I think you misunderstood. Children with severe reactive attachment disorder (particularly instutionalized kids) often meet criteria for autism, but unlike truly autistic kids the features disappear when they enter a more suitable environment. I think what Greenspan is saying is that due to a biological abnormality, autistic kids have the same attachment problems in a good home as NT kids have when severely deprived/abused.

“The only viable explanation for the aetiology of autism in this case of Rett Syndrome is that the autism is preceded by the misery of the illness. In other words, the autism is caused by TRAUMA.”

You sure are prejudiced. Being disabled is not that traumatic for a baby, unless they’re actually in pain (there is no evidence that Rett Syndrome is painful).
I have to say, if you wanted to emulate Freud, you certainly have succeeded. You twist reality to fit your theories in a classically Freudian manner, and generate untestable theories as a result.

Does Dr. Greenspan have other/newer controlled outcome data than the case review paper of the 90’s? Just curious.

We tried some floortime, but Eleanor lacked some prerequisites even for that. I tend to think of the stages as a graduated curriculum of social interaction and executive functioning.

He read rather sternly, but I think to blame parents would be off the mark; to say that we don’t necessarily know the most appropriate means for interacting with a child with atypical reciprocation skills doesn’t seem out of bounds.

http://books.google.com/books?id=Mxn-Xro7m1MC&printsec=frontcover&sig=m9KBj6InHPRDPX0G8eat4K0L0NA

I will have to do a series on floor time after I finish the online conference and read some books. I am focusing more now on sensory processing disorder and ways to help my sensory seeking kid who is smacking the walls all over the house and knocking things down and very tactile as well.

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Oh Freud was flawed sure enough. But not in this regard. Books like you just read are a dime a dozen, written by people who never read Freud or who deliberately lie. The book that started the eighties witch hunt was written by Jeffrey Masson, a psychoanalyst who had a grudge against Anna Freud. (read the customer reviews for this stinker:
http://www.amazon.com/Assault-Truth-Freuds-Suppression-Seduction/dp/0345452798/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1210608884&sr=1-1).
I think the case of the memory of an actual child abuse you mention was reported by Masson in this book as something Freud himself wrote in a letter to William Fleiss. It involved a girl who remembered a childhood incident where her brother entered her bedroom at night and kissed her feet. Regardless of whether that’s the case you have in mind, it’s a good example of how people lie about or are ignorant of Freud’s theories.

Freud believed that ALL neurosis is due to trauma. He started out assuming that children are innocent of sexuality and are thus incapable of sexual fantasies. When he discovered memories of sexual abuse in ALL his patients, he assumed that their neuroses was due to traumatic sexual abuse–rape. The recovered memory of the tender foot kissing incident, however, was hardly traumatic. There is no way Freud would have ever considered this pertinent to his seduction theory. If anything, it would have contributed to his decision to scrap the theory and finally accept the fact that infants do, in fact, have strong sexual fantasies, and that PROHIBITION of sexuality–masturbation, public nudity, goosing, etc– from people they depend on for love is the source of the trauma which caused the neurosis.

Anyway, Freud never, EVER wrote anywhere in his twenty-three volumes of collected work that children never suffer from traumatic sexual abuse, or that such a trauma would not cause neurosis. You can check this yourself. If your book is to be credible, there has to be footnotes citing Freud’s work for the outrageous claims being made against him. Freud’s collected works can be found in any university library or for sale in paperback.
http://www.amazon.com/Standard-Complete-Psychological-Works-Sigmund/dp/0393011283/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1210609508&sr=1-8
You can follow the footnote references to Freud, and you will discover that the supposed facts reported in your book are either lies or distortions, or deliberately taken out of context with the intent to deceive. I have gone through this routine myself with many anti-Freud books, and so far I am batting a thousand. They are all liars. Susan Forward’s book, “Betrayal of Innocence” was a good example. She was oh-so-condescending in reporting that Freud believed woman are inherently masochistic. What she didn’t bother to mention was that Freud believed all living substance is inherently masochistic! Then there was some fool who reported that Freud believed primitive tribesmen were something less than human. When you look up the actual reference in Freud’s “Totem and Taboo,” however, you will find that Freud was actually saying just exactly the opposite. In order to emphasize his point, however, he had simply exaggerated the primitive native’s miserable existence.

So, if you want to argue, that’s fine. You obviously know me well enough. I love to argue. I think it’s fun. However, I refuse to indulge you any further in this until you take the trouble to check your sources like I suggested.

A very popular book called The Boy Who Loved Windows by Patricia Stacey definitely portrays Floortime as a cure. The reader is essential told that Walker, the author’s child, has been ridded of autism through his mother’s backbreaking work. Actually, it’s more correct to say that she supposedly prevents autism from ever showing up. It’s an interesting book and well-written, but pretty outdated. For instance, it mentions that secretin has shown promise.

Anyway, I have always found it odd that there haven’t been more updates on the child in the book. I did see that Patricia Stacey wrote an article recently in O Magazine where she described herself as being mother to a child with special needs. So maybe talk of a cure was premature.

Hundreds of perfectly innocent people were jailed for incest all because of ideologues like you–again, whoever you are.