STORIES AS A BETTER DIAGNOSTIC TOOL
Several years ago, after giving a talk in Santa Barbara, I met a child and adolescent psychiatrist who said he had been using In the Mind’s Eye as a diagnostic tool for years. He explained that he had given his clients something like forty or fifty copies so far. He asked them to highlight in yellow all those traits that were like themselves and cross out all those that were unlike themselves.
I said, “Oh, you mean the list at the end of the book.” He said, “Oh no, I use the whole book -- it is much more useful than the usual tests and measures. They are all devised by linear thinkers for linear thinkers.”
Afterward, it occurred to me that the whole book indeed could readily serve as a rambling catalogue of traits -- but that it also would not hurt that these clients would be forced to see in themselves traits shared by important persons who accomplished a great deal, sometimes in spite of their difficulties but more often because of their difficulties and their very different ways of thinking.
To succeed with such extremely mixed abilities, as these individuals often do, you need to have a deep reservoir of confidence and fortitude to carry on in-spite-of the judgments of others that you are, in fact, really slow and lazy and stupid.
To maintain the required drive, determination, and sense of mission in the face of almost constant early failure and humiliation is often nothing short of miraculous. It would appear that only a comparatively small number survive these early days with enough confidence and drive to press on, against all odds, to find success in some area of special knowledge, deep understanding, and passionate interest.
Much of In the Mind’s Eye was an attempt to understand the nature of this kind of success and the remarkable individuals who seem able to find their way around so many obstacles, seeking an area in which they are at home with their work, often performing at very high levels of proficiency and productivity.
I have come to believe that those of us who are trying to understand and to help dyslexics (along with others, more or less like them) must come to see that conventional academic remediation is only part of the job—and not the most interesting or important part.
We need to seek ways to help dyslexics find and develop their own talents, large or small, so that they cannot be beaten down -- pushed into hiding their talents along with their disabilities. I, for one, believe that one of the best ways -- perhaps the only truly effective way -- to do this is to study the lives and work of highly successful dyslexics (in some detail and in all of their great diversity), so as to allow other dyslexics to see what can be done and to show how it can be done. (Seeing What Others Cannot See, TGWest, 2017, page 127.]
