It was a non-fiction about a ‘disturbed’ boy. I remember reading it as a teenager and thinking the boy wasn’t disturbed or, perhaps I was too young to understand the emotionally disturbed. The boy’s name was not Dobby because that’s the Harry Potter elf, but I want to call him that. Bobby?
As mentioned, I was a teenager when I read it so it has to be at least 35 years old. The book was descriptions of sessions the psychiatrist had with the young boy and the one thing that stuck in my mind was how, the first thing he would do every session was arrange the paints into the color spectrum. In a discussion I was having about the movie Charly recently, this book came out of the depth of my memory and I thought, hey, that kid wasn’t crazy, he was autistic. No one in the conversation knew what 30 year old, half remembered book I was going on about. Then I thought, if anyplace would know what I am going on about, it would be here.
If you enjoyed Dibs: In Search of Self you might also like the books written by Torey Hayden based on her real-life experiences in the 1970s and early 80s with teaching and counseling children with special needs. I especially recommend One Child and Murphy’s Boy.
I remember the Reader’s Digest condensed version; I was 9 or 10 when I read it and a lot of it went over my head, but just looking at the thread title and first line brought it back to me.