I have been a psychologist for more than fifty years (and I intend to talk about some of my experiences during that time once my blogging about teaching children with autism starts to run down). During most of that time, I have been fascinated by the process of psychotherapy, and have tried to become competent in many of its forms. Discovering the concept of the Bipersonal Field, through the books of Robert Langs, improved my skill immensely – you can read about it in the Langs paper on my website, www.RegReynolds.ca/ Langs was a training psychoanalyst, and what he wrote about was how to do psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Nevertheless, what he had to say has some relevance for teaching children with autism.
In psychoanalytic psychotherapy, it behooves the analyst to attend to the client’s vocalizations and other behaviours first and foremost as if they were a comment on the therapy, and only then to attempt to interpret them in any other way. IMO, the same holds true outside of psychoanalysis. I’ll give you a real life example from outside of therapy. An Israeli psychologist accompanied her husband to Ontario while he did a residency at one of the Toronto hospitals. While in Toronto, she visited the institution in which I was working. We chatted briefly, and I suggested that it might be of benefit to her to do some volunteer work with us while she was in the area. She was non-committal but, as we went out for lunch, she told about a psychologist that she had met who was very “full of himself.” I suggested that she might be having similar thoughts about myself, with the result that she decided to spend the better part of a year with us for the sake of what she could learn about psychotherapy.
Now, how does this apply to teaching children with autism? Many instructor therapists (IT’s) are skilled at applying the principles of ABA in their interactions with the children that they are trying to teach. However, that isn’t enough, because a bipersonal field is created within a day or two of the instructor first meeting the student, and how that student behaves from that point on is, at least in part, a commentary on the quality of the relationship between the IT and his/her student. The child wants a child-to-instructor interpersonal relationship as well any instruction which he/she may receive, and his/her progress will be, at least in part, a reflection on how well the instructor is able to respond to that desire as well as on the technical quality of the instruction being provided.
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