A Few Impertinent Questions
About Autism, Freudianism and Materialism
by
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The psychologist stood menacingly over me.
"You know," he warned, "Tony is not going to grow up - or talk - until you do something!
I knew what he meant by "do something". Psychology books described how feelings of hostility and incestuous thoughts about one's parents dominate most people's lives. Dr. Zircon was apparently furious because I refused to confess to any such feelings. One way to win an argument is to declare all dissent to be pathological. Freud was the discoverer of "denial". Patients who refused to admit to one of his imaginative diagnosis were accused of being "in denial". Faced with such a scientific accusation, who could win an argument with an analyst? I was the mother of an autistic child, and at that time autism was thought to be caused by maternal rejection. Psychotherapy for mother was the treatment. If traumatic events actually caused people to become neurotic, two and a half years of such therapy would surely have turned me into a real neurotic. Instead I wrote a book about my therapy and invited the psychologists to read it. Freud, Marx and Darwin are sometimes cited as the materialists of the 20th Century. Philosophical positions such as materialism can’t be proved, and we should all be free to choose our own philosophy. I’ve concluded that I am not a materialist, and that much of Freudianism and Darwinism are something we should all be laughing about - suitable material for prime-time comedy. I believe in evolution alright, but doubt that adaptations are random and don't believe natural selection plays any role in their organization. For instance, gifted children are often diagnosed with attention deficits, hyperactivity, Asperger syndrome, and other learning deficits. Our environment has changed dramatically in the past few hundred years. Much of mankind's formative years are now devoted to mental exercise, rather than physical activity. If evolutionary change occurs by rational response to environmental pressures, one might expect our species to be changing. One might expect also the changes to be varied and imperfect. However, such adaptations would not be random accidents, and while natural selection might eliminate the imperfections, it plays no apparent role in their organization.
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About the Book
The Freudian view seemed to be that people consist of Ids, ego's and superego's. People are supposedly also inhabited by something called a subconscious, a mysterious entity with a tendency to think naughty thoughts and keep them a secret from one's conscious self. When this naughty subconscious takes over and controls one's actions - without permission - people become neurotic. If the patient lies on a couch and talks, and a psychiatrist listens, the subconscious might be tricked into revealing itself. Once enticed out into the open by a therapist, the subconscious supposedly looses its power to cause neurosis.
About the Author
When psychologists began trying to convince the author that she had rejected her autistic child, she turned to writing. It was a way to preserve a sense of humor and feel relatively "normal". She has been writing this same book for nearly fifty years, and has expanded her interest from opposition to Freud to a general skepticism of scientific materialism. She insists that she has no credentials and is not an "authority" on anything. However, we are all equal authorities when it comes to unprovable philosophical concepts.