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Both eyes were then blindfolded … Her hands were tied to the side of the bed… When she awoke her world had disappeared. She had no eyes. New pain tore at the places where they had been. She could not move her arms or hands. Mother had disappeared. Strange hands and voices assaulted her in unfamiliar routines. (p. 18)
This is the experence of 2-year-old ‘Lucy’ when she was hospitalized at 10 months for the correction of a squint. Characteristically, Carol Jeffrey reached beyond the referring agency's tags of ‘severe psychotic type’, ‘continual violent aggression’ and ‘mutism’ to the why place where Lucy's violence underpinned her valiant and lifeaffirming decision to survive.
Jeffrey's work with autistic children like Lucy is merely one example of the problems referred to in the subtitle. Through her 50 years as a psychotherapist, she frequently engaged in long, gruelling attempts to release pre-verbal and pre-birth experiences. At school, the staff secretly dubbed her ‘That Why Child’ because of the continual probing for ‘the search of the “why and what for” of experience’ that became the mainstay of her future career. She had boundless reserves of patience and learned to be amiably silent to avoid invading the barricaded world of the patient. Often she held her patients, not merely psychologically, but physically as in the case of a 15-year-old boy who attacked her with a jackknife. ‘My body reacted and I pressed myself right up against him and he dropped the knife and burst into tears’ (p. 1).
This and other comparable acts successfully contained the beneficial first act of