Theory: Leo Kanner was a mixed bag

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20 Mar 2014, 5:00 pm

In some ways, the guy was okay. In other ways, he was pretty lousy. He died in 1981, so he's way old school in either case.

Quote:

Unstrange Minds: Remapping the World of Autism, Roy Richard Grinker, Perseus Books Group, 2007.

page 71:

'Leo Kanner believed that children with autism were born that way. They had not purposefully withdrawn from their parents or from human society in general; they were already withdrawn at birth.

'This should have exonerated parents from blame. But Kanner, and Asperger too, provided evidence for those who wanted to hold parents responsible, observing subtle shades of autism in their patients' fathers and mothers, and wondering if there might be a connection between parent and child other than a genetic one. Psychoanalysts, who dominated American and European psychology at the time, and who argued that the relationship between mother and child is the prototype for all later social relationships, seized upon this idea. They argued that people with autism were socially impaired because they had abnormal or failed relationships with their parents, especially their mothers.

'Despite the peer pressure he received from colleagues who were psychoanalysts, Kanner himself was uncertain about causation. . . '

Quote:

page 72:

http://alturl.com/72imc <-- short url to google books

'Kanner introduced the fateful term "refrigerator mother," which came to define many psychoanalysts' views on the cause of autism, including Bruno Bettelheim's. It came from a single phrase in Leo Kanner's first description of autism as a syndrome, a phrase Kanner would forever regret, in which he said that the parents of the first eleven autistic children he studied kept their children "neatly in a refrigerator that did not defrost." For Asperger, the cold parent of an autistic child was simply more evidence of the role of genetics; for psychoanalysts like Bruno Bettelheim, it was evidence of bad parents.'

AardvarkGoodSwimmer
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20 Mar 2014, 5:21 pm

So, why was the 'psychoanalytic' view the dominant one for so long?

And I think the answer is that we humans have a predisposition to pattern recognition. For example, we're more likely to think a rustling in the grass is an animal rather than the boring answer that it's just the wind, that kind of thing.

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20 Mar 2014, 5:27 pm

Yup! We are great at pattern recognition and at estimating angles because we´re hunters.

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20 Mar 2014, 6:07 pm

Kanner really didn't promote the "fridge mother" theory. It was that other dude.

Hans Asperger was way more critical of those he was studying than Kanner (you just have to read the papers).

AardvarkGoodSwimmer
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20 Mar 2014, 8:07 pm

So, Hans Asperger took the view that autism spectrum is genetic, biological, inborn?

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20 Mar 2014, 8:12 pm

And this is the point where we can't make someone a saint. With both our group projects and individual projects, we largely need to be our own leaders.

And I'm a big believer in medium step, observe feedback, another medium step, etc. This may seem patently obvious, but consider the many human endeavors where it's primarily just high falutin' theory, and very little healthy interchange between theory and practice.

ASPartOfMe
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21 Mar 2014, 4:18 am

I would think the first person to describe something usually gets a lot wrong. His "theory" reflected the Fruedian beliefs of the time.

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Callista
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21 Mar 2014, 4:32 am

AardvarkGoodSwimmer wrote:

So, why was the 'psychoanalytic' view the dominant one for so long?

It was dominant everywhere, not just with autism. Freud popularized those ideas and everybody pretty much jumped on the bandwagon. It was quite a while before people started thinking to themselves, "Hey, wait a minute; isn't psychology supposed to be a branch of science?" and actually focusing on people's thoughts and actions, instead of vague philosophical ramblings about dreams and early childhood and the unconscious mind. Of course then they went too far to the objective-observable-measurable end of things and we had to contend with rigid behaviorism, but that's another story.

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