The Child and his Behavior. A. R. Luria
The ideas that we have sought to develop enable us to take a wholly new approach to children whose physical defects have placed them in particularly unfavorable conditions, those known as “physically defective” children.
When studying physically defective children, psychologists have usually tried to answer the question: to what extent their psyche has been damaged, and precisely how much of the normal inventory of a healthy child they have retained. These psychologists usually confined themselves to a “negative characterization” of the physically disabled child; and they were often right, in that they were studying the fate of those functions with which a child is born, and which have been damaged for example, in the blind, or deaf-mutes.
It is essential, of course, to go beyond such “negative characterizations”; otherwise one would be in danger of missing what psychologists regard as most important and of particular interest. Besides a “negative characterization” of the defective child, we must also draw up his “positive characterization”.
The blind or deaf-mute child would be unable to live at all unless he somehow compensated his shortcomings. His physical defect would leave him too unadaptable. A special and peculiar mechanism, the compensation of defects, thus comes into play. As he gains experience, the child learns how to offset his natural shortcomings. Against a background of deficient natural behavior certain cultural devices and skills begin to cover, or compensate the defect, and enable the child to handle impossible tasks in new, different ways. Deficient behavior begins to accumulate compensatory cultural behavior, leading to the creation of a “defect culture”, whereby the disabled child acquires certain positive characteristics, in addition to his negative ones.
It is the latter, in our opinion, that the psychologist should study above all else. Numerous recent studies have begun to elucidate these “positive characteristics” of deficiency and their basic mechanisms.
As far back as 1905 the German psychologist Alfred Adler laid the foundations for an original type of teaching about the personality that we are only now beginning to analyze objectively. Some aspects of it shed a great deal of light on the development of the psyche and the behavior of the physically disabled child.
Adler, who was still practising internal medicine, had been interested to note that patients with a severe defect in some organ nonetheless managed to cope with that defect. The simplest confirmation of this observation is provided by the well-known fact that when illness strikes one of the paired organs (lungs, kidneys, hands) the other organ vicariously takes over its functions.[40] In a very large number of cases, however, a far more complex pattern occurs. The fact is that many of our organs are single, not paired, and that injuries to them may be so severe as to eliminate their function altogether. This latter phenomenon occurs particularly in those cases where the function of the organ is not completely lost, but innately weakened. We may thus often have an innate weakness of sight and hearing, or an innate defect of the vocal apparatus (weakness of the vocal chords, blurred articulation, etc.), or innate defects of the muscular, sexual, nervous or other systems.
Yet, as Adler has shown, people not only cope with these defects, offsetting their innate deficiencies, but often even “over-compensate” them: people with naturally poor hearing may become musicians; those with poor vision, artists; and others with speech defects, orators. In the way they overcome their defects, they may match Demosthenes, who, starting with blurred inarticulate speech, became a famous orator, thus compensating many times over his natural shortcomings.
How precisely does this “over-compensation” work? The fundamental mechanism of the compensation and overcompensation of defects clearly lies in the fact that the individual comes to focus the whole of his attention on the defect, over which a kind of “psychological superstructure” is built in an attempt to compensate a natural defect by means of persistence, practice and, above all, a particular culture for the use of that deficient function (if it is weak) or other substitute functions (if is entirely lacking). The natural defect organizes the psyche, arranging it in such a way as to permit the maximum compensation. Most importantly of all, it nurtures immense persistence in the practice and development of anything that might compensate that defect. A curious and unexpected picture then emerges: a person with poor vision that places him at a disadvantage, focuses the whole of his attention on that defect making it the target of all his neuro-psychic activity, developing a special ability to make maximum use of what information he does receive from his sight, and becomes a person for whom sight is at the very center of his work, such as an artist or draftsman. History is full of examples of such half-blind artists, and of musicians with organic hearing defects, turning deaf, like Beethoven, towards the end of their lives, as well as great actors with a weak voice and poor diction. All of them proved able to overcome natural defects, and arranged their psyche in such a way that they achieved greatness precisely in the one field where they faced the most daunting obstacles. It thus turns out that a defect that primarily depressed the psyche, making it weak and vulnerable, may become a stimulus to its development, raising it to new heights.
From this dynamic point of view the physically disabled person is seen to have not only negative but also positive characteristics. The next question that arises, however, is the nature of the mechanism whereby such defects are compensated. Is it is a simple mechanism for the shifting of functions, as occurs during an illness of a paired organ? The correct solution is suggested by one fact from the psychology of the blind. Psychologists studying the lives of the blind have long been interested in precisely how such persons compensate their natural failing. Entire legends have sprung up on the theme of the sensitive touch of blind people, and their extraordinarily subtle hearing; it has been said that they develop a new exceptionally refined “sixth sense”. Yet a precise experiment has yielded some unexpected results: it became evident that neither the hearing, nor the touch, nor the other sensory organs of the blind were an exceptional phenomenon, and that they were no better developed than those of the ordinary sighted person.[41] At the same time, however, it is well known that the blind achieve significantly better results in the sphere of hearing, touch, etc., than sighted persons.
Most authors who have studied the blind see the answer to this paradox in the fact that the blind, while they have the same sensory organs as sighted persons, develop a distinctly superior method for using them. Those auditory and tactile sensations that lie immobile in the sighted person, with dominant vision, are mobilized in the blind and used with remarkable thoroughness and subtlety. The astonishing development of the auditory, tactile and other such functions in the blind is not the result of any innate or acquired physiological refinement of those receptors, but the product of a “culture of the blind” that enables the blind to make a cultured use of the remaining receptors, thereby compensating their natural deficiency.
We may say that the blind often have dozens of elaborated skills and devices not found in sighted people. To understand the ways in which they are able to compensate, if only in part, their natural failure to adapt, one has only to consider the preciseness and dexterity often observed in the blind, and their remarkably fine analysis of tactile and auditory sensations. Hearing and touch are the focus of a blind person’s attention; under his control a number of devices designed to make the maximum use of them are elaborated. – As a result of that process there are blind persons who can read text quickly using Braille script, and others who can decipher maps and who, using their own methods, manage to become fully-fledged members of society. One has only to recall the well-known story of Helen Keller who, though born blind, deaf and dumb, nonetheless achieved a high level of education, in order to realize that rational influence and association with cultural devices can alter the psyche, even if it has grown in the unfavorable medium of a physical defect.
We also find a similar circle of “cultural superstructures” in other kinds of physical defects. We often see how, in the presence of an innate defect, various functions begin to perform quite a different, new role, by becoming a tool compensating that particular shortcoming. In the case of deaf mutes, for example, mimicry begins to acquire quite a new function. It ceases to be a mere way of expressing emotion, and becomes a vital means of communication, until new, more advanced devices, such as finger or lip reading, replace this primitive means of expression and communication.[42]
Moreover, this example shows the extent to which each of the “tools” used by the deaf-mute enhances, develops and alters his psyche. We may safely say that each of these devices has its own special matching psychological structure. A deaf-mute who relies solely on the language of mimicry for conversation with his contemporaries will of course have only minimal opportunities for contact or the exchange of experience and information, and, accordingly, very little opportunity for the further development and enhancement of his intellect. As soon as he shifts to sign language capable of conveying any word or combination of sounds, however, those opportunities develop enormously, and his psychological inventory is vastly expanded. As the same time, his intellect, enriched not only by numerous new concepts, but above all by a new and greatly enhanced method of contact with people, receives a powerful stimulus. A similar leap occurs in the development of the deaf-mute when he learns lip reading and consequently ordinary speech, which he often uses perfectly, even though he does not hear it. By mastering that “tool”, the deaf-mute enters the environment of normal people, who can both hear and speak. It enables him to understand anyone and engage anyone in conversation. Besides the enormous psycho-therapeutic benefits of this accomplishment, which brings him out of his closed world, changing his entire personality and conferring on him the standing of a full member of society, his entry into the broad social milieu immediately opens up new possibilities for his intellect. In intellectual terms, of course, one cannot compare a deaf-mute capable of lip-reading to the primitive being whose communication with his environment relies solely on the imperfect tools of mimicry and inarticulate sounds.
There is another simple example of the way physical defects may be offset by artificial means: the numerous injuries to, and amputations of limbs that occurred during the war. In all such cases a person was suddenly put out of action as a result of the loss of one or more limbs, and recovered his able-bodied status only through the use of an artificial limb or prosthesis. Learning to use a prosthesis instead of an arm or leg substantially altered such a person’s behavior, and the “prosthesis psychology” that grew up during the war pointed to a number of peculiarities in the use of those artificial arms and legs.
Braille, finger- and hand-reading in the deaf-mute, and prostheses all become subjects of psychology, alongside such processes as instinct, habit, attention and emotion. As we shift to the history of human behavior and the study of its cultural forms, such an extension appears to be indispensable.
V. James somewhere observed that the human personality ends not at the tips of the fingers, but at the toe of the shoes, and that shoes, hats and clothes in general ate as much as part of the personality as the head, hair and nails. This notion is undoubtedly true if we decide also to study the cultural forms of an individual’s behavior. The concept of the cultural personality ends beyond the confines of the organism, and the study of cultural customs and dress provides us with valuable material for the understanding of human behavior.
The entire history of dress and fashion suggests that one of their main tasks has always been that of screening certain body parts where necessary, of hiding physical shortcomings, and, when the need arose, of offsetting them. The memoirs of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are full of examples in which fashion and details of dress were of this origin. Ruffles on the sleeve were introduced at court in order to hide ugly arms; the feminine bindings that were in vogue in the early part of the nineteenth century were introduced by an arbiter of female fashion who was obliged to hide an unsightly scar on her neck.
High heels serve to increase a person’s height, while inelegant legs may be concealed beneath long dresses. Scrawniness and inadequate development of shape may be offset by corsets, bustles, padding, etc., all of which figured prominently in the fashion of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It would be hard to enumerate all the instances in which physical defects have been offset by the “strategy of dress”, when dress was used in an organized manner to supplement and rectify the personality. One has only to think of all the military outfits, ranging from Indian war dress to modern military uniforms, that add to a person’s stature and impart a fearsome, intimidating appearance, to realize that dress can in fact be virtually a part of the personality, and is often organized by an individual’s own disposition.
There is one other external device, used to good effect in the fashions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to compensate shortcomings and divert attention away from one part of the body and toward another. These are to “beauty spots”, an excellent artificial device for the organization of attention, which were used by fashion-conscious women in centuries past.
All of the devices mentioned above may be considered as external tools for the compensation of natural shortcomings. For the sake of logic we should point out that they are also supplemented by internal compensatory devices. Our previous observations about the formation of character traits is definitely relevant here. Compensation for natural weakness by exceptionally loud speech, provocative behavior and rudeness is the source of numerous traits of difficult children, hooligans, etc. We are aware that some people who seem extremely hostile turn out, on closer examination, to be quite mild: their hostility is merely a compensatory mask, while weakness of will is often masked and compensated by stubbornness.
Physical defects, just like specific psychic defects, are often compensated not only by external devices, but also by the organization and focussing of the character of the whole personality. We cannot view defects are being static, and set in concrete; they dynamically organize numerous devices that may not only diminish the significance of the defects, but also at times compensate (and overcompensate) them. Defects may be a powerful stimulus for cultural reorganization of the personality, and the psychologist merely needs to know how to distinguish the possibilities for their compensation, and make use of them.