In the previous and an earlier post I pointed out that Bruno Bettelheim was responsible for setting our understanding of autism back for a generation thanks to the so-called “refrigerator mother” theory. I also argued that Bettelheim was a paradigmatic psychotic savant, and one unfortunate consequence of such savantism is that it tends to be very successful, and to plant itself in the collective mentality, often with disastrous long-term consequences. You have only to think of the tens of millions who died worldwide thanks to Marxism—another psychotic savant’s paranoid delusion—to see the point.
A consequence of the reality of free will which I discussed in another post is that you can hold people responsible for their actions. This leads to the mentalistic skill (notably and rather creditably deficient in autistics) of naming, blaming, and shaming—something which keeps lawyers, politicians, and the press in business. Psychotic savants are often adept at this too, and in Bettelheim’s case it meant blaming mothers. Indeed, according to an authoritative biography, “No prominent psychotherapist of this time was more antagonistic to mothers—in private and in public—as he was, insisting that they caused autism by rejecting their infants and comparing them to devouring witches and the SS guards in the concentration camps.” This was naming, blaming, and shaming in one of its most virulent and effective modern dialects: Freudian Psycho-babble!
One unfortunate effect of the refrigerator mother theory has been that it has tended to tar Leo Kanner (1896-1981), the American co-discoverer of autism, with its brush. Part of the reason may be that something of the same kind of symbolism was in fact first used by Kanner to describe the frequently high-achieving, emotionally cold parents that he had noticed often tended to have autistic children. Writing in 1949, Kanner remarked that “aside from the indisputably high level of intelligence, the vast majority of the parents of the autistic children have features in common which it would be impossible to disregard.” He goes on to describe what he calls "a mechanization of human relationships. Most of the parents declare outright that they are not comfortable in the company of people ... Those who speak of themselves as sociable tend to qualify this by explaining that they have no use for ordinary chatter. They are, on the whole, polite and dignified people who are impressed by seriousness and disdainful of anything that smacks of frivolity." Kanner adds that “Matrimonial life is a rather cold and formal affair,” but also lacks major animosity and is characterized by “faultless respect” and—as far as he could ascertain—an absence of “extra-marital sex relations.” Furthermore, “The parents’ behaviour toward the children must be seen to be believed. Maternal lack of genuine warmth is often conspicuous in the first visit to the clinic.” Kanner concludes that the parents “themselves had been reared sternly in emotional refrigerators”.
Nevertheless—and unlike Bettelheim—Kanner never blamed mothers for their children’s autism and even published a work entitled In Defense of Mothers: How to Bring up Children in Spite of the More Zealous Psychologists. Indeed, in his very first description of autism he had stated that “We must, then, assume that these children have come into the world with innate inability to form the usual, biologically provided affective contact with people, just as other children come into the world with innate physical or intellectual handicaps.”
Contrary to the Freudian view fashionable at the time, Kanner emphasized that “This is not … a departure from an initially present relationship; it is not a ‘withdrawal’ from formerly existing participation. There is from the start an extreme autistic aloneness that, whenever possible, disregards, ignores, shuts out anything that comes to the child from the outside.” He goes on to observe that “While the schizophrenic tries to solve his problem by stepping out of a world of which he has been a part and with which he has been in touch, our children gradually compromise by extending cautious feelers into a world in which they have been total strangers from the beginning.”
Kanner concluded his original account by observing that “here we seem to have pure-culture examples of inborn autistic disturbances of affective contact,” and underlined the point in a follow-up study published 28 years later by adding that “One can say now unhesitatingly that this assumption has become a certainty.” Nevertheless, he goes on to complain that “Some people seem to have completely overlooked this statement, however, as well as the passages leading up to it and have referred to the author erroneously as an advocate of postnatal ‘psychogenicity’.”
With the benefit of hindsight, Kanner—and even more so Asperger, autism’s other, Austrian discoverer—was way ahead of his time in realizing that autism is a genetically-determined disorder and that any resemblance between autistic child and parent rests on nature, not nurture.
