Since, having disposed radically of all the garbage of psychoanalysis I started to understand a little of how a mind, a self, a brain works I have made numberless attempts to have some one (teachers, relatives, “friends”, well intentioned people) understand what autism is, all in vain. I list some of the reasons of the futility of these efforts.
1) People, even if generous and open, are not so much interested in a condition that, they think does not apply to them. If they sniff a suspect, that it might apply in some little measure also to them this is a supplementary reason to avoid any approach to the subject. No one likes very much to self analyze after all. Every adult is a working apparatus and to examine the cogs of the machine is a very risky business while the machine “runs”. So I am now convinced much more that the official percentages of incidence of autism (in all its ASD forms) are much greater than the usual 1% of the UK official statistics and 0,75 % of the official US statistics.
2) About mental disability there is moreover much stigmatization, be it schizophrenia, paranoia, autism, serious depression. They are all conditions about which people prefer not to talk openly, or not to talk at all. This favors the spreading of ignorance at high levels. Just in these days McCain talked of autism showing a complete ignorance of the matter. “Sarah Palin should know what autism is because she has Down Syndrome child”. A questionnaire distributed to “statesmen” and even ministers of health would probably show an abysmal ignorance about mental diseases an disabilities.
3) The knowledge of these problems in the realm of paper and TV information is a casual melee of second hand concepts fished here and there without any verification and reliability.
4) There is, even in professional milieus, the heavy weight of Freudian and post Freudian inherited ballast. The damage of this ballast is huge and it’s perhaps here that one might start do some clarity and cleaning. In Utah Frith's beautiful book about autism Freud is not quoted once. But there are still a majority of publishers who continue printing disqualified psychoanalytic literature and Bettelheim’s “Empty Fortress” is present in all bookshops I know in its recent twelfth printing in paper.
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Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.
--Samuel Beckett
Last edited by paolo on 16 Oct 2008, 4:01 pm, edited 1 time in total.
16 Oct 2008, 3:47 pm
