Through sound I could achieve no contact with Elly. Her sense of sight was hardly more promising — she looked at me sometimes, more often than at anyone else, but except in exceptionally favourable situations, as when I greeted her in the morning, she ignored me too.
Unless I came very close. When I touched her, she noticed that. And although she did not seem to hear or see, her small legs and arms and fingers moved. She could inhibit her senses but she could not entirely deny she had a body.
It was in her motion, in fact, that the discrepancy between what she did and what she gave flashes of being able to do first showed. I remember a day when a friend brought her toddler, a little older than Elly, to visit. Johnny had been walking for months. He had rushed into it, as many babies do, before he was physically ready, he had wanted to so much. He had stumbled fallen, but he had walked. We had both laughed when, able to walk but not yet to sit down, he had collapsed from a standing position on to his bottom with a thump. Elly could stand up too. She too sat down, but it was no ungainly flop. As we watched, she lowered herself, legs gradually bending through a squat, into a sitting position, in an exhibition of controlled grace unusual in any child of that age. My friend exclaimed what we both thought: ‘Why Elly, you fraud!’ This the child who couldn’t walk? Obviously she could walk. She would walk as soon as she wanted to put one foot in front of the other. Yet it was months before she did walk.
It was the same with using her hands. She had begun to feed herself with her fingers at about fifteen months, but she did not use a spoon We had done the usual tricks, we had kept a small spoon available, we had provided tempting foods that required it, but Elly had ignored them. One day she had finished her meal and been lifted down out of her high chair, while the family continued eating. Suddenly Elly, hardly big enough to reach the table, grabbed a large, awkward spoon and conveyed into her mouth a large dollop of my dessert. It happened so fast we barely saw it. Then she was gone. We tried her again next day. Her hand went limp. Not only could this child not feed herself, she couldn’t even hold a utensil.
There was, of course, no point in talking to her. A child who doesn’t respond to ‘Elly, here’s a cookie,’ will hardly understand If you don’t pick up that spoon you won’t get any ice cream Yet even pigeons can be shown that rewards are conditional upon performance; the same methods that teach rats to run mazes might have been used to get Elly to hold a spoon.
Today children like her are learning, by means of the behaviour modification techniques developed by psychologists like Ivar Lovaas and Frank Hewett at the University of California at Los Angeles, not only to feed themselves, but to respond to people, even to speak, as the desired behaviour is analysed into stages and every centimetre of progress rewarded to encourage the next small step towards the goal. Today these techniques are taught to parents. But when Elly was two experiments with reinforcement therapy had hardly begun. She was seven before I even heard of them.
It did not take long to learn that to put Elly into situations of extreme pressure was not only lacerating but useless. I have mentioned that she learned to crawl upstairs at seventeen months, and then forgot. After many months — it was after she came home from the first trip to the hospital — she learned again, and with some help she learned also to crawl down. But she did not learn as other children do, a skill to be extended, applied in new situations with a feeling of mastery and pleasure. She could crawl up and down our main staircase. Not our third- floor stairs, however, and not any staircase in a neighbour’s house. One day — she was just past two — we carried her halfway up a friend’s stairs and marooned her. I stayed at the bottom, smiling encouragement. She understood the situation at once, she who understood so little. She began to cry, with a kind of crying very rare for her, for though she might fret, or cry loudly if hurt, she did not cry much or long. This was a hard crying to listen to — lost, furious, totally committed — a crying that came up from the inside depths we never reached. We let it go on for twenty minutes. Then we carried her down. What would she have learned if we had left her there? Nothing, I think, except that we were willing to treat her with inconceivable violence. We could not have left her there. I think, I really think she was ready to stay there till she died.
But she did want to come down enough to cry about it. That itself was rare. Her detachment usually provided her with better armour. In almost all situations, the weakness of her desires was there working for her, against us. The rat wants the flavoured pellet, the pigeon wants the corn. What did Elly want enough to meet any conditions for getting it? Not a cookie, not a toy, not a ride in the car. A baby who like a Zen adept acquires the knack of inhibiting its desires approaches something akin to the Zen
So again and again it was as if she could but wouldn’t. That, of course, was the source of the doctors’ uncertainty. Those vigorous legs, those exquisitely controlled fingers sifting the links of her chain became weak and useless when confronted with any imposed task. And what was an imposed task? To climb, to reach, to walk — all the activities other children spontaneously throw themselves into in their delighted desire to learn and grow. Elly seemed strong. But between her and any normal development lay this terrible weakness, a weakness that was no less real because it seemed to lie not in the muscles but in the will.
Who knows what is willed and what is not? Who boasts he can read minds — least of all a wordless baby’s? In humility I can only say that Elly’s weakness seemed as if it was willed, in full realization of the difficulty of believing it. It is a little too much to swallow — to accept that an infant can assess its situation as we have all seen frightened grownups do — and decide that anything is preferable, even total withdrawal, to the risks of activity and growth. It is as if...
It was as if, then, Elly had realized early, earlier than it seems possible for any child to realize, that if she remained motionless, sitting on a rug in the middle on the floor, nothing could occur to threaten her, that if she attempted to do nothing, she need never fail. She did not in fact sit motionless — she was alive and healthy, her body functioned and impelled her to a fuller interaction with the world than that — but it seemed to us that this was the model of her condition. Her body was as strong as it was beautiful, but in comparison to a normal child she used it hardly at all. The first strategies of the besiegers must deal with this least abstract, most accessible of Elly’s weaknesses. It was useless to assault ears that would not hear us and eyes that would not see. The first approach — the only way in — was to try to return to her her primary birthright, the use of her body.
How elevated that sounds, how elaborate and complex! Yet it is a fancy description of something most simple. There can be nothing esoteric about a mother working with a baby, trying tactfully, delicately, to encourage it to do new things. This is what all mothers learn. Everything I found to do in this abnormal, extreme situation was only an extension and intensification of things I had done with my normal babies. Such tact as I had I had learned with them. So it may be with a feeling of anticlimax that the reader moves into a description of what was actually done. It seems very simple and it was. There wasn’t anything else for it to be. Even the most accomplished professional therapists of children, if we view them operationally, considering what they do, do something quite simple. They discover the right games to play.
Consider one of the first skills we managed to convey to her — drinking from a cup. She sat with us at the table, she fed herself, but although her cup was there before her, small and comfortably available, she never picked it up. When it was time to drink I held it up for her, as I had done ever since she was a small baby. If I put it in contact with her fingers they refused even to close around it, let alone expend the force necessary to lift it to her mouth. Months went by — she was twenty months old, two years, and still incapable of grasping the cup. Incapable at table. In her bath she had cups which she used with finesse, not only picking them up but deftly pouring water from one into the other. More months pass. It is late in November; Elly, born in July, is nearly two and a half.
One day at dinner Elly surprises us. Rapidly, decisively, she picks up a small glass of milk, pours it accurately into her apple sauce. There is a precedent; the previous day I had poured milk into her apple sauce for the first time, but that hardly explains it. Though man is an imitative animal, Elly does not imitate. Nevertheless, some resistance seems to be giving here; the very next day she picks up one of her bath cups and drinks from it. The day after, she picks up her cereal bowl, quickly drinks some of the milk, and pours the rest on the table.
There was so little at any given time going on with Elly that it took no special acumen to note a new readiness, which could perhaps be made use of. Experience had taught me that while other babies might be encouraged if congratulated and made a fuss over, Elly would react in just the opposite way, with retreat. It worked badly when we called attention to anything Elly was doing — she always stopped doing it. As if she didn’t want to be committed to any forward progress — as if she feared that any concession she made would at once be taken
