Objects in transition: The puppet and the autistic child
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Objects in transition: The puppet and the autistic child Melissa Trimingham, The University of Kent Abstract Although claims for the efficacy of puppetry in therapeutic contexts lack extensive academic research, some published evidence does exist. A phenomenological and embodied approach is used here beginning with the writer’s own experience as a mother to theorize on the puppet’s role as a surrogate communicator and facilitator with children who lack communication skills. Instead of foregrounding language difficulties (as is often the case in writings on autism), this article focuses on the physical reality of a puppet. The writer explores notions of embodiment where neurological patterns are established through physical interaction with the world, and suggests ways in which this patterning may be interrupted or disturbed, and how puppets, as safe and to some extent controllable physical objects, may act therapeutically to re-establish some of these patterns. It is further suggested that puppets may work in similar ways to Winnicott’s ‘transitional objects’ in babyhood, operating in a ‘transitional space’. Winnicott claims that in a psychologically healthy adult, the comfort of infantile transitional objects and phenomena is transferred to religion, art and creativity – activities that provide a bridge between the inner world that we totally control and the external world, which we do not. Such activities are linked to a creative ‘space’ of mind and are psychologically necessary. Puppets operate in this space. Overall, stress is laid on the importance of the material reality of the puppet and its ‘objectness’ to help explain its particular efficacy. Keywords autism
puppet embodiment object transitional object material IntroductionThis article is prompted by my long-established interest in understanding the material tools of performance (props, scenery, light and puppets), and my awareness that there has been little discussion in performance studies about the body’s relationship with the material world of which these tools form a part. It follows that there is very little written on puppets. Even less has been written on the use of puppets in therapy with children (most recently Bernier and O’Hare 2005), and virtually nothing on their use with autistic spectrum disordered children. This article is written primarily as a mother drawing on my experience and observations, a method ‘multifaceted in focus, inviting an interpretative, naturalistic approach to its subject matter’ (Denzin and Lincoln 1998: 3). Whilst my professional experience (a performer and director, in and out of academic contexts, making and operating puppets with all age ranges and abilities) inevitably informs what I write, I have brought up a child with Asperger’s Syndrome (a form of autism), whose diagnosis is complicated by attention deficit hyperactive disorder and some learning difficulties. It is my store of memories I here draw upon, testing a deeply embodied and lived experience (as a mother encountering autism) against a range of professional approaches and theories drawn from psychology and philosophy. Over the years, I used three much-loved glove puppets and soft toys to help me communicate with my son, defuse difficult situations and calm him down when agitated. Only Roland Rat now makes an occasional appearance out of moth balls, but considering his continued (if now very low-key) popularity with my son who is now 23-years-old, the reader will gather something of the force of this now irremediably filthy but always irrepressible glove puppet. Alongside Roland, who developed quite independently of his T.V. personality, the favoured trio was completed by the silly, sweet natured Pooh Bear (glove puppet) and the sardonic and ever sensible ‘voice of reason’ of soft toy Gary, the Canadian dog.1 Early on in the screaming chaos of coping with my son, I noticed that an external figure (i.e. not the parent), someone from outside the situation, who intervened and managed to engage his notice, ‘grounded’ him. True, this might be the long-suffering lodger or the neighbour called in once more to calm my apoplectic rage at bedtime, commenting gently, ‘Everything all right, there?’ as my son took a final flying leap into bed and disappeared, suddenly deflated and mortally shy, under the bedclothes. However, as the characters of my son’s soft toys developed, they almost as usefully fulfilled the role of ‘external figure’. This activity developed quite naturally from the kind of voiced animation of soft toys that surely nearly every parent engages in with their children; the interactions with my son, however, were lengthy, very frequent and had had a clear impact on his behaviour. During more drawn out interplay, the puppet, who was worked and talked by me, slowed him, drew his attention and generally calmed the potentially difficult situation: practically speaking, it also helped to get the job done, whether teeth cleaning or getting dressed or some other hated routine. A puppet, often the glove puppet Pooh Bear, initiated the task, and described, sometimes many times over, what needed to be done; Roland, who was also supremely confident in his status as a ‘Superstar’, expressed my son’s frustration and grumbles, sometimes very amusingly, performed all the antics my son wanted to indulge in, often at Pooh’s expense, and received the appropriate severe telling-off (frequently reducing the audience to helpless laughter), and finally all three puppets performed the task, perhaps inviting my son to join in and follow suit. The more times this was repeated, the more good-humouredly would bedtime pass off. If the situation got out of hand, Gary would intervene with his slow drawling Canadian accent, suggesting that we all calm down: it did not always work, but worked often enough to be highly useful. This demanded a great deal of energy from a tired parent and some virtuoso comic performing skills: but it was no less energetic than a fight, and certainly more enjoyable. I realize that, entirely without conscious intention, and deeply immersed in the ‘phenomenological complexity of the world’ (Adler and Adler 1998: 81), I had developed these three puppets so that their characteristics map on to and offset the triad of impairments in autism with uncanny precision: those of imagination, communication and empathetic social interaction. I was obviously familiar with the triad from National Autistic Society literature from the early 1990s, but I did not make the connection at the time. If Roland was imagination personified, always a hero no matter how much his boasting contradicted the reality, revelling in the anarchy and madness of everyday existence, subverting the norms and creating chaos wherever he could (and in doing so becoming my son’s all-time favourite character), then Gary the dog was communication, the slow voice of reason, summarizing the situation, undercutting Roland, and pleading for common sense and calm. My son often evoked him voluntarily in situations, speaking in his voice, to calm himself as it were. Pooh Bear was, arguably, the one provoking social interaction and empathy: Pooh often got things wrong, and Pooh Bear messed everything up accidentally, attempting to awaken my son’s sympathy and protection. I have described this highly immersive experience as one of ‘phenomenological complexity’, and this is a space where ‘connections, correlations, and causes can be witnessed as and how they unfold’ (Adler & Adler 1998: 81), even at a distance now of some years. I am deeply implicated in the experience as a mother with 23 years of parenting. As an ‘interactive process shaped by […] personal history, biography and gender’ (Denzin and Lincoln 1998: 4) this is not entirely unproblematic (Punch 1994: 84–5) but we have at least moved into a position where areas of knowledge are no longer ‘suppressed as “non-scientific” by the limitations of prevailing research methodologies’ (quoted by Punch 1994: 85). We can ‘study things in their natural settings, attempting to make sense of, or interpret, phenomena in terms of the meanings people bring to them’ (Denzin and Lincoln 1998: 3). The interactions with my son as well as my interpretation of them are also fed by 30 years or so of practice with puppets, often using them with special needs children in theatre and teaching projects. More recently, I undertook practice specifically set up to develop puppets (amongst other ‘media’) as tools for developing imagination, communication and empathy in autistic children.2 All these experiences inform my analysis. The question arises (especially in relation to the puppet as a transitional object (Winnicott 1971), which I develop towards the end of this piece) as to how far the success of the puppets was because I, as his mother, was the operator. I was someone with whom my son had a close bond and absolute trust, but also from whom he perhaps desperately needed help to distance himself, both in the emotionally charged intimacies of caring for him and in his dealings with the world. I have no easy answers to these questions except to signal that I am aware of the complexities of the observations I am making and the connections I am suggesting. To borrow the words of Punch (in his case regarding the ethics of qualitative research) it is a swamp for which I, apologetically but inevitably, fail to provide a map (Punch 1994: 94).3 Puppets in professional contexts Modern-day professional interventions into autism, theatrical or otherwise, are desperately in need of better evaluation as an ‘autism industry’ develops in the United Kingdom and the United States in particular, leaving desperate parents open to unrealistic hopes and at worst exploitation. Many parents and carers claim to have experienced positive results using various interventions with autistic children (such as the Son-Rise programme). Nonetheless, few of the ‘programme’ interventions in autism, often requiring extensive and time-consuming commitment by parents and a range of volunteers, have ever been subjected to either qualitative or quantitative research, which would perhaps enable some evaluation of their effectiveness. Research into puppetry and autism is equally lacking, but at least puppetry as an intervention is cheap, readily available and, I suggest, at worst, completely harmless. At best it may surpass our expectations. There is no shortage of anecdotal evidence about the usefulness of a puppet with autistic children. For example, an Internet search on ‘autism and puppetry’ will bring up hundreds of hits telling parents how to use puppets to communicate with their autistic child, but very little analysing why puppets work. Puppets’ efficacy with children on the autistic spectrum lacks research evidence and demonstrable results, and progress with a severely autistic child is not easily identified, monitored and evaluated. This is in part because the term ‘autism’ itself covers a huge range of differing abilities and difficulties (Gillberg 1990). Autism, in varying degrees of severity, is distinguished by the triad of impairments in imagination, communication and social interaction; children may also show behavioural difficulties to some degree, and sometimes hyperactivity. Sometimes a child exhibits clear autistic traits without being diagnosed as autistic. Indeed, categories for diagnosis still currently present real difficulties (see Wing 1997; Gillberg 1990). More recently, with the work of Simon Baron-Cohen, there is a shift away from the deficit model of autism towards describing autism as a ‘condition’, where their perception differs from our own, and has unexpected strengths as well as difficulties (Baron-Cohen 2009). However, none of this denies that living with autism is extraordinarily difficult for both the autistic child and the parent, and an efficacious intervention that is as cheap and accessible as puppets is worth investigating. Generally speaking, since the 1930s there has been widespread acknowledgement that puppets are useful in a therapy context with ‘disturbed’ children rather than ‘special needs’ children (to use common terminology to distinguish these groups, even if the distinction may be unhelpful; for example, Bender and Woltmann 1936; Woltmann 1940, 1951; Irwin 1985), but most articles are descriptive not analytical, and acknowledge the lack of statistical evidence as to efficacy (or, in modern terminology, quantitative evidence). In an article of 1951, Adolf Woltmann wrote, On an empirical level, puppetry has been found to be extremely helpful in the understanding of the aetiology of maladjustment in childhood. It also constitutes a very valuable therapeutic technique through which groups of children can learn to understand the complexities of deviating behaviour and to find solutions that promise a more harmonious future. (Woltmann 1951: 637) But as he says, ‘The therapeutic application of puppetry, like that of so many projective techniques, has not been evaluated statistically for validity and reliability’. It seems the situation has not altered much in 60 years. Apart from the sheer lack of research into the use of puppetry in applied theatre and therapy (and research on puppetry with disturbed children is far greater than evidence of its use with ‘special needs’ (Rappette 2003; Bernier 1983)), some of the ‘how to’ advice still lingers within a theatrical model: recommending the use of marionettes,4 for example, with older children and advising on the building of a stage, the selection of suitable story-based scripts and so on. Woltmann thinks of puppet therapy in these terms, understandably so given when he wrote (although he also realizes the value of improvisation (Woltmann 1940)), but the theatrical model is found for example in Caputo writing in the 1990s (Caputo 1993: 28). Freudian mind-based modes of analysis lay more stress on the story or narratives used and their therapeutic value rather than stressing the ‘hands-on’ physical experience a puppet gives. In fact, no matter what the difficulty the child has been diagnosed as suffering from, all that is needed is the parent, carer, teacher or performer to operate a figure (even a cut out) that speaks or offers some interaction with the child to get a surprisingly good result, without worrying about tangling your strings or choosing the ‘wrong’ story to tell (Martin 1987; Currant 1985; Gref and Sokolova 1999). Children may be audience or can turn into operators themselves. However, the traditional theatrical model of public performance makes complex demands on a child who has difficulties, and needs careful handling to ensure benefit to the child rather than the watching parents. A ‘closed’ performance, however, just involving the children and the workshop leader(s), is an appropriate outcome to conclude a puppet-making workshop, and can give moments of delight, humour and insight. I have found a very fluid exchange between performers and audience, swopping the roles of audience and operator, to be the most valuable, especially for autistic children. This shift into interactive models parallels the shift within therapy from Freudian approaches to those of ‘action language’ (Pivnick 1998: 52–3) and it is this interactive, one-to-one model of puppet animation that informs this article. Horse and Bamboo Theatre in Lancashire provide some evidence of the power of applied theatre work, of which puppets are an important part. During the 1980s, both before and after the birth of my son, I took part in and helped to shape many of these projects with children and adults, all of whom had a range of communication problems, though not necessarily on the autistic spectrum. The company published a practical handbook privately on their interactive work with special needs children and adults in 1984, Guided Imagery, sadly no longer available. Their projects typically involve a ‘journey’ in a vehicle (a plane, a spaceship, a bathysphere), which breaks down and turns the participants out into an unknown ‘world’ (a specially built environment – a jungle, an underground labyrinth) from which they have to make their way home with the help of a friendly guide. On the way they meet masked characters and puppets to ask for help. In the booklet are testimonies by teachers and professionals to the strength of response the experience provokes. One teacher writes: ‘I was at once filled with jealousy and admiration for the level and intensity of response elicited from each child: an achievement which in qualitative terms, I was unlikely to witness again’ (Horse and Bamboo Theatre 1984: 23). I particularly recall an example of the odd mixture of total immersion in the imaginative world that the participants seemed to demonstrate coupled with an ability afterwards to demonstrate their awareness that it was all pretend. I was once playing a masked old woman living in a cave underground who told the lost and wandering participants (victims of a broken-down miners’ ‘lift’, as the project took place in Nottinghamshire) their fortunes and guided them on their way. One woman begged me to accompany them on their journey, not wanting me to be left down there in the dark. After I had reassured her that it was my home and I had no intention of leaving (!) she grasped my hands and gazing into my eyes earnestly told me how she would never forget meeting me. A quarter of an hour later the show was over: the participants had grasped the keys from the sleeping giant and let themselves out of the underground tunnels, and I changed and emerged into the daylight outside the hall. The same woman rushed up to me, excited and animated: ‘Which one were you? Which one were you?’ This woman, as far as I know, was not autistic, but her response has particular resonance with the nature of the puppet as both physically real and also ‘imaginary’: I will return to this episode later in relation to Winnicott and the transitional object (Winnicott 1971). The theatre company Oily Cart have similarly developed a structure that provides autistic children with an individual and immersive experience with a strong emphasis on the physical elements: as Tim Webb the Director puts it, ‘intensive interaction, the multi-sensory approach, the use of hydro-pools or trampolines and the stimulation of the kinaesthetic sense’ (Webb 2009: 38). This de-emphasizes language communication or, when language is used, it is used through a physical medium. For example, in one performance for children on the autistic spectrum the child sits in a suspended, swinging seat and sees a video of themselves on a large screen in front of them (Conference of the Birds 2004). This arresting experience may function in a similar way to puppetry, although much more sophisticated technically, but perhaps the same in quality. Here the children are confronted with an externalization of themselves, a sudden focus away from their closed inner world, as if another presence suddenly shares their lonely perception of the world. As Roland Rat helped my child to clean his teeth, identifying with his frustration and misery at being asked to do such a messy, irritating and ‘crazy’ activity, here an image of a speaking being becomes the ‘Other’ that carries some of the burden of their experience. These current or relatively recent performance interventions that are documented and to some extent, therefore, available to study, show that in a performance context, puppets are often only one element alongside a successful range of ‘material’ interventions (masked and costumed figures, immersive environments, digital and projected imagery). In this sense puppetry is, indeed, one aspect of ‘media’. This article does not have the scope to cover all media interventions, and I am aware that to isolate the puppet as I am here doing may distort our understanding and prevent us making obvious connections to other physical ‘staging’ elements. It is possible that some of what I claim applies to puppets may also apply to all ‘material’ interventions that put the child/body in contact with an intermediary communicator – whether a (projected) image, a mask or a fantasy environment. With this possibility in mind, I am nevertheless concentrating specifically on the dynamic between physically graspable puppet, human operator and child. However, as Peter Schumann says, the ‘souls of things’ (and he means here, literally, material objects) ‘don’t reveal themselves easily’ (Schumann [1990] 1991: 79). Embodiment and ‘maximum grip’ A common observation on my son in mainstream school was his inability to connect up disparate pieces of information. As one teacher expressed it, it was as if he were thinking in tramlines. The result was that he had a huge repository of general knowledge, but this information was rarely synthesized into new patterns of understanding. To some extent, he understood arithmetic well, at least at primary school level; perhaps here the patterns once established, unlike language, did not tend to ‘slip about’ and change, connect up with other patterns and ‘re-form’ in quite the same way. Similarly, he was excellent at building Lego kits from the printed plan, but never played with the pirate ships and forts once they were built and had to be encouraged to create new structures using the same pieces. It was as if my son lacked the dynamism of play, a dynamism that to a certain extent is shared in the process of thinking; for example, the reach and stretch of grasping in uncertainty and the joy of settling into a conclusion. Then as I came to study phenomenological approaches to our being in the world, particularly through the embodied thinking of Merleau-Ponty, I began to consider whether my son’s problems were actually more to do with undiagnosed dyspraxia (clumsiness) than autism, since he had difficulties embedding himself successfully into what was potentially a chaotic maelstrom in the physical world around him. I no longer think this, and dyspraxia per se, forms a part of his current diagnosis: but I believe that there is a connection between the conditions. The problem of the relationship of mind, body and the material world is one that has vexed western philosophers for over two millennia, and in more recent times has continued to trouble, amongst others, psychologists, anthropologists and performance theorists. The problem is not a rarefied philosophical issue, and especially not in relation to children with perceptual difficulties. It impacts on our understanding of the embodied nature of our self-identity, and our successful ‘gearing’ into the reality about us. Mark Johnson is one of the most lucid writers on the body in the mind and the mind in the body (Johnson 1987, 1999). He says: Human beings are creatures of the flesh. What we can experience and how we make sense of what we experience depend on the kinds of bodies we have and on the ways we interact with the various environments we inhabit. It is through our embodied interactions that we inhabit a world, and it is through our bodies that we are able to understand and act within this world with varying degrees of success. All of this meaningful, and occasionally thoughtful, interaction begins for us at birth, or even earlier, and so it comes to us prior to our learning any language. It depends therefore, not primarily on propositions and words, but rather on forms of understanding and reasoning that are rooted in the patterns of our bodily activity. I shall argue that our conceptualization and reasoning are grounded in embodiment, that is, in out bodily orientations, manipulations, and movements as we act in our world. (Johnson 1999: 81) Johnson’s observations chime with much of what Frances Tustin believes about somatic disturbance in autistic children, though her contention that some traumatic event sparked such difficulties is now generally not accepted. However, her therapeutic interventions have been admired perhaps because she got the basic problem right even if she was wrong about the cause (Grotstein 1997). Tustin, as Spensley says, believes that ‘One might say that the autistic child hadn’t so much lost his mind as he has lost his senses’ (Spensley 1997: 149). Clumsiness is common characteristic of autistic children, and dyspraxic (‘clumsy’) children often exhibit behavioural difficulties and even hyperactivity as a coping strategy in a world that seems to leap out at them, objects always getting in the way. In my plea for an Educational Statement for my son in 1992 I wrote: ‘We have all had days when we seem clumsy and out of kilter with our surroundings; we continually bang our shins, or drop the crockery. For my child every day is like this, an endless frustration in a world that never seems to fit’. Johnson explains how he sees bodily interactions with the world as literally enabling the infant to learn to think. ‘Corporeal logic’ translates into cognitive logic. For example, there are basic ‘image schemas’, which are ‘recurring patterns of our body interactions’ such as: CONTAINMENT, SOURCE–PATH–GOAL, COMPULSIVE FORCE, ATTRACTION, BALANCE, VERTICALITY, SCALARITY, and so forth. The evidence suggests that these image schemas arise from the nature of our sensorimotor activities and that the image schemas are metaphorically extended to structure abstract concepts and acts of reasoning. It is in this sense that human conceptualization, understanding, and reasoning can be said to be embodied. (Johnson 1999: 93) Johnson sees these schemas as prior to language and as literally shaping the way we are able to make sense of the world and develop abstract patterns of thought. For example, he sees the ‘SOURCE–PATH–GOAL’ schema, covering both the experience of walking across a space to achieve some goal, and tracking other people and objects moving across our space to achieve their goals, as a crucial pattern ‘existing kinesthetically, visually, tactilely and auditorily’ and is a vital ‘imaginative structure’ for thinking (Johnson 1999: 94). Like the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Johnson claims ‘Rationality is thus not a static external structure that we come to grasp or know’ (Johnson 1999: 99, emphasis added). If we accept that the quality of physical interactions (e.g. experiencing SOURCE– PATH–GOAL) is a crucial aspect of the developing brain, foregrounding somatic experience, it follows that disturbance to these developing ‘image schemas’ possibly deriving from brain pathology, which in autism is not yet understood, will hinder cognitive development. The reciprocal interplay of physical and mental needs to flow smoothly, though the word ‘interplay’ suggests a split between the two, which is the precise opposite of what should happen. The flow between ‘inner and outer’ is mutual and continual. Such a flow is meticulously and vividly described in Pivnick’s description of emotional development in the baby through interaction of mother and child ( 1998: 57–83). Any subsequent healing processes where this has gone wrong would need to prompt the ‘mind-body’ into new creative interactions with the world.5 Hence, the continual references in such therapeutic approaches to the so-called ‘squiggle’ method. This refers to Winnicott’s use of the squiggle on a piece of paper, which the client takes and adds to, taking turns with the therapist to make pictures. The exercise is both real and metaphoric. It stands for a therapy where the ‘cure’ or ‘goal’ does not exist outside the creative process of ‘squiggling’ or ‘interplaying’. This is a direct parallel with the use of a puppet improvising with the child in a situation that is causing difficulties. A solution is found through the process of doing it, not by imposing a rational outcome from without. Developing on from the idea of ‘image schemas’ is Dreyfus and Dreyfus, ‘The Challenge of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Embodiment for Cognitive Science’ (Dreyfus and Dreyfus 1999). The description of Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the ‘intentional arc’ and the ‘maximum grip’ is particularly interesting in relation to children with perceptual difficulties. The basic point here is that the brain builds up neural networks around the ‘intentional arc’ of an action. Such arcs, and the tendency to get ‘maximum grip’ on a situation, are formed from bodily experience. The intentional arc names the tight connection between the body and the world, viz. that, as the active body acquires skills, those skills are ‘stored’, not as representations in the mind, but as dispositions to respond to the solicitations of situations I the world. Maximum grip names the body’s tendency to refine its discriminations and to respond to solicitations in such a way as to bring the current situation closer to the optimal gestalt that the skilled agent has learnt to expect. (Dreyfus and Dreyfus 1999: 103) This process is not reflected on or thought about when it is established and working well. Dreyfus and Dreyfus use the example of someone swinging a tennis racquet: ‘purposive without the agent entertaining a purpose’ (Dreyfus and Dreyfus 1999: 112). When the intentional arcs are being established there is a cognitive process that we all find rather painful when learning a skill. Dreyfus and Dreyfus call this the ‘novice’ stage, moving on to advanced beginner where the rudiments of patterning begin to emerge as the person begins to recognize ‘advantage’, the coalescence of certain aspects that make ‘sense’. For a child who suffers from perceptual difficulties (dyspraxia is an obvious example, but clumsiness is often a feature of autism and minor neurological damage) perhaps these patterns fail to emerge easily and they remain frustratingly stuck on the ‘novice’ level. My son would get endlessly frustrated by fastening buttons or doing up shoe laces, materials and processes that demanded engagement and pattern learning before they become automatic. Without establishment of the intentional arcs in action, whereby we ‘gear into’ the world more or less automatically, a child would also find it very hard to build up ‘maximum grips’ with which it so much easier to function and indeed achieve, improve and flourish on a day to day basis. According to Merleau-Ponty, higher animals and human beings are always trying to get a maximum grip on their situation. Merleau-Ponty’s inspiration for the notion of maximum grip comes from perception and manipulation. When we are looking at something we tend, without thinking about it, to find the best distance for taking in both the thing as a whole and its different parts […]’ (Dreyfus and Dreyfus 1999: 113) Maximum grip gives us confidence in our skill, the notion of ‘flow’ in an athlete (Dreyfus and Dreyfus 1999: 111), a state of not thinking, the feeling of ‘being there’ and ‘not being there’, which is fundamental to creativity. As Peter Schumann said of puppets: ‘Their creation has to be removed as far as possible from the purposeful definitions of dramatic characters or story’ (Schumann [1990] 1991: 79). The state cannot be achieved without the rationale that precedes it, the learning process that is subject to cognitive control; the painter must learn to draw and handle the materials well, the musician must practise, the puppet maker learn to know their materials. In contrast are the repetitive behaviours of an autistic child, spinning for example, or lost in his or her own world. The ‘ease’ of such activities is a failure to engage with the world, displaying no ‘maximum grip’. A more puzzling example is the facility in moving of a hyperactive child: I have witnessed my son moving swiftly and surely around his surroundings escaping constraining hands and exhibiting an extraordinarily nimbleness in dodging obstacles, but perhaps (as I continually feared) one day not so lucky in dodging moving vehicles and avoiding unknown hazards. While the child may appear temporarily physically adept and exhilarated by the experience, it is not a state of unconscious ‘grace’ (von Kleist [1810] 1994: 12). It is essentially a useless experience since ‘in between states’ when maximum grip is being acquired and applied to other situations do not properly exist, and life is very frustrating. I have equally seen my hyperactive son literally bounce from wall to wall in a hall corridor in his eagerness to reach a goal, bang into a chair, and throw it across the room screaming ‘stupid chair!’ as if the chair and not themselves had the energy, control and will to hurt him. The line between inner and outer, control and objects, can get very blurred. Similarly, some children are confused about their responsibility for things breaking. I have heard my son apologize almost automatically every time anything broke, whether or not he was near it, as he always assumed he must have done it; equally such children, when they attend mainstream school, are quickly identified by others as someone easy to put the blame on, and the muddle is reinforced. The problem is to nurture the bodily based gestalts within the child who gets continually stuck at novice level and prefers to bypass that level into meaningless physical activity, or becomes obsessed with sterile and repetitive actions. I suggest that the use of puppets as a focusing tool with these children helps them to pick out ‘structures of thinking’ from the plethora of information and physical stimuli around them, and helps to ground them and face the ‘novice stage’ without resorting to coping strategies. In other words, it helps them to develop the neurological structures they need to function. Puppet as transitional object I outlined earlier an episode that took place in a special needs adult project in Nottingham, where a woman seemed absolutely to immerse herself in the imaginative world of the masked figures, fantasy and puppetry that was offered, and yet demonstrate immediately afterwards that she had in fact never entirely ‘lost’ herself in the belief, despite what she said while taking part, and despite the sentimental lump in the throat in everyone listening ‘backstage’. Winnicott in his essay ‘Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena’ identifies a period of development in the infant when the infant’s relationship to the external world is between two states:
In the ‘between state’ the child, in healthy development, will normally take hold of what Winnicott calls a ‘transitional object’: Between the thumb and the teddy bear, between the oral eroticism and the true object relationship, between primary creative activity and projection of what has already been introjected, between primary awareness of indebtedness and the acknowledgement of indebtedness (say ‘ta’). (Winnicott 1971: 2) This might be the corner of a blanket for example, or any soft object from which the child does not wish to be separated. It is a ‘defence against anxiety’. There are also ‘transitional phenomena’, a particular song for example. The main point is that the infant’s illusion, that need is instantly answered by satisfaction (the mother’s breast) develops ‘into’ or ‘becomes’ a real object with a shape. It is not an internal object (i.e. entirely under the infant’s control) but it is not an external object either (entirely out of the infant’s control). The transitional object, like the ‘mother’s adaptation to the infant’s needs gives the infant the illusion that there is an external reality that corresponds to the infant’s own capacity to create’. It is a ‘neutral area of experience that will not be challenged’. The mother’s main task as the child grows is to disillusion the infant of course, as it matures, but the transitional object allows an intermediate stage between fusion and separation. Winnicott himself links ‘relief from the strain’ of ‘relating inner and outer reality’, which ‘no human being is free from’ to the adult realms of arts and religion. He calls these an ‘intermediate area of experience […] which is not challenged’. This intermediate area of experience, unchallenged in respect of its belonging to inner or external (shared) reality, constitutes the greater part of the infant’s experience, and throughout life is retained in the intense experiencing that belongs to the arts and to religion and to imaginative living, and to creative scientific work. (Winnicott 1971: 13). The transitional object becomes ‘mind imbued’ and enables a healthy transition between the illusion of fusion with the world and the realization that ‘out there’ is not us. Winnicott’s ‘transitional object’ is a very particular psychological phenomenon: clearly, a puppet is not a ‘transitional object’ as he defines it. However, I would explicitly extend his idea of an intermediate space, between inner and outer, beyond babyhood, and in this space we continue to use and develop ‘bridging’ objects. It seems to me that any child at play – and the woman in the underground environment described above – operates in this intermediate space, and toys (as the tools of intensive imaginative play) act not unlike conduits between self and the world. Therapeutic puppetry simply intensifies and directs such play more purposefully. Entering this ‘transitional space’ when we are no longer babies, through arts, religion – or, in this case, I argue, puppetry, is vital for the psychological health of children and adults, linking inner and outer worlds. Even today, my son longs for this bridge, even though he knows he has long outgrown his puppets and they are no longer age appropriate. The idea of offering a ‘bridging’ space is also the basic thesis of Robbins’s Therapeutic Presence (Robbins 1998). Robbins’ book gives us an indication as to what exactly is happening in successful therapeutic puppetry. It is devoted to Winnicott’s ideas on a ‘transitional space’. The whole book is illuminating about the healing space of creativity, the ‘squiggle’ discussed earlier, and its capacity to promote, literally, neurological growth (Robbins 1998: 17). Robbins writes: In order to understand an experience, I must first feel its contours, touch the very texture of its existence, and take the substance of the interaction into my body […].Whatever the technique, all of us attempt to transform the sensation, cognition, and affect into meaning […] (Robbins 1998: 9) Later he says: ‘Working towards being present with the patient, the therapist uses verbal metaphor to create or discover bridges to link non-discursive and discursive communications’ (Robbins 1998: 17) (emphasis added). In an essay by Felisa Weiss on puppetry the ‘verbal metaphor’ is replaced by physical object: ‘the puppet acts as the intermediary, the projective object that absorbs both interviewer and interviewee’s vectors’ (Weiss 1998: 221). Her descriptions of her work as an art therapist parallel my observations that the puppet gives access to a particular ‘space of grace’ where we can witness and experience harmony between inner and outer worlds, a subtle interplay of mind, body and object where none are felt to be separate. ‘For me puppetry has become that link, that bridge between both worlds because of its shamanic roots that conjure the abstract with material objects’ (Weiss 1998: 220).
There is only a small body of serious analytical writing on puppetry per se. But within the little critical writing that does exist, the best writers put a continual emphasis on the material reality of the puppet: Peter Schumann and John Bell are continually aware of the physical rawness of the objects they use to perform with (Schumann [1990] 1991; Caley 2003; Bell 1996, 2001). This may sound like labouring the obvious, but the recognition that a puppet is real object, a three-dimensional form, a physical reality, that is held and touched and manipulated by the child, operator or therapist is the key to understanding its power, since it is objects that children with perceptual difficulties tend to have most trouble with. The objects either get in the way or fail to be ‘embodied’ (becoming subject to ‘maximum grips’ for example) or become the object of obsessions, and for those on the autistic spectrum people are very often seen as troubling ‘objects’ too, whose complexity escapes them. A puppet is an object, a physical entity, but, crucially, imbued with ‘mindful attributes’. Schumann continually makes reference to the material nature of his puppets, the need to let them speak for themselves, the need to let go and not strive for effect. The object itself must speak, and then there is no distortion by an intruding ego of the performer (Caley 2004: programme 1). This parallels the creative space of the ‘squiggle’ game. Seen in this way, puppets, when operated by someone who establishes a rapport with the child, and particularly when their use is sustained over time, are dependable quasi-‘transitional objects’ that offer a ‘break’ from feeling so out of joint with the world. They are not internal objects over which the child has total control, but neither are they simply external objects the child cannot control. In the hands of a trusted operator, especially a parent, they adapt themselves continually to the situation of the child. They are predictable enough to feel safe, they entertain and amuse, they are funny, and they help a child to make ‘sense’ of the world. Uniquely, because they are objects, the child can focus on them as solid and real, but imbue them with ‘mind’. They have enough ‘redundancy’, unpredictability and deep connections to the ‘real’ to both maintain interest and move the child on in its development. They act as a safe bridge to the less predictable world of other objects and people, helping them deal with that ‘otherness’ and learn (and embody) crucial aspects of it – whether cleaning teeth, travelling in a car or learning to interact socially. 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Contributor details:Melissa Trimingham worked extensively in UK community theatre including many applied theatre projects with Horse and Bamboo Theatre Company, Lancashire. She is currently a Lecturer in Drama at the University of Kent. She has previously published on Oskar Schlemmer, the Bauhaus theatre and the methodology of practical research. She has just completed a book on the theatre of the Bauhaus for Routledge (2010). She is co-leader with Dr Nichola Shaughnessy of the Centre for Cognition, Kinesthetics and Performance at the University of Kent, and engaged with Dr Shaughnessy on joint practical research into media interventions with autistic children. Contact: Department of Drama, School of Arts, Jarman Building, University of Kent, Canterbury, CT2 7UG, UK. E-mail: m.f.trimingham@kent.ac.uk 1 Minor roles were played by the impulsive and always-in-trouble Manchester United red devils, Dev and Inigo, who had an infuriating habit of poking you with their horns, and a supporting cast of anodyne stuffed dinosaurs and teddy bears. 2 This project took place in autumn 2009 at St Nicholas School, Canterbury, funded by University of Kent Enterprise. 3 Regarding the ethical ‘swamp’ itself, I have talked to my son about this article and endeavoured to obtain his informed consent to share our experiences, but if I am truthful, I do not know if he fully understands what I am writing even if he is aware it will be published and in the public domain. 4 I have never used a marionette puppet with strings inside or outside special needs work even though to many people this is what comes to mind when the word ‘puppet’ is mentioned. 5 Daniel Barenboim in the 2007 Reith lectures claimed for music exactly this quality, saying we embody mental patterns physically via music (http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith2006/lecture1.shtml). |