Don: A Curable Case of Arrested Development Due to a Fear Psychosis the Result of Shock in a Three-year-old Infant
The Psychological Clinic Copyright, 1919, by Lightner Witraer, Editor. r 4 t ft.t i Vol. XIII, Nos. 4-7 MaJ 15, L * ‘ ORTHOGENIC CASES. XIV.? :Author: Ligiitner Witmer, Ph.D.
He was five years old last July, and so I entered him the following autumn in a near-by school, where he is the youngest of a group of first-grade children. His teacher says that he reads better than any of them and, except that he is poor in handwork, she considers him as competent as the other children.
‘Published originally in the Ladies’ Home Journal for April, 1919, under the caption “What I Did With Don,” and reprinted fiy permission. With this case I am able, for the first time, to prove that an arrest of development amounting to feeblemindedness may be cured and the child entirely restored to normal mentality. At the age of two years and seven months this boy responded to every test like a feebleminded child and he was diagnosed by competent experts as feebleminded. Today he is a normal boy, not quite seven years old, reading, writing and doing the number work of the second school year. Either he was not feebleminded and the diagnosis was a mistaken one, or feeblemindedness can be cured. What is feeblemindedness?a performance level or an irremediable mental defect? Don’s response to treatment shows that he had grave but not irremediable defects. His arrest of development was nearly complete, the result of disease and the psychosis which accompanied the disease. When a normal adult becomes insane we observe a marked change in character. “He is no longer himself,” we say, and a prominent symptom is a reduction of mental level called technically “dementia.” Auto-intoxication, disease and shock may cause insanity. Let U3 suppose that one or all of these causes affect a child in his first or second year. We shall not be able to observe much change in the child’s mentality except that his mental development will be arrested. I maintain that one type of feeblemindedness, better called arrested development, is due to the same causes which produce insanity in an adult, and that in some cases the psychosis or mental disorder can be cured and the child restored to completely normal condition, provided the case be taken in hand early enough.
Except to the very observant eye of an experienced expert, these cases look more like feeblemindedness than neanity. Nevertheless, they are a species of feeblemindedness or insanity, whichever name we choose to apply, very different from the congenital imbecile, one of the mongolian type, for example. The mental disorders of children which cause arrest of development and apparent feeblemindedness are as diverse as the mental disorders observed and classified by the alienists. A child may be either feebleminded or insane, or he may be both feebleminded and insane. Some of the Orthogenic Cases reported in the earlier numbers of the Psychological Clinic, notably Orthogenic Cases Nos. 4, 6, 12 and 13, are not primarily cases of congenital defect, but cases of mental disorder in which there is a greater presumption of possible cure than in the case of the child vtho is both qualitatively and quantitatively feebleminded.
Orthogenic Case XIV presents a clinical picture of fear, antagonism, anger, and obstinacy, in consequence of which the mental development was arrested until the motivation yielded to orthogenic treatment. The etiology is uncertain, something like hydocephaly was suspected but rejected as the explanatory cause. It may have been malnutrition, but I incline to believe it was only the shock of an attack of whooping cough. Orthogenic Case XV entitled “The Feminine Absolute’ is a case of arrested development, especially in schoo subjects, symptomatically a fear psychosis and an obstinate refusal to take an education: in general, the kind of behavior characterizing hysteria as a type of mental perversion.
“Terence,” said he to his pal, the gardener, who was taking him to school the first day, “don’t call me Donnie when we get near the school; don’t call me Donnie or Don; call me Donald, which is right.”
I saw Donald for the first time when he was two years and seven months old. His father carried him into my office, and deposited him, a soulless lump, upon the couch. He sat there with the stolidity of a Buddhist image, absorbed in the inspection of a card which he held in his pudgy hands, as regardless of his father and mother as of the new objects about him. While his gaze moved over the card, he scratched the back of it gently and incessantly with his finger nails. At times he gritted his teeth; and then again he made a crooning, humming sound with which it is his habit to lull himself to sleep.
He paid no attention to a rattle, to a bright-colored ball or to a picture book which I held before him, but every effort to remove the card from his hands he resisted. His face, already crimson, became empurpled. His physiognomy took on an expression of angry hostility; and I retreated before the approaching storm, leaving him again to his absorption in the card.
“He is fond of music,” his mother said; but the liveliest strains of the talking machine were powerless to distract him from his chosen preoccupation. In the months to come I was to discover that by preference he would sit or lie in bed for hours, looking attentively at the object which he happened to be holding in his hands. It appeared to be persistent, concentrated attention, that most difficult and valuable of mental powers to cultivate.
From two to six years the child has the flitting attention of a monkey. ” How do you select your monkeys for training?” a trainer of animals was once asked.
“I hold a lighted match before them,” he replied, “and pick out as the easiest to train those that look longest at the burning match.”
Donald would look at nothing but his card. One could not guess what lay behind those dull blue eyes. Was it interest, or only emptiness of mind?the dreamy listlessness with which the corner loafer looks at the passing world?
“What are those abrasions about the mouth and ears?” I asked. “When he gets angry,” his mother said, “he will scratch and tear at them.” “What else can he do?” I asked, not venturing to break in upon this obstinate immobility by trying to get him to perform the simple task which might, perchance, reveal some hidden mental ability. “Can he walk?” “Alittle, but he only began about two months ago,” she replied. “Until he was over two years old he hadn’t even crawled; and he only learned to crawl by his nurse taking hold of his knees and advancing them one after the other.”
As the flower blooms, the fish swims or the bird flies, so the child crawls, walks and talks. It is the unfolding of his own instinctive impulses. But this child had to be taught to crawl and to walk, and even yet he could only toddle about uncertainly. If he fell upon his face he would lie helplessly crying with his nose to the floor. Either he did not have the strength to change his position, or he did not know how, or he was unwilling to make the effort.
He never uttered a word spontaneously, and he could repeat at command only a few words like “Kitty,” “Mamma”?eight words in all. His understanding of language seemed to be limited to pointing to his head, eyes, ears and nose when these words were spoken. Even a chimpanzee of the same age as this boy, if brought up in human surroundings, will give evidence of understanding more of spoken language than this boy did. He could not feed himself. A much younger child can hold a cup or a spoon, but this boy could not even close his lips upon a cup when it was offered to him. He was still in diapers, and weeks were to pass before he could be safely clothed like the normal boy of two years and a half.
At two years and seven months Donald was doing no more than many a child does at twelve months, no more than every child should do at fifteen months. No one who saw him needed to consult an expert before deciding that he was subnormal. You had only to look at the large head?”top-heavy Bill” one of his teachers called him?the fat red face, the expressionless eyes and the helpless body, to arrive instantly at the conviction that “this child is feeble-minded.”
And feeble-minded I thought him?of such low grade that I refused at first to accept him for educational treatment in my school. With reluctance I finally yielded to the parents’ pleas. He was the youngest child I had ever accepted for psychological treatment, and apparently the most hopeless.
The expert, like the parent, bases his opinion on the child’s appearance, behavior and history. But even more important than these is the “attemvt to teach.” In doubtful cases I do not like to express an opinion until after I have observed the results of attempt100 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL CLINIC. ing to teach the child something new. This can often be done at the first examination, but I could not even begin to teach Donald.
“I should like to see him walk,” I said. But when he was lifted from the couch, put upon his feet and made to walk, he burst into a paroxysm of rage. His eyes became bloodshot; even his gums bled. When he was put back upon the couch he returned to his contemplative absorption in the card. Offered a block, he made no effort to take it. He even closed his eyes, as though the very sight of it and me were more than he could endure. When I took the card away, so as to secure his undivided attention, he had another paroxysm of rage. From this, however, I derived a little hope, for passion and rage may be an expression of strength. The child at least had energy at his disposal. His violent resistance evidenced resolute determination. Obstinate children are better material for training than the overpliant sort. I looked at him, sitting impassive, but always bolt upright, and this, too, I thought an encouraging sign.
“He is a very easy child to neglect,” one of my teachers entered in her report soon after he came to the school. “If you let him alone he will sit or lie in bed for hours and give no trouble. It is only when you try to do something with him, to dress him, or bathe liim, even at times to feed him, that the trouble begins.”
It takes some time and care to adjust a child to new surroundings, so I considered it no great misfortune that Donnie promptly got the measles. For a couple of weeks it was necessary to isolate him in the care of a trained nurse. This probably helped to make him less resistant to strangers. Perhaps there also awoke within his soul some responsive feeling of gratification when the soothing hand of the nurse or the doctor brought him relief from his distress of body. One month after Donnie’s arrival I began his education. “What to do” and “How to do it” are two puzzling questions confronting teacher and parent at every turn. To answer the first question is to present the aims of education. In the early years of education the three R’s are the chief objective. The answer to the second question, “How to do it,” will determine our method of procedure.
Educational aims and practice are commonly the outcome of theory. For example, an interesting and important theory of recent origin is the Montessori method. It aims to develop a child’s natural abilities. It also has a theory of educational practice. It emphasizes and, in the opinion of many, relies exclusively upon appealing to the child’s natural inclinations and desires. Deprecating the use of constraint and force, it throws the reins over the neck of the horse. Several children have been brought to me for examination and educational treatment who were nearly ruined by too close adherence to this supposed Montessori method.
I hold that constraint and liberty have equal value. At one time constraint, at another liberty, will bring the best results. The wise employment of constraint and force calls for greater intelligence and judgment on the part of teacher and parent than the leaving of the child free to work out his own salvation and development. I try to approach the problem of educating a child like Donald without any preferred theory. More than twenty years of experience has led me to see that there is some good in most theories. A few are fit only for the scrap heap. One guiding principle, however, has stood the test of time and use: “The first task of teacher and parent is to gain and hold the child’s attention by giving him something he can do, and after that, something he can’t do”? this in general is my method.
My educational aim is to develop attention by choosing tasks which develop it. Whether a child be one year of age, or two years, or six, whether he be in high school or college, the guiding principle of the educator should be to gain and hold attention first, and then to cultivate concentration, alertness, persistence and endurance, all of these being attributes of attention.
For the rest, I feel my way. I watch the child to discover what he does with interest and with ease, and from here I get him to take a step forward in the direction best calculated to bring him to what I am aiming at, “the next higher level of attention.” Montessori provides the child with stimulating objects?her didactic material? and leaves it with the child to make the next step forward. This is doubtless an acceptable procedure; but suppose the child refuses to take a step in any direction. He must be shoved.
To shove a child in the direction you want him to go is easy if the child is pliant and submissive. If he is a fighter like.Donnie, and if, like him, he has no desires except to be let alone, the development of attention and the enforcement of obedience must go hand in hand.
When you have a trout on a hook at the end of a thin line, the only way to land him is to play him. He is lively and vigorous. He has desires which conflict with yours. If you use too much force you will break the line. If you use skill, yielding and yet constraining, you will in time get him into your basket. In this way the skilful teacher “plays” the child. The hook of attention is attached to the line of obedience, and then she watches the child’s every move to insure his advance in the required direction. Shall she coax or force him? On the lee shore of this question many a gallant educational craft lies shipwrecked.
You can coax most children, some of the time at least, byappealing to their interests and desires, even as the hunter entices the deer to come within gunshot by appealing to its curiosity. But some children can’t be coaxed, any more than you can wheedle a trout into your basket.
For example, take Donald. He did not have a keen desire even for food. He would not eat prunes, apparently because he disliked their appearance, and so they had to be mixed with his cereal in order to get him to eat them. He would not drink milk or water from a transparent glass. It must be offered to him in a cup. In the early days, indeed, he declined to drink water at all, and got his only liquid in the shape of milk or soup.
He declined to accept a sugarplum offered as a reward of merit; and if you took away the object he so fondly clasped in his hands, and then yielded to his ragings and returned it to him, he would very likely throw it violently across the room. He disliked to be dressed. He disliked to be taken out of bed and put on the floor. He disliked to be taken for a walk.
All these things aroused angry resistance; and in his passion he went so far as to do himself bodily injury; but as long as Donald held something in his hand there was peace and quiet.
” What to do with him?” He could not be bathed and dressed in this happy state of calm contemplation. Take away what he held and his hands went up to his ears and mouth, tearing at them till they bled. Tell him to keep his hands down, they went up just the same; perhaps he only scratched himself a little more strenuously. Put mittens on him, as his former nurse did, and he still went through the motions.
Smack his hands, anger and passion intensified the violence of his resistance. The only thing to do was to hold his hands. Could he be compelled to keep them down after they were released? The historic battle lasted for an hour and a half. His hands were held while his teacher spoke to him from time to time: “If I let your hands go, will you keep them down?”
He raged, he stormed, he grew apoplectic, but the hands were firmly held. At eveiy lull in the storm they were released, and up they went again. In the end he gave in. Ninety minutes showed remarkable endurance, determination and consistency of purpose, qualities which might be successfully employed in his educational development later.
Never again did Donnie hold out for so long on this or any other issue. My records show that though he raged at intervals during the ensuing twelve months, the longest period of resistance lasted for ten minutes only. He had learned his lesson. There was an inevitable persistence that would outlast his own. He might as well give in first as last.
Obedience may be enforced by punishment, by suggestion and threat, or by impression. Of all these the most effective is impression?to get home to the child the impression of a will stronger than his own, and, above all, the impression of its inevitableness. This struggle of opposing wills begins soon after the child is born; and my experience shows that no child is too young or too feeble-minded to know when his will has prevailed, and to profit by it.
The next lesson which the child must learn is to give attention. Many times each day the teacher admonishes her class: “Pay attention.” But how is the child to learn to pay attention? How shall we compel him to give attention if he refuses it? The drillmaster commands “Attention!” and expects from his squad of soldiers an obedient alertness to concentrate upon the execution of his command. Behind the drillmaster’s command is the threat of punishment for disobedience; in the last resort, even the threat of death. But how may we oppose successfully the conflicting impulses and desires of a little child? How awaken the child’s interest in something in which he is not yet interested? This is the real problem of beginning an education.
I took my form board?a tray of eleven blocks of different shapes, each block fitting into a recess of the same shape from which it can be easily removed and then replaced. A four-year old child is able on the first trial to replace every block. He does it slowly, perhaps, and with many errors, but he corrects his errors and finally succeeds. His method of solving the new problem set him by the form board may reveal to the observing psychologist many of the child’s abilities and defects.
As children increase in years they replace the blocks with greater speed, precision and dexterity, but even twenty-five per cent of three-year-old children can successfully replace the blocks without instruction. Many normal children of two years and a half, and even older children, may fail to get all the blocks in place, and some may not succeed with a single block; but very few normal children over two years of age will be unable at least to pick up a block and try to do something with it.
When the form board was put before Donnie, he made not the slightest effort to obey the order to replace the blocks. I put a block in his hand and guided it to the proper recess. Quickly I picked the block out, put it in his hand again and said: “Put it back.” He instantly replaced it. A dozen times I repeated this performance. His movements increased in accuracy and speed. Thus I proved to my gratification: (1) That he could be made to obey a command; (2) that he had sufficient control over the movements of his hand and arm to hold the block and adjust it into place; (3) that he was able to see the space, giving to the task sufficient concentration of attention to accomplish what he had undertaken; (4) that he had enough persistence to repeat a task over and over again; and (5) that he learned something from each performance as was shown by improvement in speed and accuracy.
I then repeated the experiment with a second block, obtaining a like result. I was now able to proceed to the real test of his capacity for educational development. I took out both blocks, leaving two spaces empty, and handed him first one and then the other. I was amazed to find that even on the first trial he put the right block in the right space. I also observed that for the first time he showed a little interest in the performance.
On the fourth day of training, when six recesses were exposed, he put in two blocks successfully; then he became obstinate and dropped the block on the bed, dragged it across the board and finally put it in the wrong recess. At length, after much urging, he had four blocks in place, but he persistently refused to do anything with the other two. On the fourteenth day, however, he reached for the board as soon as he saw it, fell to work immediately and put nine blocks away correctly. On the next day, with all the spaces exposed, he put away the eleven blocks in one minute and fifteen seconds. Thus, fifteen days after his first lessons began, he was doing the form board as well as the average four-year-old. Observing that his interest increased with the difficulty of the task I set him, I decided to try him with my cylinder test. This is a modification of the Montessori cylinders, but it is more difficult than any of the Montessori material, combining the three sets of cylinders into one. I call it an “intelligence” test, and it is of sufficient difficulty to make it a useful test even with college students. Donnie mastered this test in thirteen days. He showed from the beginning the greatest interest and avidity for it. He would reject the form board and hold his hand out eagerly for the cylinder. As soon as he had learned to do the cylinders, I picked up a large capital letter B made of wood and, giving it to him, said: “Donald, this is B. Put B on the chair.” When he had done this I said: “Give me B.” In this way I taught him to pick the letter B out of a jumble of six other letters. In the afternoon of the same day he appeared to have forgotten it, but the next day he learned to pick out three letters from a confused pile of six, and he was able to name the letter B.
On the day following, exactly one month after his training had begun, a very satisfactory test showed that he had retained the three letters he had learned the day before, and he was able in addition to learn three more letters. One month later he could pick out and name all the letters of the alphabet, the capital wooden letters as well as the capital and small letters printed very large in a child’s ‘pictorial alphabet book. He was now doing work which six-year-old children are just about able to do in the first school year.
From the results of this “attempt to teach” I discovered that Donald had an aptitude for recognizing, remembering and discriminating forms. Teachers are advised to select their material and methods so as to appeal to the child’s interests.. In the beginning Donald gave no evidence of having the slightest interest in form. This interest developed only under compulsion, though it was undoubtedly founded upon the fact that he learned easily what some children learn only with effort. He was, withal, very human. He always chose the easy way. To fill a board with thirty-six pegs bored him. Monotonous and easy tasks still bore him. We never could get him to take an interest in the Montessori buttoning and lacing frames, and even now he will never dress himself if he can get somebody else to do it for him. He learned to like the form board, cylinders and letters because this work was relatively easy for him. He had a natural aptitude for form discrimination, a tenacious memory and that greatest endowment of the human being, intelligence. To use his natural abilities gave him pleasure and excited interest. We were always able to carry him along more quickly in the direction indicated by his natural abilities; thus he learned his letters in half the time it took him to distinguish and name colors.
The quick change from distaste to liking was characteristic of Donald. He hated to walk. At times he was dragged outdoors, screaming and raging. At times he was enticed to walk by trundling ahead of him a moving wagon; for, like other children, Donald was interested in motion, and this one interest alone we did not have to draw out or cultivate.
One day he was kept outdoors twenty-minutes, howling all the time, and only stopped when he was taken upstairs and put to bed. A week later he went outdoors with eagerness, and walked about poking a stick here and there into the ground, or picking up stray objects, until he was made to sit down and rest. Then he howled because he was not allowed to keep on walking.
He could say so few words when he came, and was so slow learning, that I was not sure he would ever learn to talk. Asked to say “shoe,” he would make a sound like “h-m?” with a rising inflection, as though he had not quite heard the word, but would be delighted to oblige you if you would only say it again and a little plainer.
After you had repeated the same word fifty times, always getting the same response, you lost confidence in his desire and ability to please. He learned the word “shoe” when his teacher, tossing his shoe in the air, said with great gusto each time she caught it “shoe!” This amused him, but it took ten minutes to get him to follow suit. When he finally gave the word he mimicked her exact tone. In the same way I taught him to give the sound of V, at which he balked for a long time. It was only because he was amused at the way in which I elongated the sound, that he was finally’’ induced to imitate it.
Soon he was learning words rapidly, and at the end of the second month, his initial vocabulary of eight words had increased to one hundred and fourteen. With sixty-three of these words he had some association evidencing at least a partial understanding. He early showed that his intelligence was not defective. He had been taught to “kiss the pretty lady” on the back of a magazine. In the fifth week when he was given the magazine without the picture of the lady, and was told to “kiss the pretty lady,” he turned over the pages, but, not finding the picture, hesitated. When the picture was returned to the magazine, he recognized and kissed it. After he had been with us three months he began to name objects: “It’s a spoon;” “It’s a shoe;” “It’s a lady.” His sense of humor could always be appealed to. He learned to grunt like a pig, to gobble like a turkey, and even formal lessons were often enlivened by grunts and gobbles. If some parts of his education were accompanied by tears, other parts won smiles, and awoke his full, rich laughter.
After the second month of formal training and the third month of his stay with us, Donald went to Nova Scotia for the summer. There, by the seaside, he was given a month of full enjoyment, the chance to adjust himself to the new environment and the opportunity to learn through natural and spontaneous reaction to people and things. He was now picking up many new words, the names of those about him, and even an occasional sentence. To the question, “Who are you?” he was taught to answer “I’m Sunny Don;” and to “How do you feel?” to reply “I feel happy.” “A new Donald,” a teacher records, “went to the seashore, a Donald cleareyed and clean-skinned, alert, with a disposition as good as it was determined.”
To carry forward my plan of training his powers of attention and discrimination, I began to teach him numbers up to four by holding up one or more fingers. At the same time he was taught to put the three large wooden letters, C, A and T, together, and then to pick and spell CAT and DOG when the whole six letters were jumbled together. Next the words were printed on paper, and he was taught to see, spell and read as separate words such sentences as “I see a man,” “A cat can see a dog.” Before three months had elapsed, and after only five months of formal training in all, I made the crucial test, putting a primer into his hand for the first time. Haltingly, to be sure, but like a normal child just beginning in the first grade, he read the sentence: “A man can see a dog.”
One day, just a year after Donald came to the school, his parents visited him. He walked into the room and, carefully coached beforehand, he greeted them: “How do you do, mother?” “How do you do, father?” Otherwise his behavior was spontaneous and wholly childlike. With the delight which he always took in showing off, he said his pieces: “Little Bo-Peep,” “Little Boy Blue” and Stevenson’s “Bed in Summer.” His delivery was amusingly solemn, his articulation perfect and his intonation reproduced the exact tones of those who had taught him.
He read for his father and mother three pages from his primer. He spelled words like jump and John, and he gave the four separate sounds of jump. He put together a jig-saw puzzle of fifteen pieces. He strung beads, picking out each color upon demand. He put together twelve sliced animals, saying each time, “That’s a bear,” “That’s a kangaroo,” and so forth,enlisting his mother’s co-operation by: “Will mother put the kangaroo together? Will mother put the elephant together?” Playing with blocks, he built up a house, tumbling it down and then turning to his father with: “Will father build a house?”
In one year he had arrived at this level of performance from a condition so abnormal that when of his own accord he looked through and around a picture frame at his teacher it was considered an event worth recording.
Five months later Donald was four years old, and another summer at the seashore brought him by the following autumn to a stage of general development where I was willing for the first time to consider him normal, lifting from the hearts of his parents the heavy burden of a diagnosis of feeble-mindedness.
Having stirred to activity all the mental abilities which I considered essential to the normal child, our work was directed to developing him in an all-round way. I did not push his reading in the second year as I had done in the first. Attempting to teach him phonic analysis as this is employed in language work, I made up my mind that he was not ready for it. Primarily I was not interested in having him read, write and cipher efficiently. I was interested only in arousing his latent capacity to do this work. I had no desire to produce an unbalanced monster.
In the past year and a half only I could easily have carried him on to second-grade work, but his general abilities would still have remained far behind those of a first-grade pupil. I used his natural ability to distinguish form in order to develop his powers of attention, and carried him far beyond the average child of his age in reading. But in all this the training of attention was my chief concern because I thought this essential for the development of his powers of observation, self-control and responsiveness to all the stimuli of a child’s environment.
It was necessary now to let time and steady training humanize him, so we gave him what conspired to make him a normal, laughing, playful child, ready to work at times, but always preferring to play. In the further carrying out of this plan I entered him last autumn in a small private day school, where he is in the first grade. His class is now reading a little book which Donald finished reading a year and a half ago, but he is learning from the class and his teacher far more important things than what the “Little Red Hen” did. He is beginning to adjust himself to the everj^day world of children and adults in which he lives and must play his part.
If I began my work without a theory and without understanding Donnie’s mental status, I am far from that position how. I have unraveled much of the mystery, and I find the understanding of this one child of important value in interpreting the behavior and progress of other normal children. I believe that Donnie was at the start dominated by fear, which plays still an important role in his behavior. His concentration on the card was in the nature of a defensive reaction. He disliked to get out of bed because he was afraid to get out of bed. He disliked to walk and talk because he was afraid?perhaps of failure.
It was noted on one occasion that when taken outdoors he would not stop screaming even after he had been put on the back of a pony. I know now that this was the worst thing that could have been done to him. Donnie is afraid of all animals. He takes kindly, however, to little creatures and has often alarmed his teachers by bringing them caterpillars and worms.
One day Donnie, while seated at a table playing with a train of cars, had his attention called to the fact that a little gray kitten was in the room. He was mortally afraid of it, so he would not turn his head to look, but kept moving the train back and forth, saying “Puff! Puff!” in the same absorbed concentration which was characteristic of him at the beginning. He was ignoring the kitten just as he used to ignore people he disliked by closing his eyes when they came into the room.
He was afraid to look down a well, he was afraid of a doll, of a soft rubber ball, of a balloon, a loaf of bread, a spinning top. He was afraid to go on a sailboat the first time, but the second time he went with joy. He took a fearful pleasure in trains, for he loved them as moving things, and yet they terrified him. He would say: ‘’Let us go to town in the three trolleys;” but when you asked him why he would rather go in the trolleys than in a train he would never tell you.
He has never verbally admitted that he is afraid of anything. “Won’t hurt you,” he very early exclaimed whenever he was frightened by anything; and this was one of his first spontaneous reflections. “Don’t have to pat the pony,” he would reiterate during the many weeks required to get him to overcome his fear of the school pet. The effort to take him out driving in a little pony cart, which it was thought would entertain him, only succeeded after a period of two months. But then, as was usual with him, he couldn’t get enough of driving behind the pony.
Even yet he is afraid. “I like dogs,” he declared lately, as he started on his way to school. “Nice kind dogs which don’t bite,” he added thoughtfully. Nevertheless, he managed unobtrusively to place his companion between himself and every dog. “I like to pat dogs,” he boasted; but when one appeared unexpectedly he excused himself tactfully: “I don’t like them that color.”
So, while Donnie is fearful, he is not a coward. He is doing his best to overcome his fears, and he has worked out his own method of doing this. He had no fear of dark or of the supernatural. Fears and desires are the two greatest motive forces of mankind. No problem is more perplexing and none so absolutely fundamental as the proper treatment of fears and desires so that these motive forces may excite the actions desired. As I understand Donnie now, he had no desires, but many fears. We compelled him to do those things which he feared. As soon as he had done the-fearful thing, the fear, in many instances, disappeared and desire took its place. Donnie is now afraid chiefly of what surprises him.
Donnie’s obstinacy measured the intensity of his fear, but in part it measured also the intensity of his desires. Always, from the very beginning, Donnie has known just what he wanted. Never was there any wabbly uncertainty of choice. He either desired it or he didn’t desire it. This, to my mind, is a strong and valuable trait of character if you can turn it to the right use.
The desire for possession gives rise perhaps to his keenest pleasure. He held on to his card, not only because it enabled him to ignore the fearful things of the world about him, but he held on to it because here was something “all his own.” Not until recently has he been willing to share any of his possessions with others. For a long time he not only clung passionately to his own possessions, but appropriated the playthings of all the other children as well, so much so that his room was known as the “Robber’s Den.” He is now so far advanced on the road to generosity that he will give away his second-best toy.
He has always shown the same concentration of attention which he showed at the beginning. One day recently he wore to school a necktie which he had borrowed from the gardener, Terence. The teacher could do nothing with him that day because he persistently explored the attributes of his new possession. He met Terence, who came to take him home, with the matured fruit of his morning’s work: “Terry, can you see the top of your necktie?”
His first craze was for automobiles, and then for sailboats, bicycles, trains and cars?anything that moved. As he learned to talk, he went through the magazines. “It’s an automobile, see the automobile,” he kept reiterating. When he grew fond of excursions abroad, “Are we going out, Agnes?” he would say, “Agnes, are we going out?” a thousand times until he threatened to drive his nurse to distraction. No child can have a better endowment for future accomplishment later than this power of persistent concentration. Donnie’s traits of character are therefore positive traits. He has a definite arraj’ of abilities, keen desires, self-dependence. Even from the first he preferred to walk alone, though in constant fear of falling, rather than hold someone’s hand. He only sought the hand if a terrifying object came in view. With strong desires and fears, strong likes and dislikes, Donnie has an equal capacity for happiness and great unhappiness, for success and failure. He can be sweet-tempered or angry and resentful. His emotional balance is easily disturbed, and he still requires very careful handling. Of the cause of Donnie’s mental condition when he came to us, and which led several experts to diagnose him as feeble-minded, I cannot be sure. He had an illness after birth, which I now believe left his brain so devitalized that it permitted fear to gain the upper hand over desire. Of one thing I am certain: If Donnie had not been given the painstaking and expert training to which we subjected him he would by now have fallen into a state of irremediable feeblemindedness.
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