Helen Keller is complicated. Yes she communicated many things herself but you have to admit Sullivan acted like a filter for information both to and from Helen. Very few people could communicate with Helen.
Take sex for example. Sullivan didnt tell Helen about sex, Helen read about it in a book written in braille and then went and asked Anne about it. When Helen was in college she wasnt allowed to make friends outside of Anne.
For most of Helen’s life she was basically someones meal ticket. Her books and fees for speaking made Anne and others alot of money. The one time Helen had a boyfriend Helens family cut off the relationship. So yes they had an influence on what Helen heard and said.
Helen Keller in love is a novel. It’s not a true story, but fiction. It’s an “imagining” of what might or might not have been a real love story. (Peter Fagan was a real person who worked briefly with Keller in the 1910s, but the extent of their actual relationship remains unknown.)
I never said Helen didnt communicate directly with others. What I DID say is many people controlled what she was told and said because their was only a limited number of people who could communicate with her. Again, like how her family chased off her one suitor or how in college Helen wasnt allowed to have any outside friends other than Anne.
Dont you get it? Its the same with any interpreter. Say I need someone to interpret for me in another language. They can choose what they interpret.
As for DJ I think he is capable of forming attachments and that comes from my experience with working with special needs children and adults. Now I wouldnt go so far as this woman did and act like this could be an adult level of attachment. At least as far as being husband/wife type relationship.
I just wanted to add that this article brings up the delicate issue of sexuality and the disabled. They are obviously sexual beings with normal desires and the question of how to allow them to seek those out is a difficult one.
Now this woman basically took advantage of and raped DJ. The same type of “rape” that occurs when some man working in a hospital has raped a woman who is in a coma or is severely disabled.
What she should have done is discussed the issue with the family and let them decide how to handle it.
It depends on your disability. If you are mentally disabled to the point of having the I.Q. and/or emotional mindset of a child, then the situation is totally different.
Based on fiction, and people you’ve met with unrelated maladies. It reminds me of something Harlan Ellison once said: “Everybody has opinions: I have them, you have them. And we are all told from the moment we open our eyes, that everyone is entitled to his or her opinion. Well, that’s horsepuckey, of course. We are not entitled to our opinions; we are entitled to our informed opinions. Without research, without background, without understanding, it’s nothing. It’s just bibble-babble. It’s like a fart in a wind tunnel, folks.”
Do children not form attachments? My cat forms attachments. The level of mentation required to form attachments is somewhere north of an amoeba and somewhere south of the mammal split.
[Insert all appropriate disclaimers about how we don’t know if this individual formed an attachment to that person or not.]
The attempted analogy with Helen fails because Helen was not severely retarded and was capable of communicating with others where DJ is not.
Certainly communication with Helen was difficult, but the role Anne performed was in no way analogous to what Anna did, which was to completely project her own thoughts on DJ. There is a world of difference between filtering information (as with Helen) through real communication and completely, 100% imposing your own thoughts through woo on someone who is incapable of possessing that level of reason (DJ).
You claimed that both Anne Sullivan and Anna Stubblefield pushed to intentionally force a dependency in communication, yet the points you are discussing in Helen’s case discuss restrictions from her family. At any rate, this is tangential to the discussion of DJ, because the cases are not sufficiently similar.
For Stubblefield, she didn’t have to work on reducing the means of interpreting – there was no interpreting going on. The so called “communication” was made up of whole cloth so obviously others would not be capable of making the same shit up.
