“He was a lone child in what must have seemed to him to be a cold, unfriendly world.”

When Dibs is first introduced, Dr. Virginia M. Axline describes him as a child who exists on the edge of life, and who seems to harbor a deep fear of the world. Over the year they spend together, Dr. Axline is able to learn why Dibs viewed the world this way, and slowly helps him find comfort and contentment inside and outside of himself.

“The darkened sky gives growing room for softened judgments, for suspended

indictments, for emotional hospitality. What is, seen in such light, seems to have so many possibilities that definitiveness becomes ambiguous. Here the benefit of a doubt can flourish and survive long enough to force considerations and limitations of human evaluation.”

Dr. Axline draws on metaphor to explain the concept of withholding judgment of patients. To her, it is important to do this because it allows a psychologist to remain open to all possibilities of how and why. She admits that she does not know everything about psychology, children, or Dibs; in fact, Dibs knows more about himself than anyone else ever will. If a psychologist allows themselves to remain in the dark, control is (rightfully) left in the hands of their child patient.

“It was incredible. Here she was, in the best scientific manner, offering me some data to study. Not a child in trouble. Not her son. Some raw data. And she made it very clear that she did not expect any change in the data.”

When Dr. Axline meets Dibs’s mother, she is taken aback by her cold attitude toward her son. It becomes clear that Dibs’s mother plays a part in his problems, that her expectations of him have influenced his reclusion. This first encounter foreshadows many others, as well as Dibs’s mother revealing how she pushed