A Thorn in My Pocket: Temple Grandin's Mother Tells the Family Story (20 page)

A few years later, Claudia’s heart, unequal to the task, will stop beating and her parents will establish a memorial scholarship in her name at Dedham Country Day School.

Perhaps they’ve known all along that Claudia’s heart wouldn’t be equal to the task, but I doubt it. That’s not an acceptable fact.

Suddenly autism looks easy.

Fall, 1961. Temple is fourteen, having a hard time of it and giving us all a hard time. Her glands are yo-yoing up and down and so is her rage. She’s reached her full height and her rage carries a new strength. She pins one of the Irish girls to the wall holding her there with threats of what she can do to her if she really wants to.

“Because I’m stronger than you and I won’t let you go.” I see the fright in Bridie’s eyes, in the siblings’ eyes.

“Temple, stop it at once!” I yell, as if she were still a small child. The yell works; fortunately there’s still enough of the small child in Temple to obey me. But taking into account her size, strength, and non-stop determination, I worry. Reports are coming in from school: she’s a holy terror in French class. At workshop she hogs all the attention and throws a fit if she doesn’t get it.

“I don’t ask permission for anything,” she announces when I confront her. “I go ahead and do it, and if it’s wrong, too bad!”

How much is this bravado? How much is clinging to old baby ways? How much is a genuine hunger for friends and a new awareness that’s she’s being left out? Her classmates, on to better things, are sick of making allowances for her, and the siblings are humiliated.

“Temple is autistic when it suits her to be autistic,” they say bitterly, “And she’s normal when it suits her to be normal.”

Later Temple tells me she’s learning to substitute tears for rage. Smart enough, she says, to figure out that rage is unacceptable and tears produce sympathy. But couldn’t that just be a desperate manipulation, while her rage brews away inside waiting to erupt? For now, mercifully, she seems to be able to do it, though repressing rage is a real battle, producing nerve attacks that she says are like “the worst stage fright.” Also violent outcroppings of eczema on her hands which she scratches until they’re raw and bleeding.

I write to Temple’s doctor:

When Temple feels love and appreciation, her compulsive behavior dwindles, her voice loses its curious stress and she is in control of herself…. Large, noisy groups confuse her. With work she wastes a lot of energy complaining, flinging herself around, but finally buckles down to work. She wants someone near her in whom she has confidence … in any therapy with Temple (and let us consider that your premise of psychic injury is correct)
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the most important point seems to be love. As if to make up for the love she could not give or receive in her early years …. Mrs. Dietsch, Temple’s teacher, feels Temple needs familiar surroundings and that those handling her should deal firmly with her eccentricities rather than being shocked by them.
**

Ah, but what are the boundaries? And what is dealing firmly? Temple’s hijinks at her new school now border on the unacceptable, like locking another girl in the school broom closet. In part they are to get even with the girls who tease her. Passing her in the corridor, they nudge each other and whisper, “Retard.” Temple doesn’t know how to join them. She’s homesick for her childhood, for the days of bicycle kites and putting on plays about Bisban. Even the Wampatuck Gang is growing up. They’re into boy-girl talk now and don’t want any part of her “baby” projects. For the first time in her life Temple is truly bereft and the hurt of it stings to the quick. She wants back her right to be a bad sport, to be let off the hook. The timing is cruel: no more baby privileges just when she needs them most.

Despite my misgivings, she insists on wearing her “little girl” shorts to her new school. Then one day she catches sight of herself in the mirror and bursts into tears. Real tears this time, not tears substituting for rage.

“I don’t want to grow up.”

But the clock is ticking, like Peter Pan’s crocodile, and we both can hear it.

The Disquieted
, the documentary on disturbed children, is aired, but is not as successful as
The Innocents
. For one thing, retardation, though a tragic fact of life, is an easier subject to investigate. Autistic children can also be retarded, but the reasons for their limitations are not yet fully understood, which makes psychiatrists wary of searching questions, fearing today’s answers may come back to bite them tomorrow.

But there are deeper reasons for the program’s lacks. I have too big a stake in Temple’s well-being to want to challenge doctors on medical choices I, myself, have been unwilling to accept. All I can manage is a fervent, heartfelt relief that Temple wasn’t sucked into their vortex when she was little. I don’t want to discuss her successful childhood lest the doctor’s question me on her adolescence, which isn’t too great right now. If any medical negativity about Temple were to find its way into the documentary, Dick would pick it up in a flash and resume his arguments. Though Dick and I continue to have our predictable fights, his present target isn’t Temple, but annoyance at me for undertaking the documentary. An example, he says, of my overweening need to inject myself into everything that comes my way.

There’s still another issue that keeps me silent. Sitting between the doctors and me is a two-thousand pound gorilla we don’t either of us want to talk about: Doctor Bruno Bettelheim.

Bettelheim, so stunningly popular these days, recalls the dangerous and ever-present pressure of fashion on medicine, how certain doctors and remedies rise to dazzling vogue for no particular reason except that we’re intrigued by them. Bettelheim’s fashionableness is riding on the current movie trend of featuring psychiatrists as heroes—a trend that began twenty-five years ago with the role of Dr. Abraham Van Helsing in the thirties movie,
Dracula.

The original publication of Dracula, Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, rose to fame by way of Victorian anxiety over sexual lust: an urge Victorians found deeply shocking and irresistibly present. Stoker’s Dracula is an unnatural creature who can enter a lady’s bedroom in any hour of the night unannounced, unexplained, yet for some godless reason always surreptitiously invited. There’s no cure, but to drive a stake through him, and one, for good luck, through Mina, his favorite vampire. If you’re looking for a ludicrous and titillating read, try Stoker’s orgasmic rendering of Jonathan Harker thrusting a stake into Mina’s heart. Again and again.

However, the thirties movie version of Dracula deals with something much more anxiety-making for 20th century movie goers than old style Victorian smarminess: that’s the dread of neuroticism, a newly created emotional stew dreamed up by Freud and introduced to our country by European doctors with foreign accents.

We’re a bit vague about what neuroticism actually is,
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but we’re in awe of these new doctors who call themselves psychiatrists and declare they can cure us of it. As far as we can figure out from their accented rumblings, neuroticism seems to be some kind of unwanted ego nastiness connected with infant sex. For all we know it’s already entered our lives, unbeknownst and unbidden, and will contaminate our happiness if we let it get the better of us.

In a word, it’s Dracula.

Dracula the egotist who lives only for himself, feeding on us in the shadows and never around in the clear morning light when it’s time to shape up and be a happy person. Dracula’s bite may kill us, or worse yet, turn us into something unspeakable, unacceptable—

In a word, a neurotic.

Haven’t we all known people like that? Beings who suck you dry with their neediness, while they go on and on and on, forever fresh and rosy? God deliver us from being neurotic!

It isn’t God who can deliver us, it’s Dr. Abraham Van Helsing—the newly invented, all-knowing, all-powerful psychic authority with a foreign accent—the explainer of the unconscious, the holder-up of wolf bane. Must we tell our secret dreams to Dr. Van Helsing, the feared and revered one, so recently granted the right to pry into our souls? Yes, or he can’t free us from what we keep buried during the day. By day we read about such things and try to make them seem usual, just the ordinary advances of good medicine.

But at night, when we draw the shades and see it all played out in movie shadows of black and white—No! No! No! I don’t want to hear the psychiatrists sing the praises of Bettelheim! I’m not even sure I want them to clarify the subject of autism.

But then neither do they. It’s a perfect symbiosis.

And who of us would dream that in another twenty years Dr. Bruno Bettelheim would turn out to be fraud?
*

I reread Erik Erikson, now a seriously prominent figure in the field of psychoanalysis and human development, and am impressed all over again with his theory of identity. He’s still the first to see “the ego’s roots in social organization,” the first to show us how our individuality is more than mere self, imprinted as it is from early childhood by family, community, city, and nation.

But since I’ve raised my own autistic child, since I’ve seen the difference between Temple and autistic children who’ve been institutionalized, but not much educated, I think much more positively about autism than I did when I first read Erikson. I can also see how his conclusions are tied to old world Freudism, still of the school that sees autism as childhood schizophrenia, brought on by faulty maternal conditions, to be cured with talk and dosages of psychoanalysis. Yet even Erikson himself reacts to the inexplicable eerieness of autism.

To come face to face with a “schizophrenic” child is one of the must awe-inspiring experiences a psychotherapist can have. It is not the bizarreness of the child’s behavior which makes the encounter so immediately challenging, but rather the very contrast of that behavior with the appeal of some of these children.
*

It’s 1961. The suburban Leave-it-to-Beaver world and the Bebop/Beat world are still not on speaking terms, so the Leave-it-to-Beaver world still hasn’t learned what the creative world has always known and accepted: the irresolvable ambiguity and ambivalence of all human life. Psychiatrists, despite doubts, are hanging onto their diagnosis of autism as a psychosocial illness, and to their role as its curer. Our suburban culture has validated psychiatry in books and movies. Psychiatrists seem to have the answer, and we like answers. We live in an economy of finished products: this year’s car, this year’s film, this year’s cure. Finished products are so much a part of our thinking that we look for human solutions in their terms: positive commodity closure and no waffling around with “maybe.” Our style is too focussed on perfection for “maybe,” too quick to repair the smallest rip in the fabric of domestic bliss. We look the other way when a child is separated out, provided it’s with the blessing of psychiatry.