This book is so severely outdated, that it has become interesting and important again. Have you ever heard about this old school in psychology and psychiatry that deducted all psychiatric problems people have in their life from their early experience? That school that linked autism to the way parents _thought_ about their kids while they were pregnant; from they way they _looked_ at them when they were one month old? Well - that's the book! Autism meets psychoanalysis.

Since then this "theory" was debunked entirely and completely, but before it happened thousands of parents were taught to think that all the problems their kids have are their, parents' fault. And thousands of kids were taught to hate their parents for incorrect nursing and potty training that allegedly screwed their lives forever.

That's a great book if you need to feel a bit of righteous anger. And a very important historical source. ( )

Laurie, Marcia et Joey, le petit garçon ' mécanique ' : trois enfants autistiques enfermés dans leur forteresse vide, figés dans leur mutisme et leur monde fantasmatique. Trois enfants parmi d'autres qui sont tenus pour incurables, avec lesquels Bruno Bettelheim et son équipe ont tenté d'entrer en communication - on verra au prix de quels efforts et de quels aléas. C'est donc moins l'histoire de cas qui nous est ici rapportée que celle d'une aventure méthodique : la recherche patiente et passionnée d'une rencontre, là où l'importance de ce que l'on appelle trop vite la régression paraît l'interdire à jamais. On trouvera, encadrant ces trois bouleversantes observations illustrées de dessins et de photographies, une analyse critique de la littérature psychiatrique sur l'autisme infantile, l'exposé des vues théoriques de l'auteur sur la constitution du ' Soi ' et une discussion du mythe des enfants sauvages.

Bruno Bettelheim believed that the autistic child, like the so-called zombies of the concentration camps, was withdrawing from unbearable agony. "Autistic children . . . fear constantly for their lives," he wrote. Also: "The precipitating factor in infantile autism is the parent's wish that his child should not exist." Bettelheim that held emotionally aloof "refrigerator mothers" responsible for autism.

Well, psychoanalytic theories of autism have come a long way since then. Bettelheim's idea of something frozen still seems accurate, but his attribution of cause is now seen to be at fault.

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