want to know what I did yesterday? What’s this stuff? I hate prunes, don’t you? You want mine? Will you play with me after? We need the ball, Johnny’s got it. Come on, don’t be mean, Johnny! He’s always like that. Do you want me to pop you one?’ I listen in wonder. This is retardation, these pronouns, these prepositions, these verbs, with their auxiliaries and their tenses, this mastery of verbal and social idiom? Yet some of these children, at thirteen, cannot learn without constant repetition mathematical relationships that to Elly at eight are intuitively obvious. Her disabilities are no more mysterious than theirs. How can they miss these clear simplicities, when they can learn so well the infinitely more complex modes of social interaction? What have they that Elly lacks, and why do her abilities not interconnect and ramify to allow a comprehension of wider experience?
However clearly one recognizes such questioning as useless at worst, at best as premature, one is forced back on it at last. I have earned the right to my speculations and I present them here, hygenically cordoned off and plainly labelled for what they are.
It is not up to me to decide between the various labels that are offered to describe my child’s condition, but there is one that I have come to think is clearly inapplicable. My child is not, I think, a ‘disturbed child’. Now and then things happen that are too much for her capacities, and these disturb her. But the longer I watch her, the better I know her, and the more there is to know, the more I am convinced that what we are concerned with is not a disturbance but a lack. The screw is not loose, it is missing. I dredge up crude terms from the innocent past when those who took it upon themselves to describe aberrant human beings did not yet veil their uncertainties under precise terminology. These crude terms still suggest an important distinction. Elly is not crazy. She is not feeble- minded; her mind, for those aspects of the world she can make sense of, is sharp and retentive. She is
Over the past five years we have watched Elly’s passivity change to hyperactivity, leading us to reflect that one must be very conscious, in reading case histories, of the case as
Elly has learned to do most of the things she did not do when she was four. She turns knobs, she opens windows, she puts her zipper together and zips it, she unbuttons buttons if there are not too many, she will button one. She goes downstairs foot over foot as normal children do. She jumps down one step — she was seven before she became willing to do that — and recently she has jumped two. Carefully she climbs alone up snow banks and fences, if the person who is with her stays out of reach of her searching hand. She dresses herself in a finite time, if her clothes are laid out for her and she is constantly spurred on to take the next step. She toilets herself, not on impulse, but by a self-established routine night and morning. This month she took the brush and brushed her hair. Occasionally she has even come out with the proud, impatient ‘Elly do’ so familiar to mothers of normal three- year-olds, as she mails a letter or pushes open a heavy door.
But she is eight years old. She does not ride a tricycle. Unless encouraged to do so, she does not pull a wagon, and she does not manage a sled. She will not climb a ladder or go down a slide, though she did both at three and though this summer she climbed without protest down a twenty-foot ladder into a boat in order to go sailing. She cannot snap a snap or operate a safety pin or untie a knot or tie her shoes. She still takes your hand to effect what she wants. It is no longer a denial of you as a human being; she may be in close contact with you, talking and laughing. She may — she probably will — respond to a good-humoured ‘You do it, Elly.’ But it is six and a half years now and still she tries to avoid action on her own.
Her manual dexterity, once so remarkable, appears so no longer. She has not increased it over the past four years and normal children have caught up with and surpassed her. Her letters were good at age five; they are as good today, no better. They are clearly good enough for her; she puts them down, fast and casual, and makes no further effort. At school, if her work is good, she gets a star. At first that delighted her, but now she is equally pleased with a zero or an 80. It is not that she doesn’t know the difference; she does. But any notation pleases her, and the star is no longer novel enough to motivate sustained effort. In fact, Elly will sustain effort only within the framework of a stereotyped task, and even there she does so only f
Elly types easily now, but two years ago she was as weak with the typewriter as she had been at three with faucets and switches. At first she used my fingers, then I used hers. It was weeks before she would press a key hard enough to make a mark of her own. The process repeats itself with each new skill. Certainly I can teach her to tie her shoes if I try hard enough. Perhaps this year I will do it, or perhaps her teacher will, as Elly in the service of weakness mobilizes the vanished blindness and deafness, ignoring instructions, averting her eyes from the task, even closing them. We can teach her one new skill, or five, or ten; we can insist, ignore her protests; we can batter down her resistance. But there are hundreds of such skills inherent in the condition of a normal eight-year-old, and how much expense of spirit can we — or she — afford?
It is of course impossible to separate this physical inertia from the mental and emotional inertia which accompany it. Again, it is characteristic of the condition, not unique to Elly. Rosalind Oppenheim[35] describes her son’s inability to sustain any activity-this of a child who at four endlessly rolled a ball across the floor but who at six, still speechless, could read and answer questions in writing. Unlike Elly, he read stories, if mother or teacher shepherded him through page by page, asking questions at the end of each. He enjoyed the stories too, but though the book was left temptingly available week after week he never once picked it up on his own. And so it is with Elly. Whatever she does, no matter how well it begins, peters out. There is no forward motion, no self-sustained expansion of mastery — in play, in self-help, in drawing, in reading, even in the numbers she finds so fascinating — except in completion of a routine, or sustained by someone else with a support that is in constant danger of becoming a substitute for her own activity or — if it lures her into activity that is too successful — of causing her to abandon it altogether.
Of how many remarkable feats, experienced with how much hope, have I had to record that ‘She did this only once’, or ‘twice in six months’, or ‘no longer shows interest’? Her liking for letters and her memory for their combinations is still remarkable. Another child who possessed the ability to memorize a new word overnight would have been reading within a month. Elly reads voluntarily not at all — unless we count the OFF-ON on switches or the NOPARKING signs whose non significance she embraces with delight, perhaps because it does not threaten her with further progress. Elly can understand spelling too, or so I infer from the fact that for days she has been writing VAKE and GAKE and correctly pronouncing them. But when I suggested she add TAKE and LAKE she said ‘No?’ I knew better than to insist, but she avoids them as if I had drilled her in them daily.
Even in the area of learning where she is more at home, inertia holds her back. It would be possible, by proper selection, to make Elly appear extremely precocious mathematically. When I was still diffidently showing her that 1 + 1 = 2, she assembled two six-inch blocks and a seven-inch one from her set and remarked, without counting them, that 6 + 6 + 7 = 19. Yet today in school, six months later, she makes all the usual mistakes in performing far simpler three-digit sums. This summer, when someone said we needed thirty hamburgers for a picnic, Elly, who had seemingly been paying no attention, volunteered that 15 + 15 = 30. When she was given a box of 48 crayons to add to her set of 64, she knew by some process of her own that she had 112, although she had not yet learned to perform addition that involves carrying. Watching such isolated feats, it is hard not to speculate on what she could do if she would. Yet they remain isolated, and if one tries to elaborate on them Elly resists. Inertia and passivity take new forms but they do not disappear. They ensure that Elly remains a very imperfect idiot
