THE REFRIGERATOR MOTHER THEORY as the Cause of
Autism
April 5th,
2018 – I completely 100% agree with Breggin, Tustin, Miller and the others regarding
their findings that the single cause of Autism is psychogenic, not genetics!!!!! I witnessed the obvious link my whole
career. Children of Toxic parents were the loudest deniers of any psychogenic factors of causation but of course they would be. Many of the toxic Unit Managers as well as the CEO had an autistic/schizophrenic child. Everyone of these health care elites had Cluster B traits. It is a given that they would deny and project any cause / responsibility for their damaging actions.
According to Peter Breggin’s Toxic Psychiatry, the psychogenic theory of Autism was abandoned for political pressure from
parents’ organizations; not for scientific reasons. For example, some case
reports have shown that profound institutional privation can result in
quasi-autistic symptoms (Rutter, Andersen-Wood, Beckett et al 1999).
Clinician Frances Tustin
devoted her life to the theory. She wrote:
“One must note that
Autism is one of a number of children’s
neurological disorders of psychogenic nature, i.e., caused by abusive and
traumatic treatment of infants [...].
There is a persistent denial by the American society of the causes of damage to
millions of children who are thus traumatized and brain damaged as a
consequence of cruel treatment by parents who are otherwise too busy to love
and care for their babies” (Tustin 1991).
Alice Miller, one of the
best-known authors of the consequences of child abuse, has maintained that Autism is psychogenic
and that it is fear of the truth about child abuse has given rise to the High
Priests of Psychiatry denial of the psychogenic causes of nearly all forms of
autism. When Miller visited several
therapy centers for Autism in the United States, it became apparent to her that
the stories of children regarding their abusive past “inspired fear in both
doctors and mothers alike”:
"I spent a day
observing what happened to the group. I also studied close-ups of children on
video. What became clearer and clearer as the day went on was that all these
children had a serious history of suffering behind them. This, however, was never referred to […]. In my
conversations with the therapists and mothers, I inquired about the life
stories of individual children. The facts confirmed my hunch. No one, however,
was willing to take these facts seriously" (Miller 1991).
Like Arieti and Tustin, Miller believes that
only empathetic parental attitudes lead to the complete blossoming of the
child’s personality.
A book by Jay Joseph
released in 2006 challenges the current genetic theory of Autism:
“Looking specifically at
Autism, despite the near-unanimous opinion that it has an important genetic
component, the evidence cited in support of this position is stunningly weak.
It consists mainly of family studies, which cannot disentangle the potential influences
of genes and environment and four small
methodologically flawed twin studies whose results can be explained by
non-genetic factors. Not surprisingly, then, years of efforts to find ‘Autism genes’ have come up empty.” (Joseph
2006)
Despite the current genetic research on Autism
and Autism-related conditions, the “refrigerator mother” theory, widely
discarded in the United States, still has some support in Europe and is largely
believed to be the cause of Autism in South Korea.
