Books in Brief: No Language But a Cry

No Language But a Cry, by Richard D’Ambrosio (Doubleday, 252 pp., $6.95). When Richard D’Ambrosio, a clinical psychologist, first met Laura, she was twelve years old, autistic, mute, and, according to psychological tests, possibly mentally deficient. Her parents had tried to kill her when she was one-and-a-half years old; they were sent to a mental hospital, and she was being cared for in an institution run by a group of nuns. It was with extreme reluctance that Dr. D’Ambrosio went to the institution in the first place—he thought institutions were “impersonal” and antithetical to his idea of the therapist-patient relationship. But he went, “coerced” into doing so by a young social worker; once there, he was coerced by the nuns into reading some of the girls’ case histories, and it was Laura’s that arrested him. (Part of his enormous admiration for the nuns was based on their “Machiavellian” ability to make anybody do anything, by means of “nun-magic,” “nuns stance,” and “outright hypnotism.”) For two years, he mainly talked to Laura, with little apparent effect; finally, by a combination of skill, absolute dedication, and some luck, he got her to speak. Then he and the nuns spent the next four years working to give Laura some trust in other human beings, and a belief that she herself deserved to live. The book ends with her successfully graduating from high school and from a special nursing course, and going out into the world.

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L. Bridges

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No Language But a Cry, by Richard D’Ambrosio (Doubleday, 252 pp., $6.95). When Richard D’Ambrosio, a clinical psychologist, first met Laura, she was twelve years old, autistic, mute, and, according to psychological tests, possibly mentally deficient. Her parents had tried to kill her when she was one-and-a-half years old; they were sent to a mental hospital, and she was being cared for in an institution run by a group of nuns. It was with extreme reluctance that Dr. D’Ambrosio went to the institution in the first place—he thought institutions were “impersonal” and antithetical to his idea of the therapist-patient relationship. But he went, “coerced” into doing so by a young social worker; once there, he was coerced by the nuns into reading some of the girls’ case histories, and it was Laura’s that arrested him. (Part of his enormous admiration for the nuns was based on their “Machiavellian” ability to make anybody do anything, by means of “nun-magic,” “nuns stance,” and “outright hypnotism.”) For two years, he mainly talked to Laura, with little apparent effect; finally, by a combination of skill, absolute dedication, and some luck, he got her to speak. Then he and the nuns spent the next four years working to give Laura some trust in other human beings, and a belief that she herself deserved to live. The book ends with her successfully graduating from high school and from a special nursing course, and going out into the world.