“So what’s her problem?” dominated every test and every appointment with therapists and experts in Shunamit’s early childhood. “What’s her problem?” I used to repeat the question and add: “She doesn’t have a problem. She has a load of problems!”- all sorts of difficulties, incompetence and lack of skills and, last but not least, “everything that she has and you can’t see,” I used to add defiantly.
“Her problem” was a code word for the one that would put Shunamit in an identified diagnostic category. A category that the experts at the Sheba Child Development Institute in Israel tried to place her at the age of two, following a series of tests with no indication of pathology but with an untitled category called “problem”.