Dibs
Dibs is a five-year-old boy with significant behavioral problems, emotional instability, and problems with anger management, and a hostility toward communication. Nobody know the case, though theories run the gamut and run rampant. He was not a wanted pregnancy, not a wanted infant and, once born, not a wanted child. Resistant to all attempts to reach break through and establish contact until the arrival of Dr. Axline whose successful treatment will eventually reveal Dibs—thought to be mentally retarded—has a much higher than average I.Q. and is more than capable of succeeding in the world.
Dr. Virginia Axline
Dr. Axline is the author, the narrator and the secondary protagonist of the book. Upon seeing Dibs’ misbehavior for herself, discussing his problems with those at school, and interviewing the Dibs’ mother she offers her services as a clinical psychologist at not charge to the wealthy parents of Dibs in the name of research. Her approach is a relatively new form of behavioral therapy that is much more familiar and well-known today call play therapy which involves acting out using dolls as stand-ins for his parents.
Dibs’ Mother
Dibs’ mother comes across as one of the most thoroughly unpleasant and unsympathetic mothers in the history of literature. But this portrait is only conveyed because she is ruthlessly honest with Dr. Axline about herself and her relationship to Dibs. Exhibiting a remarkable lack of desire to self-censor herself for the sake of preserving a positive image, it is precisely this aspect of truth and honesty which winds up being the most positive contribution from his family to facilitating Axline’s successful treatment of Dibs.
Dibs’ Father
Contrary to his wife, that which is known about Dibs’ father comes to the reader through the Dibs and his mother rather than self-confession. He comes across a typical man detached and emotionally enclosed husband and father of his era who most open display of emotion toward his son is reserved for outrage, anger and punishment. Most of the worst that is learned about Dibs’ father arrives as the result of being symbolically incarnated as a doll during therapy.
Jake
Jake is the family’s gardener by occupation, but Dibs’ father figure by default. He becomes for Dr. Axline the definitive proof of the lack of empathy and emotional bonding as the foundation for Dibs’ misbehavior. Jake’s acts of kindness toward the boy, the juxtaposition of attention given Dibs drawn between the gardener and his own father, the emotional response to Jake’s sudden absence following a heart attack all serve to confirm what has been an assumption all along by not just Axline but a psychologist the family had consulted earlier.
