You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
“It's less trouble to feel sorry for her than it is to teach her anything better.”
When Dr. Gerard Fromm asked me to speak on The Miracle Worker at the Austen Riggs annual Creativity Conference in honor of playwright William Gibson, who passed away in November 2008, at the age of ninety-four, and who was a great friend to psychoanalysis, I demurred at first because I am not an expert on the life of Helen Keller, nor indeed on blindness, nor on disability; yet I have thought deeply about the film, and I hope that what follows may prove meaningful. It is, of course, a brilliant work, and all I can do is to offer a few of my own perceptions. I must emphasize at the outset that, in what follows, I shall be speaking about the 1962 movie with William Gibson's script, just as it is, and not its relation to historical fact. I shall be treating it sui generis, as a work of art, tout compris.
Last term, my colleague Professor Jay Freyman, a classicist, and I taught a seminar on “The Nature of Learning and the Art of Teaching” at our campus of the University of Maryland. In it, we screened this film, as it seemed to us that The Miracle Worker had to be an indispensable part of our inquiry. But why? What makes it such an important and timeless classic on the nature of learning and the art of teaching?
Ninety minutes long, black and white, deceptively simple, the film held our students rapt (the class, twenty Humanities Scholars, watched it together, as a group). Although they had already been captivated by a plethora of engaging material,