Autism and Gender: From Refrigerator Mothers to Computer Geeks

Chapter 1. Interpreting Gender: Refrigerator Mothers

chAPter 1 interpreting Gender Refrigerator Mothers June Francis was a refrigerator mother. When her son was diagnosed with autism in the 1950s, she was told that she “had not connected or bonded with the child because of inability to properly relate to the child.” The doctors she consulted prescribed psychological therapy— for her, not her son. “I couldn’t quite see how that could happen,” she states in a documentary called Refrigerator Mothers. “But here’s someone of authority saying that it had happened.”1 In the 1950s and 1960s, shortly after Leo Kanner first identified autism as a unique psychological condition, experts drew upon psychoanalytic theories to explain the apparent detachment of autistic children from their parents. One particularly notorious expert was Bruno Bettelheim , a survivor of the Nazi holocaust who operated as a child psychiatrist using fraudulent credentials. In his book The Empty Fortress and in numerous columns and television appearances, Bettelheim insisted that cold, emotionless mothers could provoke an autistic response in their children. Despite his questionable credibility, Bettelheim became a minor celebrity and spokesperson for autistic children, claiming that he could effectively treat them using the psychoanalytic methods he used at the residential Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School in Chicago. Bettelheim has since been widely condemned for the damage he caused to children and to parents and for the false image he helped generate of autism as a child’s withdrawal from uncaring or cold parents. The most 34 • chAPter 1 thorough critique of Bettelheim is by Richard Pollak. In The Creation of Dr. B. Pollak reveals that Bettelheim fabricated both his credentials and the results he claimed for his methods in treating autism.2 This chapter examines the reasons why Bettelheim’s theories became so influential despite these fabrications. One explanation for this phenomenon centers on Bettelheim as a particularly persuasive figure. In this view, the refrigerator mother theory was a hoax, and a rhetorically savvy charlatan had hoodwinked unsuspecting doctors and parents into accepting it. Katherine DeMaria Severson, Denise Jodlowski, and James Arnt Aune claim that Bettelheim used “clever” rhetorical strategies to persuade popular audiences of this theory despite his “shoddy” science.3 Similarly, Roy Richard Grinker argues that, while other theories about autism were in play during this time period, Bettelheim was “simply too good a writer, and with his Viennese accent—the sign of an authentic expert in psychology—too good a self promoter” for his theories not to take hold.4 Yet pinning the circulation and persuasiveness of the refrigerator mother entirely on Bettelheim does not fully explain why he was so readily believed or why other psychologists supported similar theories . After all, the term refrigerator mother stems from a statement made by Kanner, not Bettelheim, and similar theories of parental causation were applied to an array of childhood disorders, not just autism.5 Rather than locating the popularity of Bettelheim’s theory solely in his rhetorical prowess, in this chapter I examine the rhetorical characters that gave it persuasive power. I argue that Bettelheim’s theory of autism was convincing because it drew on extant characterizations of cold, emotionless mothers and the narrative of maternal deprivation, in which a child deprived of a mother’s presence or affection could develop psychological problems. Theories of autism premised on this hypothesis were persuasive because they drew on a set of culturally available topoi. The commonplace of the absent, anxious, or cold mother became a heuristic through which Bettelheim and other experts could interpret autism. I first examine some of the scientific and popular sources of those topoi and show how they informed theories of autism from the 1940s to the 1960s. I then discuss the ways mothers countered the figure of the refrigerator mother. By interpreting their characters differently, mothers found an alternative position from which to argue. Rather than accepting the guilt and blame placed upon them by this theory, mothers took on the character of heroines and saviors of their children. In doing so, they configured their children, reciprocally, as damsels Interpreting Gender • 35 in distress—vulnerable figures that only mothers could save. Finally, I consider how the character of the refrigerator mother continues to haunt some contemporary autism research, especially research into parent-child interactions, bonding, stress, and attachment. interpreting mothers In an article in a 1961 Saturday Evening Post, Rosalind C. Oppenheim offered her story as the mother of a nonverbal son, Ethan, who was diagnosed with...