THE REFRIGERATOR MOTHER THEORY AS THE CAUSE OF AUTISM

 THE REFRIGERATOR MOTHER THEORY as the Cause of Autism

April 5^th, 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.