicts it. Living their lives among questions, not answers, they are natural empiricists in a field that — they may be pardoned for suspecting — is not yet ready to press beyond empiricism. They have learned to feel their way; they have learned it not only from their experience of abnormal children, but from normal children too. Years before Elly was born, in the course of one of those mother-to-mother chats by which parental expertise is spread, a friend told me a story. It contained a lesson, and since it has become as sure a part of my education as anything I have read in a book, I must tell it here.

My friend and her husband, travelling with their children, had arrived in Germany. They had come to visit an elderly relative, the husband’s great-aunt, never seen before and barely known through infrequent correspondence. His parents had left Germany sixty years before; these young Americans were nervous about the visit, aware that the free-wheeling spontaneity of modern academic children might not pass muster among German ladies of an earlier generation. So when they arrived they were relieved at the old aunt’s suggestion that they sit inside while the children played in the garden. After a few minutes the mother went out to check and found to her consternation her four-year-old son standing beside a broken sundial. A mother both permissive and understanding, she gently explained that everybody knew that accidents happened and that little boys made mistakes and that it was very much better to own up to a thing than to pretend you hadn’t done it. Hand in hand they went inside and the little