A Pseudo-Talent for Words? The Teacher’s Report to Dr Witmer
The Psychological Clinic Copyright, 1917, by Lightnor Wltmer, Editor. Vol. XI, No. 1 March 15, 1917 ORTHOGENIC CASES.1 XI. By Sarah Warfield Parker, M.A. Philadelphia, Pa. “In my harem, in my harem! There’s Rosie, Posie, Josie.” I stopped on the stairs and listened to a high, childish voice beating out the measures with exaggerated accent. “And there never was a minute King Solomon wasn’t in it.” I turned on the landing and saw a dark, undersized little fellow shuffling, circling about the room with the cr^de rhythmic jerk of knee and hand which enlivens our vaudeville stage. “Wise for breakfast, wise for dinner, And wise for supper time; Lots of fancy dances, And it doesn’t cost a dime.” He stopped with a laugh of sheer delight in the rhyme of time and dime.
‘I looked at Gordon. If I had not known that on his next birthday he would be ten, I should have judged him no more than 1 The following reports of Cases treated by the Orthogenic Method, have appeared: I. A Case of Chronic Bad Spelling. Lightner Witmer. Vol. 1, p. 53. II. The Fifteen Months’ Training of a Feebleminded Child. Lightner Witmer. Vol. 1, p. 69. III. Retardation through Neglect in Children of the Rich. Lightner Witmer. Vol. 1, p. 157. IV. The Treatment and Cure of a Case of Mental and Moral Deficiency. Lightner Witmer. Vol. 2, p. 153. V. The Restoration of Children of the Slums. Lightner Witmer. Vol. 3, p. 266. VI. The Irrepressible Ego. Lightner Witmer. Vol. 4, p. 193. VII. Children with Mental Defects Distinguished from Mentally Defective Children. Lightner Witmer. Vol. 7, p. 173. VIII. The Outlook for James. Sarah Warfield Parker. Vol. 10, p. 71. IX. Tom the Enigma. Sarah Warfield Parker. Vol. 10, p. 209. X. A Fettered Mind. Lightner Witmer. Vol. 10, p. 241. (1) eight. He was frail and undersized, with legs comparatively short, and long trunk, head, and arms. An unusually heavy mass of coarse, waving brown hair grew down partially to conceal a forehead so abnormally low as to seem no forehead at all. Even then, with his body all tense, rhythmic movement, I could see how ugly his face was, with its small broad nose and thick lips, partly opened. I could see, too, the somewhat underdeveloped ear set far back and, in the shuffling movement, caught a suggestion of the flat, square foot.
Suddenly, he saw me and came forward with a courtly bow and cordially proferred hand that would do credit to the most punctilious of the old time southern gentlemen. I felt his hand in mine? coarse, inert, stubby, with short, blunt fingers, For the moment, he looked almost attractive with his brown eyes sparkling and his cheeks flushed with the animation of the courteous host. “Have you ever been to Savannah?” he asked, bending toward me graciously.
But the welcome over, the light died out of his face, and I saw, sitting in the corner, alone, a different Gordon. I saw the pallid, yellow skin of a face that was old, weary beyond any weariness I had ever seen, a face marked with tired, quivering lines, and eyelids that flickered ceaselessly. Yet again, after supper, he was all animation. “Have you ever heard ‘Cavalliera Rusticana’ sung by Enrico Caruso?” he asked.
As the record was played, he stood directly in front of the graphophone, marking time with head, arms, in fact with rhythmic movement of his whole body. He came back to me, humming, his face a bit perplexed. “What is it I am singing?” “The Toreador,” I answered.
His face lighted with recognition. “I heard that when I saw the play called Carmen at the theater. Carmen was a lady. This is what she sang,” and he hummed again, a few measures from one of Carmen’s solos.
Gordon’s abilities were foremost this first evening?his sense of rhythm, and his audio-motor memory for words and tunes. Only his physical characteristics led one to suspect the disabilities which these concealed.
In reality, Gordon, this finished young gentleman of ten with the society manner and the excellent memory, stood very near the zero point in the scale of social efficiency, and as sixteen months of subsequent observation have proved, he is incapable of being trained to even a passable level of such efficiency. Underneath his excessive excitability to a certain few stimuli which interest him, lies an organism of low vitality and sluggish response to material environment. With the exception of a few charged areas energized for immediate and violent response, his mind is in a state of unperceiving, irresponsive detachment from surroundings. Not inability to do a thing per se, but inability to do it efficiently, is his marked defect in practical performances. lie learned to dress himself but emerges in such a rumpled state that someone must straighten everything he has on. He learned to fold a napkin, to lace a shoe, to tie a bow, but unless coerced, does them wretchedly.
He is incapable of putting anything straight, for he lays it down dreamily, scarcely looking. He will always dream across a city street, oblivious of traffic, until he is under the horses’ very feet. He will lose himself in the city, for he can wander on for an hour with no consciousness that he has lost his companion. He continually bumps into people, for he never looks where he is walking, and despite his courtesy, does not awake to the situation quickly enough to apologize. He loses everything he carries, even candy for which he has an inordinate passion. He drops everything, spills everything, tumbles everything he touches. If his hat blows off, he does not know enough to pick it up. He never pays enough attention to a game to remember his turn or to keep consistently in view the aim of the contest. One season, Gordon was actually energetic enough to coast in the snow, but at the foot of the hill he remained lying on his stomach flat on his sled. Some one told him to get up. “Why?” he asked vaguely.
Though his coordination has improved so that it is possible for him to fill in neatly the outlines from the Montessori insets, he does not develop sufficiently sustained attention to boundary and to precision of line to impel him to do the possible. Though he has learned to write in good form, and because of his verbal memory and facile flow of ideas, composes fluently, his penmanship is careless and smudgy unless he is constantly stimulated. Though by persistent illustration, the concepts which at first were totally lacking, of middle, upper, lower, right, left, under, on top of, turn over, flat, straight, etc., have been formed in Gordon’s mind, his habitual inattention to position makes him unable to use these concepts without hesitation and indecision.
This inability to react effectively to the animate and inanimate objects about him cannot be corrected. Persistent drill can, in many instances, give him the means to such reaction but in him the will to react is lacking. Perseverant attention to the means as applied to the end cannot be developed in him. Gordon’s responses are spontaneous only to those stimuli which, in his physical organiza4 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL CLINIC. tion, are immediately interesting to him. These immediate interests are reading, music, conversation, words, watches, wasps, twisting, and soldiers. He cares nothing for other children, in fact, always resents their interference, and is, indeed, already a leisurely old gentleman, enjoying only the society of adults. Obviously, if to this incapacity to look out for himself, you add Gordon’s total deficiency in the concept of numbers, you have an individual who drops away down the line of imbecility?a total incompetent in the practical affairs of society. Yet superimposed on this low level of daily performance is an apparent gift of language that makes us pause to question:, given a valet, a financial adviser, and a private secretary, can this boy develop intellectually into an individual who approximates the normal?
One morning at the breakfast table he asked pleasantly, “Did you know that George Bernard Shaw had written a new play? ‘Androcles and the Lion’?”
“Yes,” he added, “I read it in Everybody’s magazine.” By the time he has finished a brief and accurate outline of the plot?remembered, by the way, from the story of Androcles and the Lion read in his reader eight months ago?the casual observer may be tempted to believe that this precocious child can indeed realize his ambition to become “a college professor who teaches psychology and geology and writes plays.”
For an understanding of the real insufficiencies of the child it is necessary to differentiate between a gift of words and a gift of language. We shall study Gordon, first, to determine whether or not he possesses those elements which constitute a gift of words? sensitivity to verbal impressions and retentivity of verbal images. If we find that he possesses such a faculty, we shall attempt further to discover whether he possesses the associated mental qualities which are required to translate such a gift of words into a gift of language, that is, into a usable tool of expression.
Is Gordon sensitive to audito-motor impressions? He learns nonsense jingles, college yells, and rhymes almost on a single hearing. After he ‘had heard another child repeat twice the eight lines of Stevenson’s “Bed in Summer” he knew them perfectly. After six or seven readings of the story of King Alfred and the Cakes in Baldwin’s “Fifty Famous Stories,” he reproduced it almost verbatim. The original story contained five hundred fifteen words: He reproduced it in two hundred fifty-seven words, two hundred thirty-four of which (45 per cent) were from the book. Similarly, after reading twice King Canute by the Seashore, four hundred nine words, he reproduced verbatim one hundred ninety-seven words (45 per cent); and of How the Bean Got Its Black Mark, three hundred fortyseven words, he recalled two hundred eighty-seven words, (82 per cent). Instances of this immediate sensitivity to words could be multiplied ad infinitum. I shall add only a transcript of his account of a visit in the city to show how swift he is to catch the words and sounds in his environment.
“I’m glad I’m not at the hotel. I like the country. It’s so hot in at the hotel, and babies wakes us up and shades rattle. Our room was on the fifth floor, number 502. Do you know who manages the hotel now? Charles Blank. They have a fine dining room. Monday we had supper,?not dinner. Then we stayed down and listened to the music. They played something I knew, Tannhauser. We stayed down until eight o’clock. The next morning I read to mother from a ‘Little Boy Blue’ book. I am sending the book to a little boy named Morgan. I took a bath too, all myself, a nice hot one. We had lunch at a tea room with Auntie. We went to the moving pictures?the Edison you know. It is on Market Street. You know those ‘any rags, any bones, any bottles’ men? There was one of them and a boy, and the boy stole a necklace and the rag-picker man said, ‘Did you steal that necklace?’ Wednesday we went shopping in the morning. I went to the moving pictures with Auntie. We had dinner at the hotel and I stayed down and listened to the music until half past seven. I went to bed, and after I was asleep, mother came back and I had been asleep all by myself while they had ginger ale and things. I could not stay asleep in the morning because a baby woke us up crying.” In addition to sensitivity to verbal impressions has Gordon adequate retentivity of the images formed? The poetry he has learned he remembers over an interval of twelve months, recalling the lines with very little prompting. After a lapse of three months he reproduced the story of King Alfred, already mentioned, in two hundred eight words, one hundred seventy-four (33 per cent) of which were a direct overhang from the original. Nine months after the first reading he retold it in one hundred eleven words, sixty-seven of which (13 per cent) are to be found in the printed story. Gordon added as he finished, “I saw it in the book, ‘Fifty Famous Stories’ by James Baldwin.” After two months he recalled 25 per cent of King Canute, and 61 per cent of How the Bean Got Its Black Mark,?approximately a drop of 20 per cent of recall in two months. A month after Howard Pyle’s “The Companions of King Arthur” had been read to him, Gordon showed a distinct and accurate recall of names.
“King Arthur was a king, and he ruled in the southern part of Britain. He had knights. Their names were Sir Galahad, Sir Geraint, Sir Pelleas, Sir Percival, Sir Tristram, and Sir Lancelot of the Lake, and Sir Gawain. He wore a crown of gold, jewels, emeralds, and opal stones, and he had a fair lady named Queen Guinevere. Her father was King Leodogrance of Cameliard. He had a court, ladies, damsels, and lords. He had a wonderful sword, Excalibur. It had jewels, rubies, and opal stones, and emeralds, and when King Arthur went out to fight it would go through any one. He went with another knight through the woods and at last he came to a wonderful and beautiful place?a magic enchantment place, and he saw a hand coming out of the water and he rode in an enchanted boat that went very fast, and after he got the sword Excalibur the hand went under the water. King Arthur had a Round Table. It was like a ring, but there was one chair that no one could sit in?Siege Perilous. There was fifty chairs for fifty knights. He had one for King Pellinore and Sir Pelleas and Sir Launcelot and Sir Gawain and Sir Bann of Benwick and Sir Percival and Sir Galahad and Sir Geraint. Merlin was an enchanter. He was a nice enchanter and he made a ring for King Arthur, that Round Table, for his marriage. There was another queen, Queen Morgan le Fay, sister of King Arthur. A wicked enchantress, Vivian, bewitched Merlin. Sir Launcelot loved Queen Guinevere. Oh, yes, and
” Elaine the fair, Elaine the lovable, Elaine the lily maid of Astolat, High in her chamber up a tower to the East Guarded the sacred shield of Launcelot.” The basis of this retention is not only the acute sensitivity to the impression, but the mental repetitions of the verbal image. Gordon loves the sounds and says them over and over to himself for sheer pleasure in words. When he is listening to prose or poetry, he often stops the reader, “Please read that over again. Do you mind? It is such a nice sound.”
There is certainly every indication that Gordon receives and retains verbal impressions. Of course, it would be impossible to keep a record of even a hundredth part of the verbal images conspicuous in a single day’s observations. It is significant, however, that in a great mass of material collected in sixteen months’ study of Gordon, including diaries, letters, records of conversations, recollections, oral and written reproductions of stories, etc., I have, exclusive of twenty-six stories reproduced verbatim almost in toto, a record of one thousand forty-four distinct verbal images and fifty-four repeated fragments of conversation. This enumeration of verbal images does not include the primary images which are a part of the mechanism initiating speech, the possession of which Gordon’s fluent conversation justifies us in assuming. They are such phrases as Gordon treasures for pure pleasure in sound, as “King Leodogrance of Cameliard,” “Geraldine Farrar,” “the eminent psychologist,” etc. They are the verbal high lights which signal the conspicuous development of the language center. It can, therefore, be strongly substantiated on inference from behavior, that Gordon’s mechanism for the reception and retention of verbal impressions is particularly active, in fact, that he has a definite gift of words. Until we look at the mental qualities which translate this verbal faculty into the faculty of expression, we may be tempted to believe that Gordon’s gift of language not merely approximates but exceeds the normal. To own a kiln full of bricks does not make one a mason.
Gordon has a speech center stored with thousands of verbal images, a store that increases daily. What are the qualities requisite for the use of these words in expression as the units of language? There seem to be three most important qualities; (1) a so-called memory span adequate to link a series of images in sequence; (2) a flexibility of association which will bring them into significant inter-relation; (3) a consciousness of meaning that converts these verbal images into symbols of ideas and concrete images.
Our first concern is with the adequacy of Gordon’s memory span,?the number of images that he can link together in sequence. His span for numbers is barely five; for disconnected monosyllables, four; for colors named, three; for colors seen, scarcely three; for pictures of familiar objects exposed sixty seconds with no inhibition of voco-motor aid in memorizing, five; for syllables in a sentence, ten?not a good memory span for a child of ten years. This limited span showed itself in Gordon’s reproduction of stories. After two readings of a two page story, King Canute for instance, he could recall the substance of the story in full. After four readings of King John and the Abbott, a story of double the length, he repeated it glibly up to a certain point, a little more than half way through, then remembered not another syllable or another idea. Gordon’s reproductive memory is excessively active up to a certain point, then the strain snaps the thread. He receives only a limited number of impressions in sequence.
A still greater limitation comes to light when we pass over the one, two, three sequence to a radial inter-relation of ideas. The first signal of the inflexibility of Gordon’s associations is seen in the extreme difficulty he has in reversing an association. An attempt to teach him geography met in many ways with considerable success, but his knowledge is limited to a rigid sequence. He can learn? “Mexico is a republic?the United States is a republic.” If you ask him then, “What republics do you know?” he either cannot answer or brings out the reply with visible signals of extreme mental disturbance. To the question, “What rivers do you know that flow into the Mississippi? ” his answer is prompt. At the next question, “Into what does the Ohio River flow?” he shakes his head with an expression of abject misery. Moreover, he cannot bring together two sequences which have a single term in common.
Q. Into what does the Mississippi River flow? A. Gulf of Mexico. Q. Into what does the Rio Grande River flow? A. Gulf of Mexico. Q. What two rivers do you know that flow into the Gulf of Mexico?
The reply is only a flushing face, twisting hands, and a miserable shake of the head. He cannot hold a group of ideas in his mind under a single category. He knows, for instance, that Georgia is in the United States, New York is in the United States, Pennsylvania is in the United States, etc., but he seems wholly lacking in the conception of them all as having a common quality of statehood, all parts of one country. Gordon is always interested in the first four or five chapters of a book, and can tell the main points intelligently, but as the threads of the story are woven into some complexity of plot his interest flags, and one finds that he no longer shows any comprehension of the progress of the story. It seems, therefore, that Gordon has a further handicap in defective associability of words and ideas. Consciousness of meaning brings us into a more vague psychic field where whatever data we have can only be suggestive. It is to be expected that such a surplus of verbal images retained as themselves a pleasurable element in mental content apart from any use in expression, would usurp in some measure the place of ideas and concrete images. There is evidence that this is the case. Gordon’s letters and diaries are often composed of an extended catalogue of flowers or animals, of a large number of which I am reasonably sure he has no visual image. One day he was talking about a baby. He began with a definite auditory image of his actual experience, but gradually drifted into familiar fairy tale phrases. “It cried all the time?’e-aa-h.’ It was the cunningest of all the children, and the baby grew more and more beautiful than ever, ?more and more beautiful every day.”
Gordon can tell time quickly and accurately, but it is a purely mechanical acquirement. A given position of the hands on the face pulls a string which jerks out, “Ten after five.” When someone says, “Ten minutes after five” Gordon is mazed. “What does ten minutes after five mean?” he asks.
He has no association with the intermediate marks other than five, ten, fifteen, etc. Nine minutes after is no more closely connected with ten minutes than with fifty minutes after. The compelling interest of verbal stimuli does, indeed, withdraw Gordon’s attention from concrete stimuli. If he is shown a picture, his attention flies instantly to the words of the title and the picture makes practically no impression. I showed’Gordon a series of twelve simple colored illustrations in Madge A. Bingham’s “Mother Goose Village.” I concealed the title, allowed him to study the picture silently for one minute, removed the picture and asked him to tell what he had seen. The sum of his recollections was about 50 per cent below the reactions of a low grade imbecile whom I had tested some few months before, a child of considerably less apparent intelligence but with a greater interest in visual impressions. Gordon remembered persons and positions fairly well, but noticed few details, and in his effort to remember color usually named the wrong color. In the mass of material in which the one thousand forty-four verbal images were found, only forty-six concrete visual images appeared, fourteen of which are probably verbal and only fifteen of which are distinctly vivid visual memories. Ten of these fifteen are visual images of movement?an interesting point in connection with the indications from the study of the girl mentioned above, that in her case also movement is the most coercive stimulus to visual perception. On the other hand, fifty vivid concrete auditory images are to be found in the material collected and the majority of the fifty-four repetitions of conversations were accompanied by imitation of voice. Music, explosions, cries, bells, and voices were the predominant stimuli recalled. He described as ” Zzzzzzzzzz” the sound made by an electric vibrator, an aeroplane, and a machine which he had heard. He spoke of wind as making a “sound like singing.” He talked one day about a typewriter,? “There were keys, and you pressed them, and they went tick?tick, and then ding-ding.”
It would seem that Gordon’s sensitivity to verbal stimuli distracts his attention from all concrete stimuli except such as are strong enough to compel attention?visual stimuli of movement, and sounds which are immediately exciting to the over-charged auditory area.
There is further ground to believe that the paucity of visual imagery is conditioned by this withdrawal of attention from visual stimuli rather than to defect in the visual receptive area. Provided his attention is properly directed, Gordon readily forms visual images. He is interested in faces, and recognizes and names instantly even after a lapse, perhaps of years, a person he has seen only once or twice. Color design blocks and color cubes were introduced into the school exercises and as of use in developing his defective sense of vision and as material on which he might exercise whatever capacity for visual imagery he possessed. In June, 1914, Gordon watched me take two dominoes and lay them at right angles. With the two dominoes lying directly before him to copy, he could not place two others like them. At the end of August, 1914, when I first gave Gordon the design blocks, I made a square of four red blocks and gave him four others to work with. He looked at the square, piled four red blocks one on the other in a tower, shook’ his head, knocked them down and strung them out in a row, and finally ended in tears. In March, 1915, Gordon was able to copy rather difficult designs requiring thirty-six blocks. Even more apropos to our inquiry was his acquired ability at that time to reproduce from his own image, after a sixty second exposure of the stimulus, any arrangement within a square of four color blocks. He was able to reproduce from a visual image such relatively complicated designs involving the two-color faces of the blocks as the pinwheel and the chevron.
An interesting point bearing on the question of memory or image span is the observation that he was never once able to reproduce a group of six color blocks. With his attention directed definitely to concrete visual impressions Gordon was able to form simple visual images. This training did not seem, however, to develop in him any more spontaneous response to concrete visual impressions. The almost exclusive fixing of his attention on words and sounds seems to obscure other impressions, and therefore exclude largely images of other stimuli.
In many instances words “do not know their place” in Gordon’s mind. They establish a tyranny where there should be a service of ideas. There are other instances of behavior where there is some little evidence of consciousness of meaning. The unerring instinct with which Gordon uses a word in its proper context would lead us to suspect, though it does not prove, some dim comprehension of its meaning. There are daily bits of conversation which startle one with the apparent intelligence with which the child uses words picked up here and there.
A PSEUDO-TALENT FOR WORDS 11 ” I am working industriously, am I not? This is very hard, but I will demonstrate to you that I can do it.” “I did not like to stay in bed. It was so tedious.” “Heroes are mighty and strong.” “When I was holding the pencil it broke easily because it is brittle.”
Then again, he misses his shot,?”We saw a whole cattle of cows.”
His facility in finding synonyms also stands on this borderline of evidence. In reading I stop him frequently to ask the meaning of a word. His answer is always quick and usually accurate. Dwelt?”lived” sable?”black” crimson?”red” scarlet?”very bright red” gaze?”look” curly shepherd lad?”a boy with curly hair, isn’t it?” damsel?”a young girl” barge?”a boat” bade?”told him to do it”
Beyond these there are further evidences, I believe, of positive consciousness of meaning. In the Binet Tests, according to which, by the way, Gordon’s mental age would be reckoned as eight years on an uneven distribution of credits (five years plus four six-year tests, plus four seven-year tests, plus four eight-year tests, plus four nine-year tests, plus one fifteen-year test), Gordon defined a fork as “something you get things with and put them in your mouth”; a table is “made of wood and it has five feet, and when you sit at the table to do puzzles you have to rest your hand on it.” He compared the butterfly with the fly,?”A butterfly has wings. And does a fly have wings? Yes. It hasn’t a head like a fly. The butterfly isn’t so large as a fly?I mean it is larger. His wings are yellow?the butterfly’s are?but the fly’s wings isn’t.”
One day he was asked to write a composition of what he knew about the earth. “The Earth is round like a ball. We live on the Earth. We can see the sun shineing up in the sky. We can see the moon at night. We can say our prars to God at Night. We get up in the morning and dress ourselfs. We see the people all around us. We see the flowers growing on the bushes. We can see the trees blowing from the wind. We can feel the wind blowing hard. It makes us cold. We can see the horses stamping their feet on the ground.”
In this I think clearly Gordon is expressing ideas and not merely using words. The way in which he handles a composition on the Lady of Shalott shows too how he can in a measure throw off the tyranny of words even when the ideas have been suggested by verbal stimulus.
The Lady of Shalott. “She was a young lady that lived in a castle. She had a spinning wheel and she had a magic web with colors gay?bright red and bright pink, and bright green, and bright purple. She has heard a vose say a curse is upon her, if she stay to look down to meny-towered Camelot. She has a mirrier before her all the day in the mirrier she sees the road going down to meny-towered Camelot. She sees the knights on horseback and they come two by two. The nicest knight in all the land is Sir Launcelot, and the lady of Shalott looked at him on the road that leads to meny-towered Camelot. She got in a boat and sailed away in the river and while she was floating she sang, and she sailed and sailed, and she died, and all the knights of King Arthur’s court crowded around the Lady of Shalott, and one of the knights was Sir Launcelot, and he said she has a beautiful face.”
One can scarcely deny that in Gordon’s mind concrete impressions and consciousness of meaning are often obscured by the over balance of verbal images. Neither can one deny that Gordon has some mental content other than verbal images, and has also some ability to put words in their proper position as symbols for expression of that content.
We are now in a position to summarize Gordon’s status in relation to the faculty of language. He has to his credit a conspicuous gift of words, a certain comprehension of their meaning as symbols of ideas or images, and a certain ability to use them as such symbols, but the scope of these abilities is rigidly limited by his defects. A short receptive span of impressions reduces to the briefest series the number of ideas, images, or words, which in his mind are registered in sequence. The rigid inflexibility of association tracts also seriously limits his ability to manipulate single ideas or simple sequences which are registered. An over-attention to words and sounds further subtracts from his store of concrete impressions and his attention to the significance of the symbols he uses. Gordon’s language faculty, which seems so highly developed, is on the contrary seriously defective. With all its limitation it is, however, a positive quality?his one gift. On it must be based his intellectual development. Such development, which on a straight line may progress far, will be extremely simple and will be m irked by long stretches where glib verbal repetition masquerades as knowledge. There are two types of behavior in Gordon which distinctly influence his progress on this straight line toward culture. In the first place we have to consider a series of emotions and reactions which are commonly called hysterical. His sensitive organization is in a continual state of vibration. Such a high strung physical organism vibrates to every stimulus, and his mental state is quite as susceptible to the impetus of suggestion.
Gordon trembles and cowers under the acute pain of the sensation a loud noise stimulates in his over-senstive auditory processes. He suffers “when shades rattle and babies cries to wake us up.” He thrills to the sound of music or melodious words. He quivers with fear when another child raises his hand, even in pretense of striking him.
An idea has quite as much power to upset his mental and physical equilibrium. He eats wretchedly at table, stuffing his mouth in apparent inability to swallow. A reprimand only increases the difficulty. Gordon then comes to table with a tense, nervous resolve, “I mustn’t fuss with my food.” The idea is so in the forefront of his consciousness that he does fuss and the idea of the consequences of fussing so fill him with fear that he is reduced to a state of gulping, quivering tearfulness. I watched him writing one day. He had been in the habit of making a superfluous loop on the last back stroke of the s. He was muttering to himself determinedly, “I mustn’t make a loop,” but every s emerged with the forbidden loop. The next day I said quietly, “Remember to come back on the same line in your s,” and lo, the trouble was over.
Suggestibility is the keynote to Gordon reactions. If he hears a very amusing story read in a somewhat mournful tone of voice, he will sit in a luxury of grief, the tears rolling down his flushed, quivering face. A simple “Yes” to his question, “Is it sad?” is sufficient to make any piece of music bring him to the same emotional state. Another child is always sure of company in his tears, for Gordon weeps in sympathy with everyone.
Except for his purely physical apprehension of sound and his fear of losing his balance, which has a physical basis in his ill-balanced body, I think Gordon’s fears are all subject to suggestion. He was at first afraid of snakes, frogs, and toads. When he saw other children liking them, and handling them, his reaction changed. He wanted to touch them; to bring them home. One day in the spring he found a wasp struggling in a can of water. He rescued the wasp, spread it on the hedge in the sunshine, and hung over it for a full half hour until, to his joy, it took wing. This was his first experience with wasps. Thereafter, all bees, wasps, and hornets were his special delight. He had no thought of their sting, and handled them freely. “My friend the wasp,” he called each one gaily, and strangely enough, though he allowed them to crawl over his hands, and one afternoon lent the shelter of his trouser leg to a wasp pursued by a less sympathetic youngster?his friend the wasp never harmed him. A year later, a hornet stung Gordon. Disillusioned, the child shrank from his beloved insects, and the friendship is at least temporarily severed. A thunder storm usually frightens Gordon, though his fear is sometimes modified by a certain esthetic pleasure in watching the fall of the rain and the play of the light in the sky. One day, during a storm I went into his room to see if he was frightened. I found him lying in bed, his eyes bright, his face eager, his body tense. “Look,” he cried, holding up his arm with the fist tightly clenched, “I am playing the lightning goes into my arm and makes me strong, and see it does make me strong,” making me feel of the rigid muscles. That self-suggestion has counteracted the fear of storms except at times when the crash of thunder is so loud as to set him vibrating with the physical sensation.
There is much of the hero in Gordon, for he fights his fears with all the might of his little being. At first he only reached out wistfully for reiterated assurance from others that he has nothing to fear. Early in our experience with Gordon he was taken one day to the city for a doctor’s examination. A dozen times on the train he asked fearfully, “Is she going to hurt me?” On the way into the office he accosted the janitor, “Does the doctor hurt little boys?”, and again of the stenographer he asked, “Does the doctor hurt little boys?” Despite all assurance the fear was too much for him, and in face of the doctor, Gordon burst out, “Are you going to hurt me?”.
Later he began to reassure himself. He sat through the circus, tense, quivering, and exclaiming, “I’m not afraid, am I?” Sometimes when the fear rose within him that he might not do his school work well he would begin, “This isn’t hard, is it? Why, there is nothing to be afraid of. I wouldn’t be afraid of a teacher. There is nothing to cry about, of course not.” Gordon began to make explosive resistance to the teasing suggestions of the other children. “I won’t, I won’t, I won’t,” he would shout, but the moment he stopped the vehement self-assertion, their strength became too much for him.
This battle against suggestion foredoomed to failure explains more than one phase of his conduct. Gordon is afraid of people? all people, even those who are most kind to him. The cross play of their personalities upon his suggestible nature, and the conflict of their suggestions with each other and with the power of suggestion in his environment and instincts upset the equilibrium of his mind. The painful chaos thus created causes a behavior similar to fear reaction, a quivering tensity, a tip of the body away from the person, and an apprehensive query, “Are you going to do me anything? ” Gordon is too afraid of people to wish to be other than obedient, but in the absence of the suggesting personality, impulse is often too strong for him. He seems to have little powev of inhibition. A piece of chocolate candy seen is a piece of chocolate candy eaten. Even if the suggestion is a bottle of a dozen chocolate malted milk tablets, the whole dozen are swallowed rapidly. An impulse to twist and tear cannot be inhibited. At least half a dozen pairs of glasses have been twisted into bits in a year. Five inexpensive watches have been similarly destroyed, though a watch is Gordon’s proudest possession. Money has an irresistible attraction?not money to spend, but money to handle, to pat in a purse, and to put in one’s mouth, to gloat over.
Probably his lies can be traced to this same evil genius? suggestibility. Not a day goes by that Gordon is not detected in two or more lies. One type of lie, the denial of a misdeed committed, can be traced to the over-powering force of fear of punishment; another type, the confession under pressure of a misdeed not committed, to the suggestive force of another personality which fully convinces Gordon of his guilt; a third type, a spontaneous confession of an imaginary misdeed, to an eagerness to find expression for a newly formed ideal of truth which he at first confused with mere owning up. Finally his claims to accomplishing something which is quite beyond his capacity as, for instance, his claim (one morning) that he had tied the bow on his shoe several weeks before he had actually learned to do it, may be traced to the confusion of the mental image of his aim with the mental image of the actual occurrence. Indeed, for Gordon, ideas have quite as much force as reality, and at a time of conflict and nervous confusion he is unable to distinguish between the two. In the main he has a vehement desire to tell the truth even though he doesn’t know what is truth. Such a state of fear, vaccilation, and nervous tension, all traceable to high suggestibility, must necessarily stand in the way of his mental development. It makes every effort to think, a moment of high nerve tension, so that all mental work is attended by immediate and excessive fatigue. These are the marks, the marks of weariness, of nervous conflict which he bears on his face. This confusion also makes an independent reaction to a problem almost impossible since his aim is only to give the response that is wanted of him. One has only to see his almost uncontrollable impulse to look at the person directing him rather’than at the task itself, to see that this is his attitude toward work. Suggestibility, with its resulting nervous tensity and loss of equilibrium is a very great influence operating against Gordon’s mental development along the lines of such abilities as he possesses.
A second influence, on the contrary, is one which we may count as a positive ally. Gordon is a thinker. He may be inactive in relation to material surroundings, but he is not mentally lazy. When Gordon compared the butterfly and the fly, there was every evidence that he was carefully thinking out the differences. In the record of his responses to the Binet Tests there are other evidences of thought. He took the questions in the ten-year old group very seriously though he failed on every one. He made a definite effort to puzzle out the answers to each question. His responses came always after a long pause.
Q. What would you do if you were delayed in going to school? A. Really, I don’t know. Q. What would you do if you were to take part in an important affair? A. I don’t know. Q. Why is a bad action done when one is angry more excusable than the same action done when one is not angry? A. I am thinking and thinking, but I can’t make that out. Q. What would you do if you were asked your opinion of someone whom you did not know very well? A. I don’t know what I would say. Do you mean a stranger? Q. Why should one judge a person by his acts rather than by his words? A. I am thinking, but I can’t get it. People can do errands for you, that is one thing. In the fifteen-year old test Gordon’s analysis of the situation, “My neighbor has just received some significant visits. One after another, a doctor, a lawyer and a priest called. What is happening at my neighbor’s?” seems really remarkable, in the light of his age, and of his limitations of experience and of mind. He answered, “Someone must be sick, and the priest might be there to christen someone, and the lawyer might be there to find out if someone had done wrong.” When left to itself Gordon’s mind is independently active. He rarely lets pass a question which he fails to answer. An hour or so later he will rush up to his teacher exclaiming, “I know it now!” Sometimes a space of twenty-four hours will intervene between the question and the answer.
The child’s thought, too, pushes out beyond the present complex of sensory stimuli about him. He lives often in an imaginary world. He plays sometimes that he is a knight, Sir Gordon, and calls gaily, “Come my fair Elaine. You may comb my black hair.” He thinks of the future, of himself as a man, how he may get back to his own home in the South, of marriage, and of a profession. His thought is tinged at times with a wistful intuition of his incapacity. “I don’t think anyone will ever want to marry me, do you? I should like to have a wife, because I want someone to love me, and eat dinner with me, and to go to town with me. How can I ever be a lawyer? I don’t know how to do lawyer’s things. Could you teach me how?”
His mind reaches out toward a concrete spiritual reality. He says that he is “more braver” when he thinks God is someone very kind and very near, and with him all the time. He looks at the stars at night and asks, “Which star is God on?” Of course, a part of this is mere words, and where the consciousness of meaning enters in, the comprehension is of the vaguest and most elementary, but that the mind of a low grade imbecile should be so independently active, and should concern itself with such abstract problems is to me a curious phenomenon. Perhaps it is the mind of his race persisting in an unequal, degenerate organism. Often the defects which bring an individual so far down in the scale of imbecility are such as to remind us emphatically of our kinship to the animal. Gordon’s external physical defects do remind us of this kinship, but an acquaintance with Gordon’s mental processes seems rather to reveal the persistence of the distinctly human qualities of mind in a degenerate body in which the neural and cerebral development are inadequate mechanisms for its operation. Is this mental activity correlated with the high development of the language center?one of the specific faculties differentiating man from animal? The treatment of such a case is, of course, the practical question. Gordon belongs to the mongoloid type in which we often find a peculiar union of conspicuous and permanent deficiencies with equally conspicuous gifts. Such a case, though tantalizing in its specious doubtfulness, is not hard to deal with when its limitations are once understood and accepted. The obstinate deficiencies cannot be remedied. The few capacities are energetic enough, if wisely directed, to develop themselves. For Gordon the program is simple; first, the physical building up of his weak and degenerate organism; secondly, tactful management to eliminate in so far as possible, the nervous elements of fear and self-consciousness; thirdly, a careful use of his suggestibility to fix, if possible, the suggestion of certain useful types of behavior; fourthly, the development of his appreciation of literature and his gift of expression as a resource for his necessarily lonely, protected, and inactive life.
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