If a group of parents differed from the average as extremely as these seemed to, was it not likely that they had treated their children differently? The combination of drive and detachment may augur well for success in a profession; it is not so well regarded as a qualification for bringing up a child. To Kanner, these parents seemed too detached, too controlled. They seemed, in sum, a cold lot — ‘detached, humourless perfectionists, more at home in the world of abstractions than among people, dealing with their fellow-men on the basis of what one might call a mechanization of human relationships’. [10] One of them, a prominent surgeon, even affirmed in response to Kanner’s question that he wouldn’t recognize his children if he met them on the street. Kanner came to think of the group as ‘refrigerator parents’ — ‘able to get together just long enough to produce a child’. There were exceptions — about ten per cent of the group seemed warm and responsive. And of course the deleterious effects of their personalities were not universal; virtually all the autistic children’s siblings were normal, and indeed except in the case of identical twins autism rarely visits the same family twice. But in general the profile seemed clear enough.
When my husband and I read these characteristics in Dr Blank’s reprints we did not find it hard to recognize ourselves. Objectively we belonged in the group; we had a Ph.D. and an M.A. , and the nearest we had come, before Elly, to mental illness was a single great-uncle who had spent a few years in a sanitarium. Subjectively we felt, both of us, the acute shyness that defended itself as reserve. We both knew what it was like to cross the street to avoid an acquaintance seen fifty feet away — not because of any anticipated unpleasantness, merely because one is not always able to sustain the effort of finding something to say. We were both capable of detachment; sustained thought is rather difficult without it. We had both been bred to self- control, and perhaps born to it. Four times I had discovered that one of the difficulties of having a baby is that nurses won’t give you so much as a sedative if you can’t scream. We were well suited, my husband and I. These characteristics had brought us together and kept us close. They had served us well. Most of them had seemed to be strengths. We saw them now transmuted into pathology.
Time had taught us, we thought, to live with our shyness, to fight it, increasingly to transcend it. But it is easy to deceive oneself; psychologists know that. Consider — as I considered — this sketch of the mothers of ‘atypical’ children as I read it in one of the books my solicitous friends lent me:
On the surface these mothers may give the impression of being well-adjusted; not too rarely they are highly intellectual, prominent people. Close investigation reveals that the majority of them are immature and narcissistic with precarious social contact… who have struggled heroically to build and maintain the image they have created of a fine woman, wife, and mother. The nearer to perfection die success of their efforts, the stronger their belief in magic and their own magic (impenetrable defences)… In spite of the outward appearance of self-assurance or worldliness, there is inner isolation. This type of mother tends to function on two levels: the surface level in contact with the outside world is a thin crust only, overlaying a strong tendency to detachment. When this dual level of functioning is a constant way of living, it bespeaks a serious disturbance.
The article then got down to cases.
The picture which Mrs I. had of herself and which she successfully communicated to the world was that of a well-educated, vigorous, charming woman with many abilities and a host of satisfying interests. She had in fact obtained a graduate degree and had achieved success in her professional career… The personality behind this facade was gradually revealed to us during the course of Mrs I.’s therapy. We came to see her as a very isolated person who tries to combat her perception of her own emptiness and her tendency toward withdrawal by precipitating herself into constant activity and excitement. [11]
I would have been obtuse indeed not to reflect that the therapists who on close investigation had revealed the reality below Mrs I.’s facade might uncover something very similar below mine.
These were threatening ideas to confront. Yet somehow they did not take hold.
It is hard to see why we were not crushed with guilt. Not long ago, in a television programme on autism, I heard a distinguished psychiatrist say that ‘of course, all the parents feel guilt’. Even a close friend, a psychologist herself, once suggested I should have an analysis ‘to work my guilt-feelings through’, and I don’t think she believed me when I told her I never had any. I should have. Even if I had not been a typical autistic parent, I had been far from welcoming my pregnancy with Elly. I knew that and so did my friend. It would have made good Freudian sense for me to fear, as I slowly awoke to the severity of Elly’s condition, that she rejected human beings because her mother had rejected her.
The dogma that all parents of the psychotic must suffer guilt- feelings is well based. Popularized psychology has encouraged a high level of free-floating anxiety even in the parents of normal children. The situation is made worse by the fact that a disproportionate number of abnormal children in general, and of autistic children in particular, are first children. Their apparent rejection of love is more terrifying because their parents have no experience of the affection of normal children; their bewildering behaviour is, to uncertain and inexperienced mothers and fathers, more bewildering still. It would be hard indeed, in today’s climate of opinion, for the parents of a seriously deviant first-born child not to feel they were in some way responsible.
But we were lucky; we had Sara, Becky, and Matt. Responsive as well as intelligent, they functioned well in school, in the neighourhood, and at home. If it is fair to lay failure at the parents’ door, as much should be done for success. It was of course possible that our success, like Mrs I.’s, could be dismissed as a facade, its hollowness shown up at last by this small, atypical baby. Occasionally, in nightmare descents into compulsive objectivity (after all, objectivity was part of our syndrome) we might see it that way. But these nightmares could not stand the light of day. A look at our children would dispel them. We were proud of them. We had done a good job with them. We knew it, and knew that others knew it. This knowledge and this pride sustained us as we read the formulations of the Bettelheims of this world — this, and a certain natural scepticism which had been with us even before Elly made us need it. No scientist’s household, after all, can fail to be familiar with the great procession of plausible hypotheses that have yet proved incomplete or false. My husband’s discipline, and common sense itself, warned constantly of the dangers in the premature formation of hypotheses; for his graduating seniors he had copied down the great cautionary words with which Newton closed his Principia: ‘The true reason of these properties… I have not yet been able to deduce from the phenomena, and I frame no hypotheses. For whatever is not deduced from the phenomena is to be called a hypothesis, and hypotheses, either of metaphysics or of physics, of occult qualities or of mechanics, have no place in experimental philosophy.’
'Hypotheses non fingo.’ Everything works together, though we do not always see it. This was doubtless one of the reasons why, among all the things we had read, we had read so little psychology.
So even as we began, slowly and reluctantly, to read a little more, we were not disposed to blame ourselves. Now, when I have talked to other parents of autistic children, I know what agony we were spared. We knew we had been the same kind of parents to Elly as we had been to the others. I knew I had been the same kind of mother. Elly had been warmed, cuddled, tickled, and loved. Experience with three children had taught me that the mind-reading powers of babies are greatly exaggerated. I knew that Elly had never guessed that (like so many mothers of normal children) I had not really needed another baby.
10
Kanner and L. Eisenberg, ‘Notes on the Follow-up Studies of Autistic Children’, in