Autism / Aspergers
Becoming Other
I continue reading things about Autism / Aspergers, like John Elder
Robison and others. These people are just 100% wrong!
There is no syndrome, disorder, or deficiency. There are just people
who probably are gifted with above average intellect, but have lived
in extremely abusive environments.
1. Middle class family, where adults use children to establish their
own social legitimacy.
2. Age segregated school system, which is designed to use bullying to
enforce social conformity.
Both of these institutions compliment one and other and were
originally designed to turn young Albert Einstein's and Andy Warhol's
into Homer Simpsons. Most of the time they succeed. But once in a
while someone escapes, just only wounded.
The problem is that these people like John Elder Robison don't fight
back, they collaborate with the abusers. What he describes as being
done to himself, and what he watched being done to his son Cubby, are
exactly what Alice Miller describes as causing the Narcissistic Wound.
Robison claims to remember that as a baby his maternal grandmother was frustrated that he would not mirror back her facial expressions. So she would just gruffly put him down.
Robison also explains that with his son Cubby, the mother, Little Bear, would try day after day to make him play patty cake with her. Now of course Robison and Little Bear both came from horribly abusive families. And so Little Bear's idea about making Cubby play patty cake with her does not come from her having grown up around babies, or from her being in touch with her own childhood self. The idea comes from her reading Baby Books. Well, this is what the stores that sell them call them. I call them kiddie porn. What Alice Miller calls them are Pedagogy Manuals. They are a way of marketing parenthood.
The effect of this is exactly what Miller calls the Narcissistic Wound. It is inflicted when the mother is unwilling to reflect the baby's expressions, but instead expects the baby to reflect her own expressions. Of course she is doing this because she suffers from the Narcissistic Wound herself.
I read the descriptions in Charles Patrick Ewing's,
I see that what Alice Miller describes in Drama of the Gifted Child is an expression of postpartum depression, and that this can be lethal. I also feel that it is more likely to be directed at a male child.
The evolutionary biologist Robin Baker writes about postpartum depression. He sees it as an evolutionary adaptation, a time when the mother is probably preparing to kill the child because she does not see that child as worth making the required investment to raise.
Now as far as Autism / Apsergers, even before there were names for these things, there have always existed forms of "differentness". Everybody is unique anyway. So what is the big deal?
Well it becomes a big deal when we are demanding that people conform to the group dynamics of institutions, like our age segregated school system. And it becomes a big deal when middle class parents are making babies in order to trumpet their own social status.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refrigerator_mother_theory
Leo Kanner, Bruno Bettleheim, Silvano Arieti, and Margaret Mahler, all believed that Autism / Aspergers is caused by mothers. They may have explained it in different ways, but this is what it comes down to. They all suffered political heat because of this. I mean, what it challenges is the middle class family.
Alice Miller also believed something like this, though she doesn't talk about it in Drama of the Gifted Child, she talks about it in a later of her first 7 books.
And yes of course, the victims of Harry Harlow's monkey experiments at the Univ of Wisconsin at Madison, do look like children supposedly suffering from the disorder known as Autism or Aspergers. They look like the children I see today on the cover of Autism Today magazine.
In his 1991 "Toxic Psychiatry", Peter Breggin says that this psychogenic theory was abandoned because of political pressure, and no other reason. He says that the main Autism advocacy groups are simply defensive formations created by the parents.
Now I find this, a most curious work, Act Early Against Autism, by Jayne Lytel, 2008. It has an endorsement from T. Berry Brazelton, M.D., Professor Emeritus of Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School and Children's Hospital Boston.
Lytel describes having a first child at the age of 42. Then she has a second child, Leo, at the age of 44. By around the time the child reaches the age of one, she is convinced that 'something is wrong with him", and she sets about getting him tested and it comes back with the diagnosis of autism. You can feel her terror throughout this whole book. She even reflects back on how her mother always had scorn for the children in "Special Ed", and admonished Jayne to stay away from them.
Well again, even before there were names like Autism or Aspergers, there have always been misfits. And so having evolved from the primitive socius, we all have inherited reactions to misfits. She is terrified that her son will be one, that he already is one.
Now Lytel and her husband and super yuppie conformists. They made enough money at the start of the dot com boom by selling a domain name to buy a 5000 sq ft house, and the husband runs some sort of internet political business. Lytel writes about various movers and shakers and about the go getter that her husband is, his wall covered in college diplomas.
So she sets about trying to get Leo into all sorts of special pre-schools, extra schools, and therapies, trying to get to maybe 40 hours per week. She is going to stop him from becoming Autistic at any cost.
So she is always paying tens of thousands of dollars to lawyers who represent her in hearings before school boards. They are using some law which entitles the disabled to an appropriate education. And if the school district cannot provide it, then they have to reimburse the parents for paying for it out of pocket.
While maybe this sounds great, but it is actually an extension of the Bush No Child Left Behind idea, which makes school district money pay for charter schools, when the standardized test scores drop too low.
So here you have these super conformist yuppies, cutting the guts out of our public school system.
Lytel is also always arranging these play dates with other children. Often they are in the kitchen, supposedly baking something, but in fact dumping baking soda and vinegar into a bowl of flower to make an explosion. She is determined to make her son non-autistic, to make him "normal", by all these therapies and all this exposure to 'normal' children.
I read all of this and I think probably some of these special schools and therapies could be good, as someone is paying attention to Leo. But I don't think all of it is good. I mean in some ways he probably is different. Everybody is unique. But the real rub is will he fit in in school. I mean, clearly he already doesn't fit in in the eyes of his mother. I mean talk about Narcissistic Wound, she is hurting him every time she is around him. She is always testing him, examining him, checking him. Her entire life revolves around there being something wrong with him.
And she does this with impunity. She has zero fear that someone, like say me, is going to step in and intercede and teach her a lesson she will never forget by making a public example of her.
So Leo, totally unprotected, has a nullified social standing. So of course he will be a target for bullying and harassment in school, and probably for his whole life.
Now eventually the white coats ratchet down his diagnosis a few steps, till it is something, but not really Autism / Aspergers. So Lytel, though still fearful, feels vindicated and she has founded "The Early Intervention Network", and writes books about all she has done.
When I read it I am continually reminded of Judith Guest's novel, Ordinary People. Many people know of this because of the Television adaptation with Donald Sutherland and Mary Tyler Moore.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081283/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
Mary Tyler Moore has made some of the best stuff which has ever been on television. But in her memoirs she devotes an entire chapter to Ordinary People. You have two teenage boys who go out in the water sailing. In a storm one of the boys is killed. This was the one that the mother liked. The surviving boy feels guilty and he has a nervous breakdown and ends up hospitalized. The mother has always disliked him. He just seems to reflect something about herself back to her, something that she is afraid she is.
They show clips of her interacting with the deceased son. She is laughing at all of his joke and hanging on to all of his words. But she hates the surviving son. She considers him an embarrassment.
Finally the culmination of the movie is that the father dumps this mother, and continues life with the surviving son.
I read Lytel and I see her the same way. She is terrified that her son Leo will develop with Autism, and she most certainly sees him as a huge potential embarrassment. In both stories the issue is that these sons won't be able to measure up to the expectations of their social class. And so of course they are not marriageable. No sensible girl would even look at them or ever converse with them.
Now people like John Elder Robison claim to be Autism advocates, and some people actually seem to see them that way. But Robison and many like him, like Temple Grandin, exonerate the parents and stand by the self-reliance ethic.
Well the self-reliance ethic is the middle class version of original sin. Children need to be broken because otherwise they won't adhere to the self-reliance ethic. So the parents are always right.
Robison, Grandin, and it seems like most of the other Autism / Aspergers advocates, are collaborators and accomplices to abusers.
What Alice Miller writes about is post partum depression, and what she writes about is what causes clinical Autism / Aspergers, and Bipolar and Schizophrenia as well. Sure, some of these people may have been different in some way. I would certainly hope so. But what reduces them to objects of pity is the mother's pity for them, the Narcisstic Wound
It is never going to change until those of us who see how this works start organizing, standing up for ourselves, and start taking some scalps.
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New rules are coming for all forums I am responsible for. No one will ever be able to post anything which endorses Therapy, Recovery, or Religion.
If I let you post endorsements for these things, then I would be letting you denigrate those who are committed to redress. I would be letting you make it unsafe. The forums I run are safe.
No one will ever be able to post anything which denigrates the commitment to redress.
As far as those of you who practice therapy, but denigrate redress, and those of you who run online forums, but denigrate redress and disrespect people who want it, I am acting. I am working to build up a world wide network of people. So it won't matter where you are, the US, Mexico, Canada, Western Sweden, any where. We are going to find you, expose you, and put you out of action.
Becoming Other
Monica Chelagat
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