Whose Side Are They On?

According to many parents of autistic kids, at least those who know the history of autism, psychoanalysts were 'the bad guys'. Many also hail early behaviorists as heroes. Certainly, they were much kinder to parents. Bruno Bettelheim, in his book The Empty Fortress, said that the difference between Nazi prison guards and mothers of autistic kids was that the mothers got at the children from a younger age (Bruno Bettelheim was a concentration camp survivor, and appears to have drawn extensively from that in his work). In contrast, in an interview I found with O. Ivar Lovaas, he said: 

"I can tell you that the parents that we work with are very nice people. We get to know the parents as people, and when you do that you find that there is no reason to believe that they produce autism. But a lot of parents still think that it must be their fault somehow. They have heard that the parents of autistic children do not express love adequately, so they bend over backwards to be loving. What they get for their trouble is even more bizarre behavior � the child smears his feces on the walls, bites his parents, and has violent tantrums. The parents are afraid to punish them for these acts because they have been told that the child behaves this way because he feels unloved, so if you punish him you are only making him worse. But this is all nonsense. And this theory has made a lot of parents feel terribly guilty and made the autistic child get worse instead of better." 

It's obvious which attitude parents would prefer. But if I was an autistic child in the 1970s, I'd much rather receive psychoanalysis than ABA, even though it would be worse on my parents (though admittedly not all psychoanalysts were quite as bad as Bruno Bettelheim). Here's why: 

"You see, you start pretty much from scratch when you work with an autistic child. You have a person in the physical sense - they have hair, a nose and a mouth - but they are not people in the psychological sense. One way to look at the job of helping autistic kids is to see it as a matter of constructing a person. You have the raw materials, but you have to build the person." 

(Ivar Lovaas, in the above-mentioned interview)

In contrast, psychoanalysts typically viewed the autistic child as a person and assumed their behavior was meaningful and important in some way. Behaviorists consider behavior meaningful, but in a very limited and simplistic sense of receiving a reward of some kind, and they don't question whether abnormal behavior should be reduced. Psychoanalysts ideally hoped their patients would become normal, but they were careful not to remove important methods of self-expression unless the person had better ways of expressing themselves (and even then, they were careful about it). In general, the treatment was much kinder. Psychoanalysts worked on building connection and understanding the patient. With higher functioning, adult patients, this was generally sitting or lying comfortably while saying whatever came to mind - 'free association' - but with children, especially if they had limited verbal skills, it was basically play therapy. The book Dibs: In Search of Self is a good illustration of this with a boy who probably was autistic (they call him emotionally disturbed). Here's Lovaas describing how he treated autistic kids: 

"Spank them, and spank them good. They bite you and you just turn them over your knee and give them one good whack on the rear and that pretty well does it. This is what we do best; we are very good at controlling these kinds of behaviors. This is also the way we handle self-destructive behavior." 

"One day I was talking with her teacher and Beth began hitting her head against the edge of a steel cabinet. She would only hit steel cabinets and she would only hit them on the edge because, you see, she wanted to draw blood. Well, I think because I knew her so well, I just reacted automatically, the way I would have with one of my own children. I just reached over and cracked her one right on the rear. She was a big fat girl so I had an easy target. And I remember her reaction: She turned around and looked at me as if to say, "What the hell is going on? Is this a psychiatric clinic or isn't it?" And she stopped hitting herself for about 30 seconds and then, you see, she sized up the situation, laid out her strategy and then she hit herself once more. But in those 30 seconds while she was laying out her strategy, Professor Lovaas was laying out his. At first I thought, "God, what have I done," but then I noticed that she had stopped hitting herself. I felt guilty, but I felt great. Then she hit herself again and I really laid it on her. You see, by then I knew that she could inhibit it, and that she would inhibit it if she knew I would hit her. So I let her know that there was no question in my mind that I was going to kill her if she hit herself once more, and that was pretty much it. She hit herself a few times after that, but we had the problem licked." 

"We stay close to them and when they hurt themselves we scream "no" as loud as we can and we look furious and at the same time we shock them. What typically happens is this - we shock the child once and he stops for about 30 seconds and then he tries it again. It is as though he says, "I have to replicate this to be sure." Like a scientist. He tries it once more and we punish again and that is pretty much it. So we can cure self-destructive behavior - even long-standing, self-destructive behavior - in a matter of minutes." 

"How do you avoid having the child become afraid of you? Lovaas: That is a good question. No one punishes who isn't prepared to devote a major part of his life to that child. Nobody punishes a child who doesn't also love that child. As soon as you suppress self-mutilation you start building appropriate behaviors. You reward the child for doing other things instead of hurting himself." (It actually won't work - I lived with someone who was sometimes nice and sometimes mean and I was plenty scared of him.) 

Which would you prefer - someone playing with you and getting you to express how you feel, or someone hitting you, yelling 'No!' right in your face and zapping you with an electric shock device? Which would you prefer - being viewed as a person who is hurt and coping the only way they can, or as a physical person who is not a person 'in the psychological sense'? Psychoanalysis certainly had its problems, but it was by far better for autistic children than ABA.