Aspies For Freedom

Well, it is counter-intuitive.

Yup.  It only takes one instance to falsify, and my family is that instance. We have been criticized for 'spoiling' our children -- as if a baby can be spoiled.  Bah!

Well, obviously it's caused by parents with a spinning habit... *grins*

"Clinician Frances Tustin devoted her life to the theory. "

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a life wasted unfortunately!
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THAAANK YOU!

Comorbid conditions aside,I think much of it comes down to genetics.Especially the genetics of the father.As I said elsewhere on this board,my father is an undiagnosed aspergerian,with retardation (Fragile x?),and bipolar/schizophrenia in his family. One of my sisters is bipolar,the other schizophrenic.

Personally,I don't think,a doctor,a parent,or whoever should even consider the possibility of an ASD,if there is no such history in the family.The fact that there are quacks out there diagnosing ASDs, without  taking a really thorough disease/family history,infuriates me to no end !!! That a doctor/psychiatrist be required to take such a history before such a diagnosis,is one of the main things that I would like to see changed.Of course,it might mean a large per centage of those with autism,may in fact have something else entirely,but I cannot understand why anyone would want to go around with a false diagnosis.

Oh,and I have read all of Kanner's writing on the web,and taking it literally,I find little that  would implicate him in coming up with this garbage.It's all this guy's fault !




        The Bruno Bettelheim we knew was an invention, says his biographer
        
Bruno BETTELHEIM'S new biographer lays his cards on the table right away: he thinks Bettelheim was a pathological liar. Richard Pollak, the former executive editor and literary editor of The Nation, got interested in the famous psychotherapist and author in order to learn more about his own younger brother, who died on a family vacation in 1948 when he slipped through a hayloft chute during a game of hide-and-seek. The boy had been at the Orthogenic School for emotionally disturbed children at the University of Chicago for five years before he died, so, in 1969, Mr. Pollak figured Bettelheim, the director of the school, could tell him about his dead brother.

        Instead, Bettelheim called Mr. Pollak's father a simple-minded ''schlemiel'' and his mother a false martyr. Then he bluntly announced that the child had committed suicide. And, he added, Mr. Pollak's mother was largely to blame, because she had rejected him at birth. ''What is it about these Jewish mothers?'' Bettelheim fumed.

        Mr. Pollak left reeling. On reflection, though, something seemed fishy. He recalled that the hayloft his brother died in was so treacherous that he himself had almost fallen, too. And his mother, whatever her quirks, was not the harpy Bettelheim described. Mr. Pollak began exploring other options. What if the great Dr. Bettelheim, the champion of emotionally disturbed children and the author of ''The Uses of Enchantment,'' ''Freud and Man's Soul'' and ''The Empty Fortress,'' was in fact a bitter, sadistic, anti-Semitic, mother-hating liar?

        That is the hypothesis Mr. Pollak follows in ''The Creation of Dr. B.'' Although Bettelheim declined to be interviewed for the book, Mr. Pollak interviewed two of Bettelheim's three children, his first wife and a slew of colleagues, editors, students and friends. And many of them agreed that, in the words of Jacquelyn Seevak Sanders, Bettelheim's successor at the Orthogenic School, ''you couldn't believe anything he said.''

        The trouble with the book is that Mr. Pollak seems to think he must dig up malice and lies at every turn. The result is a shocking but curiously unnuanced biography of a psychologically complex figure. Here is a man who comes out of a concentration camp with the idea that prisoners are like children, and later turns the idea on its head to suggest children are like prisoners. And here is a biographer who pursues this disturbed man's fibs like an accountant.

        According to Mr. Pollak, Bettelheim's alter ego, the self he invented, did everything the real Bettelheim wished he had done: he met Freud, took autistic children into his home, earned three degrees from the University of Vienna, was part of an underground movement to rid Vienna of fascism, stood up to the Nazi guards in Buchenwald and Dachau, was rescued from the camps by Eleanor Roosevelt and never spanked children.

        The real Bettelheim felt that ''people regarded him as ugly, small and Jewish.'' He grew up in a bourgeois Viennese family; his father played cards with him and his mother read him Grimms' fairy tales. He wanted to be part of the intelligentsia. So he studied art history at the University of Vienna and read Freud backward and forward.

        But when his father died of syphilis, Bettelheim suspended his intellectual aspirations and took over the family's lumber business. He married a teacher named Gina Altstadt. Then came the Anschluss. In June 1938, Bettelheim was taken by train to Dachau, then to Buchenwald. That seems to have been the dividing line between the real Bettelheim and the false one.

        One of Bettelheim's lies, according to Mr. Pollak, was an anecdote about his heroic, uncomplaining survival in Buchenwald that Mr. Pollak calls ''the Frostbite Story.'' Bettelheim said he persuaded a guard to admit him to the camp clinic by asking him first to cut away dead frostbitten flesh, thereby avoiding ''pleading, deference or arrogance.'' Vivid as the story is, Mr. Pollak suggests it is probably false. In real life, he reports, Bettelheim had a comparatively soft job in Buchenwald, mending socks indoors. And, he says, Bettelheim's freedom was probably bought by a bribe to the Nazis in 1939, before the war began.

        Whether it was survivor guilt, shame, anger or the chance to start over, once Bettelheim was freed, Mr. Pollak says, he began creating Dr. B. He sailed to New York, was reunited with his wife for a day, then after a few weeks went on to Chicago, where he eventually married Trude Weinfeld, whom he had fallen in love with before the Anschluss.

        Soon after, Mr. Pollak says, he began inventing degrees he never earned and even boasting that when he trained to be an analyst (which he never did), Sigmund Freud (whom he never met) said of him, ''This is exactly the person we need for psychoanalysis to grow and develop.'' He ended up claiming a classic Viennese academic record, Mr. Pollak says: ''14 years at the University of Vienna, studies with Arnold Schoenberg, summa cum laude in three disciplines, two books published, training in all fields of psychology and membership in an organization that studied the emotional problems of children and adolescents.''

        And why not create such a life? The Nazis, Mr. Pollak says, ''expunged the real one'' and no one in America had the gall to doubt a man who had spent time in concentration camps. Soon, Bettelheim was wowing students with his Viennese accent, his casual references to Freud and his habit of psychoanalyzing students' dreams, memories and parents.

        In 1943 he sealed his reputation with the publication of ''Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations,'' a paper in which he observed that the prisoners in concentration camps were effectively turned into children. He said that rather than fighting their captors, they fought with one another, daydreamed and admired, even emulated, the Nazis. Thus, they were ''more or less willing tools of the Gestapo.'' The paper caused a huge stir, catching the attention of Meyer Schapiro, Dwight Macdonald, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer.

        Mr. Pollak, though, seems most impressed by Bettelheim's shoddy science. He points out that although Bettelheim claimed his article was based on interviews with at least 1,500 prisoners in five different barracks, this kind of research was impossible since he lived in only two barracks.

        Then Mr. Pollak goes on to the fib he thinks was the foundation for Bettelheim's career: Bettelheim claimed that Patsy, a troubled girl his first wife had taken in, was autistic and that it was he who cared for her. Neither was true, Mr. Pollak suggests. Later, Bettelheim embellished more, saying there had been two autistic children. Partly on the basis of this putative experience, Mr. Pollak writes, the University of Chicago asked him to take over the Orthogenic School, which he did in 1944.

        There Bettelheim built a kingdom for children. With another Viennese immigrant, Emmy Sylvester, he created the first formal ''therapeutic milieu,'' which Mr. Pollak describes as a permissive, ''all-encompassing healing atmosphere.'' The children painted their rooms whatever colors they liked and ate from expensive china. Meanwhile, though, in books like ''Love Is Not Enough'' and ''Truants From Life,'' Bettelheim exaggerated his successes and, Mr. Pollak says, lied about how gentle his methods really were.

        Bettelheim ''sought to shape the Orthogenic School in the reverse image of the concentration camps,'' Mr. Pollak writes, and in that new world, mothers were seen as villains, even Nazis. Bettelheim ordered mothers not to visit their children at the school or take them home. He praised the kibbutzim in Israel for removing parents from their children's lives. And in his 1967 book ''The Empty Fortress,'' he attributed autism to bad mothering.

        Mr. Pollak contends that despite Bettelheim's benign mission, he was often cruel. He bullied his staff so much that one counselor called his training style the ''Nazi-Socratic method.'' He made some of his patients undress and shower in front of one another. And though Bettelheim said he was against slapping ''because it's a brutal and illogical method,'' he often spanked his patients. Indeed, Mr. Pollack devotes an entire chapter to Bettelheim and punishment.

        When Bettelheim retired from the Orthogenic School in 1973, he lost his strange kingdom and moved to California. There he wrote the work for which he is best known, ''The Uses of Enchantment,'' in which he argued that such bloody tales as ''Hansel and Gretel'' and ''Sleeping Beauty'' were a needed outlet for children's fears and anxieties. Mr. Pollak shows that this too was based on a lie; large chunks of the book, he maintains, were plagiarized from a 1963 volume, ''A Psychiatric Study of Fairy Tales: Their Origin, Meaning and Usefulness,'' by Julius Heuscher. Mr. Pollak gives a damning passage-for-passage comparison of the two.

        On March 12, 1990, the very date the Nazis had invaded Austria 52 years earlier, Bettelheim, who at 86 was suffering from circulatory problems in his legs, heart trouble, diabetes, arthritis, an enlarged prostate and a blockage in the esophagus, ''swallowed some drugs and whisky and tied a plastic bag over his head.''

        He once said, ''We must live by fictions - not just to find meaning in life but to make it bearable.'' What is striking in ''The Creation of Dr. B'' is that most of the lies Richard Pollak ascribes to him seem so unnecessary. A counselor at the Orthogenic School, commenting on one of Bettelheim's inflated reports of success there, put it well: ''I felt like saying: 'You don't have to exaggerate, Dr. B, it was dramatic enough.' '' Mr. Pollak's book is a startling and thorough account of a life of lies. A less vengefull biographer might have paused to analyze the psychic uses of the elaborate fairy tale Bettelheim constructed for himself.

Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company


Evidence that autism is in any way related to how parents behave is unconvincing, nor is there evidence that it is related, as so many parents foolishly believe, to early vaccinations.  

<SNIP>

Strong evidence that autism is a dysfunction of the brain has been available for half a century, and was taken for granted by neurologists outside the Freudian tradition. For a while it was called childhood schizophrenia. However, psychoanalysts and amateur Freudians persisted for decades in the fantasy that autism was somehow caused by unloving parents, especially by cold "refrigerator mothers." The leading advocate of this absurd view was Dr. Bruno Bettelheim (1903-1990).

Bettelheim was a small, bald, nearsighted man with thick glasses and a strong Austrian accent. He liked to tell people he was so ugly that when his mother first saw him after his birth she exclaimed "Thank God it's a boy!" Born in Vienna to a Jewish father who died of syphilis, Bettelheim claimed to have studied under Freud. Although he was briefly psychoanalyzed in Vienna, he was not trained as an analyst. He never claimed to be a psychiatrist of any sort -- only a psychologist. His doctorate in Austria was on the aesthetics of nature.

Arrested by the Nazis, Bettelheim spent a year in Nazi concentration camps, first at Dachau, then at Buchenwald. This was before they became extermination centers. Released in 1939, he came to the United States where he was given a job teaching at Rockford College for women, near Chicago, and later at the University of Chicago. In 1994 he took over the University of Chicago's decaying Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School for disturbed children, which he headed from 1944 to 1978. During this period he became one of the country's most respected experts on childhood pathology.

Bettelheim wrote eleven books, numerous articles in technical and popular journals, and an advice column that ran for ten years in The Ladies Home Journal He lectured everywhere, and even appeared as a psychiatrist in Woody Allen's 1983 film Zelig.

In 1983 Bettelheim retired from the Orthogenic School, or Bruno's Castle as it was sometimes called, and moved to California. He had early on been divorced from Gina, his first wife. His second wife Gertrude died in 1984 after forty-three years of a happy marriage and three children. After a stroke in 1987, Bettelheim moved to a retirement home, which he despised, in Silver Spring, Maryland. In 1990, ill, lonely, and depressed over a rift with his daughter Ruth, he overdosed on sleeping pills, fastened a plastic bag over his head, and died.

After his suicide, evidence of Bettelheim's dark side began to emerge. Although many of his counselors at the Orthogenic School considered him brilliant and admirable, others began openly to call him a cruel, egotistical tyrant, the guru of a cult, and a power-mad mountebank.

Evidence accumulated that Bettelheim exaggerated his bravery in the concentration camps, and lied when he said that Eleanor Roosevelt had helped him escape. He claimed an 85 percent cure rate of autistic children in his care, a boast no other psychiatrist came close to making. Critics pointed out that Bettelheim alone diagnosed autism and he alone evaluated "cures." Most of his cures, they charged, were of children who were not even autistic or only mildly so.

Although untrained in analysis, Bettelheim was a Freudian fundamentalist. Counselors reported that every trivial incident that occurred in his school, such as a child breaking a dish or unintentionally hitting another child with a rubber ball, was taken by Bettelheim to be an unconscious expression of hostility. He was given to outbursts of anger and frequently slapped children. Alida Jatich, a patient for seven years who became a computer programmer in Chicago, published an article in The Chicago Reader (a weekly newspaper) in which she said Bettelheim once dragged her naked and dripping from a shower and slapped her repeatedly in front of her dorm mates. In her words:

In person, he was an evil man who set up his school as a private empire and himself as a demigod or cult leader. He bullied, awed, and terrorized the children at his school, their parents, school staff members, his graduate students and anyone else who came into contact with him.

Roger Angres, another former patient, in an article for Commentary (October 1990), described what he called Bettelheim's "insulting and intimidating theatrics." He insulted children, Angres wrote, "just in order to break any self-confidence they might have. I lived in terror of his beatings, in terror of his footsteps in the dorm."

The degree of Bettelheim's cruelty toward patients was mild compared to his cruelty toward mothers. For a detailed account of this I recommend science writer Edward Dolnick's excellent, hard-hitting Madness on the Couch: Blaming the Victim in the Heyday of Psychoanalysis (Simon and Schuster, 1998). It is one of a raft of recent books exposing psychoanalysis as one of the most monumental pseudosciences of the last century. What follows is taken mainly from Dolnick's book.

Bettelheim was convinced, in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that autism had no organic basis but was caused entirely by cold mothers and absent fathers. "All my life," he wrote, "I have been working with children whose lives have been destroyed because their mothers hated them."

Again: "The precipitating factor in infantile autism is the parent's wish that his child should not exist."

In the mid-fifties Bettelheim adopted a policy known as "parentectomy." Under this policy, parents were not allowed to see their children for at least nine months!

You can imagine the desolation felt by mothers when they were told they had created their child's pathology. Annabel Stehli, one of many such mothers, read Bettelheim's book about autism, The Empty Fortress (1967), a book his detractors called The Empty Book. In The Sound of a Miracle (1991), Stehli described her reaction this way:

I was carrying around this terrible secret. I didn't want to talk to anyone about Berrelheim. My husband said that he thought it was baloney, but I didn't talk to my friends about it. I was very alone. I really felt as if I had a scarlet letter on, only the "A" was for "Abuse."

I felt that I'd hurt Georgie in some subtle way that I couldn't grasp, and if I could just figure it out, then maybe she'd be okay. There was a part of me that wanted to believe Berrelheim, because that would mean that if I got better, Georgie would get better.
This sort of crap was the prevailing wisdom,at the time I was dianosed.

A typical bit of Freudian nonsense in Bettelheim's Empty Fortress was how he explained a child's obsession with weather. The child broke down the word "weather," unconsciously of course, into "we/eat/her." It's hard to believe, but Bettelheim actually wrote: "Convinced that her mother (and later all of us) intended to devour her, she felt it imperative to pay minutest attention to this 'we/eat/her'."

<SNIP>

Bernard Rimland, a psychologist and father of his autistic son Mark, is the author of Infantile Autism (1964), another slashing attack on Bettelheim. Dolnick devotes several pages to Mark, an amiable man who has managed to adjust to life. Mark is one of those autistics who can name the day of the week for any date, but is unable to explain how he knows. When Bettelheim died, Rimland's comment reflected the opinions of almost all authorities on autism. "He will not be missed."

My next column will be about Facilitated Communication, a crazy development involving autistic children that is almost as sad and deplorable as Bettelheim's attacks on refrigerator mothers.

http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-66496160.html

hmmm... i'm trying to visualise all the refrigerator-mom theorists giving birth to autistic babies (who are born like that).

Like, gather the wood folks, the ice-age is coming!!!