A Thorn in My Pocket: Temple Grandin's Mother Tells the Family Story by Eustacia Cutler Read Free Book Online

steps to maturity, I pick up another thought. What could have caused the rift between Temple’s doctor, an arrogant, proper European, and my old boyfriend, a lanky, laconic Westerner from Nebraska? The boyfriend was brilliant, irreverent, and funny—one of Oppenheimer’s fair-haired boys before he switched from physics to psychiatry. Had he made fun of the Viennese doctor when the two of them were interning? The doctor was an easy mark; Germans don’t get our tongue-in-cheek irony. They don’t understand Jimmy Stewart.
    A chink, I think I found a chink! The doctor is human. He will no longer intimidate me.
    Ah, but with a heavy heart, I guess I’ll have to accept his diagnosis. Temple may well be suffering from infant schizophrenia, brought on by a psychosocial trauma. And maybe, just maybe—even if I didn’t mean to—I’m the one who brought it on.
    Boy, that’s a bitter pill.
    OK, I accept it, but, as Aunt Ruby advised, I won’t weep and wail. If Temple’s problem is psychosocial, then it’s time to look for psychosocial clues.
    First, I thumb through old college textbooks, get as far as the startled response and feel waves of boredom creeping over me. The plodding, literal focus of Psych. 101 offers no clues to autism, so as fast as I can I turn back to my true love, which is literature. At least literature will give me the illusion of addressing Temple’s problems while allowing me to run away from them. But something’s changed. Now I find I’m drawn like a magnet to Victorian novels full of dark family secrets and wicked, autocratic men. I’m also drawn to Victorian ghost stories, perhaps because what lurks about, unspoken, between Dick and me feels sort of like a ghost. Most of the time we talk practicalities but always hovering around the edge are the unanswered questions about Temple: like why had Dr. Meyer come up with her demand that I explain Dick to her. What did he say to her unbeknownst to me? And what has he written to the new doctor? Where did the new doctor get the idea of farming Temple out to a foster family? I like to think Dick cares for Temple, but I wouldn’t want to bet on it. For the time being, he simply allows her to exist under the same roof.
    Continuing my literary search, I prowl around in the spoiled, uneasy world of Scott Fitzgerald, then, best yet, I light on Henry James. Here are social battles I know by heart: women struggling to hold their own in a Boston only two generations removed from the one I live in. James’ understanding of the way in which we are both the product and victim of the society we live in leads me to read Erik Erikson’s recently published Childhood and Society . An innovative leader in the field of psychoanalysis and human development, Erikson writes that our psyche is made up of more than a Freudian ego developing in lonely isolation. Coining the term “identity,” Erikson describes us as a combination of individual development, family, community, and nation. All these elements impact on our ego, and our ego on them.
    Well, if that’s so, then what’s going on between Dick, Temple’s new doctor, and me?
    First, there’s the young Viennese doctor, disciplined in old-world Freud, seeing his future in the United States as a psychiatrist in the growing field of disturbed children. But, still a European, perhaps not fully acclimated to our culture, our particular subtleties?
    Then there’s Dick, WWII vet, reared in patrician Boston, seeing his future as a paterfamilias, carving the Sunday roast as his father has before him, his children watching, their faces washed, their hands in their laps. Afterwards a Sunday walk perhaps, with the youngest child riding on his shoulders.
    Last comes me. More than twelve years younger than either man, the first college female in my family, in my neighborhood, freshly hatched from postwar Harvard, from classes filled with vets on the G.I. Bill of Rights. Not college kids, but men in their late twenties who’ve