The Siege

Yet it is astonishing how much that one has learned from living with normal children is applicable also to the disturbed and defective.

I have come to see mental health and illness, soundness and defect, not as the separate entities the words seem to describe, but as a continuum. The needs of the defective and the sick are more imperious than those of the well, but they are not different in kind. Sick children need to be accepted, supported, comforted, corrected — like well ones. Above all, like all children — like all people — they need to be respected. Good parents have no magic key to dealing with children beyond this almost foolishly simple one: to try to imagine each situation from the child’s point of view. Some people do it by instinct, but it is a technique that one can learn — to turn in upon oneself at need and ask, ‘What would I feel like if?'

But the child is ill, its thought processes are incomplete, distorted? So are we ill, by turns and chances, and we are no strangers to distortion and incompleteness. Indeed since our children tend to be like us, we may have a special insight, based on our own self-knowledge. Our memories of our own childhood will guide us as we try to understand our children’s.

I remember a little girl, seven years old, shy to the point of incapacity and so tense that every social situation was liable to flood her in helpless nausea. I remember a father less known in daily familiarity than in arbitrary incursions and descents bringing with them fear and distrust the child could not acknowledge, since children learn only that it is customary to love one’s father. I remember a weekend of crisis so acute that the doctor had been called — the little girl had been able to keep nothing down for two days and the doctor and her mother had agreed that she should not be forced to eat, in hopes that the tension would abate of itself. I do not forget the unwonted apparition of the father in the kitchen, tall, handsome, intense. He would get the child to eat, these people knew nothing, it was all a matter of the right approach. He would make it with his own hands — a simple, tasty meal served in attractive circumstances. They would see that she would eat for him.

And she did eat, while he stood over her; she ate everything down to the last bit of apple-sauce, fighting back nausea with every mouthful. She thought that this would be the way to satisfy him, to give him what he wanted so that he would leave her alone and she would never have to eat again unless she was able. She could not guess that he would take her gift as proof that what she had done then she could do always, and that a genuine and terrifying disability (which has followed her all her life) was merely a spoiled child’s malingering. That memory is also part of my education. It taught me, when my own children came, not to confuse gallantry with strength. Respect must grow out of knowledge — knowledge of what a child can do, and what is at present and perhaps for ever beyond its power. When Elly came I at last formulated what I had learned so long before — that a result that has been achieved once because of some unusual motivation may have taken every ounce of strength a child possesses, and that it must never be construed to commit the child to that level of performance.

Every parent has been a child — more likely than not a child in some way like this child of his. Every parent has incidents he can remember and learn from, from which he can assess his children’s vulnerability or strength. The bringing up of children is an exercise in self-knowledge and in the respect for others that grows out of it. The millions of families that function in comparative happiness are evidence that ordinary parents have intuitive knowledge of this principle of respect. They are expert in many things, but penetrating and modifying everything they do is their expertness in the application of that golden rule which governs all personal relationships. Family life is the first school in which we learn the techniques of love, and if it is not perfect, still I know no better.

I have not dared to set down in my list of advantages a parent’s love for the child. Love is not only not enough — we have almost been persuaded to admit that it is a disadvantage. Yet I cannot think that we are disqualified for working with our child because we love her. Detachment and objectivity are techniques too and can be learned. Psychiatrists themselves work by love — in their strange language it is called transference. It is usually understood as the love the patient feels for the person who is helping him, but psychiatrists have learned from their master Freud that it works both ways and that they love whom they help. It is in fact to prevent their being consumed by the power of reverse transference that they have learned to set limits to the therapeutic relationship — and this knowledge is part of what they can give to parents. They have learned, too, the dangers of a love that uses the creature that it loves to satisfy its own needs. It is quite true that parents can exploit children to build up their own egos. Teachers can exploit students, ministers parishioners, psychiatrists patients. ‘Love seeketh only self to please,/To bind another to its delight’ — the love that builds a hell in heaven’s despite is one we must all recognize. Most of us learn to recognize it in the school of family life, from the childhood of others if we have been lucky, from our own if we have not. We learn it from reading, watching, listening — in as many ways as we are able, for it is the single indispensable lesson. Never to make Elly feel guilty for having taken so much of our time — never to voice the words ‘the best years of our life’-always to remember that though she may have needed what we gave her, she never asked us for it, that we gave of our free choice what must remain a gift and not a claim — luckily these are not recondite principles. We must remind ourselves of them continually; no expert can do it for us. Though others may help us to it, such analysis as we make must be our own.

So it is that we must be aware of the ways to go wrong in loving, ways that help not the person we love but ourselves. But our consciousness of these should not be too acute, lest it immobilize us for the work to be done. We need to learn the lesson, but not to be made afraid by it. Insight, overdone, becomes cliche; if there is a cliche more widespread than that of the rejecting parent it is that of the possessive mother.

Physicians of the soul do the thousands of afflicted children no service if they undermine the confidence of their parents in what they can accomplish by intelligent love. Intelligence and love are not natural enemies. Nothing sharpens one’s wits for the hints and shadows of another’s thinking as love does — as anyone who has been in love can testify. Blake’s poem describes as well another kind of love — the love that ‘seeketh not itself to please,/Nor for itself hath any care,/But for another gives its ease,/And builds a Heaven in Hell’s despair’. There are millions of parents — as well as teachers, and social workers, and doctors, and ministers, and psychiatrists, and ordinary men and women-who practise this love daily, knowing that love is a technique as well as an emotion.

Ordinary men and women. The point needs emphasis; the special advantages of parents are not unusual but widespread. It is some time since I myself have felt shut out by professionals. Those with whom I have lately come in contact treat me almost as if I were on the inside. But their amiability has a corollary; they seem to think, as some readers may think, that I have done something extraordinary, something that few parents would have been able to do. I do not believe that. I learned from my Cockney cleaning woman that an uneducated mother of six can have a delicacy of touch in dealing with a psychotic child that few can match who are trained to the business. Of all the types of success, the most widespread is successful parenthood; the species survives because this is so. It is also the most inconspicuous; it is precisely those millions of parents who successfully pilot their children through illness and crisis who never come to a psychiatrist’s attention. No one, professional or amateur, should underestimate the immense fund of goodness, knowledge, and resourcefulness possessed by ordinary parents. Let it be understood that I am no miracle worker. I am not ‘good with children’ or particularly fond of them. I knew none before my own, and even now I would never voluntarily seek a small child’s company. Such qualified success as I have had must not be thought of as unique.

Once, in an access of mingled self-congratulation and self-pity, I was describing all I had done with Elly to a friend, herself a mother of three. When my torrent of words had ceased she replied with healing matter-of-factness, ‘Well, you couldn’t have done anything else, could you?’ Of course not. She did not have to tell me that she would have done the same.

Psychotic children are a congregation of mysteries. So little is as yet understood about them that the distinction between amateur and professional has hardly begun to acquire a meaning. There are many parents who, like us, have had no choice but to make themselves experts in their child’s abnormality. I have met some of them. They should not have to work alone.

13. Towards Speech:. A long, slow chapter

I have described Elly’s first four years in almost complete detail. To describe her second four as minutely would be impossible, even in a much longer book. Not only has her behaviour become more complex, but as her withdrawal has lessened and helpers and teachers have been able to contribute more and more to her development, I have not, as in her first years, been aware of everything she said and did. I have been aware of