Comments on: Therapy Moms and Psychoanalysis (for autistic children)

By: larry

larry — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 07:20:25 +0000

“And I find it troubling that a professional in the autism field might hold such a view.”

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And you accuse ME of being peurile!

By: larry

larry — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 05:01:08 +0000

In reponse to Owl:
Where did you get the idea that Freud’s works are nothing more than remnants in modern psychiatry? Interpretation of Dreams is still required reading for all medical school psychiatry residents. Ninty percent of all modern psychotherapy is still Freud. Recently Aaron Beck admitted this in public, after winning his fancy Lasker Prize in medicine. What’s more, Freud’s book on aphasia is still required reading for neurology residents all over the world.

I think the big problem with Freud is that nobody knows a thing about his theories. The reasons for this are obvious enough. Up until about ten years ago it was illegal in the U.S. for anyone but physicians to practice psychoanalysis. Therefore only physicians were qualified to teach it. Your typical psychology professor is a dunce compared to the old-time psychoanalysts, and such a professor is not qualified to teach Freud to his students. He can present cheap jealous scorn though. That’s why all students go around smirking and giggling at the very mention of the word Freud. Just Read Freud for yourself. All his 23 volumes of callected work are available in paperback.

Anyway, Freud had something to say about autism and schizophrenia. For your information, it was Freud who first saw autism as essentially different from schizophrenia. In schizophrenia, libido is withdrawn from external reality. In autism it is not withdrawn. Instead it is focused on only one aspect of external reality; one’s own body. For this, Freud coined the term “auto-erotism.” Eugen Bleuler first agreed with Freud, but then decided he no longer could accept Freud’s libido theory. Instead he decided that auto-erotism was simply a symptom of schizophrenia and therefore changed the name to “autism.”

This truly aggravated Freud, but there was nothing he could do about it. Bleuler outranked him as the world’s leading psychiatrist at that time.

So, the big question is this: Was Freud right? Is autism distinct from psychosis? Or was Bleuler right. Is autism simply a symptom of psychosis.

By: larry

larry — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 04:40:28 +0000

I can’t figure out why you find various ideas for research “troubling.” If there is “no known cause and no known cure” for autism, why leave any stone unturned. I thought we were supposed to be concerned primarily about children around here; not their mothers.

Anyway, of all psychoanalysis, the object relationists are are probably best suited for curing autism.

As for your point that psychoanalysis can’t learn too much about the meaning of symptoms; that was Bettelheim’s complaint. However, modern psychoanalysts have been working on that problem just as classical psychoanalysis. If you start out with a deterministic view of things–that EVERYTHING has a meaning–all you have to do is decypher observed behavior. It’s like decoding dead languages. It has been done before.

By: Kristina Chew, PhD

Kristina Chew, PhD — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 19:54:27 +0000

I’m not inclined to delve too much into this topic either—but it is more “alive” that many of us might think or wish, and I’d rather be informed. At the 2005 conference in Cleveland on autism and the humanities that led to the book on autism and representation from a disabilities studies perspective—one of the keynote speakers was a psychoanalyst from Austria (I think). He spoke a good hour (that’s what it seemed like) about the equivalent of Bionian conceptualisations—–his presentation did not at all fit in with the focus of the conference.

By: Regan

Regan — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 19:21:52 +0000

Thanks Kristina,
While I doubt that I am going to delve too deeply into this, sometimes when there is a lot of explanation of internal motives, ideation, etc., I like to find out just plainly what is going on on the outside–as in what they are actually doing.
As owl pointed out, the translation is somewhat dependent on what the observer’s point of reference is.
Cheers.

By: Kristina Chew, PhD

Kristina Chew, PhD — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 17:29:31 +0000

Regan, I’ve just looked at the summaries so far—will see if I can access more. Shades of play therapy here—–

By: Owl

Owl — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 17:08:07 +0000

I’m glad somebody is willing to take a cognitive view to treatment instead of just drugs or conditioning… but I do take psychoanalysis with some grains of salt. I liked how one of the psychoanalists is quoted saying that they could make themselves more useful by staying out of discussing the cause of autism and sticking with how understanding the mind can help… but then again they base their understanding on the remnant of Freud’s ideas. I’m just remembering a Freud reading I did where he was trying to diagnose schizophrenia I think it was as having something to do with masturbation… He completely failed to say anything relevant on the subject. Modern attempts to pin down withdrawing from social interactions as a result of narcissism etc I think will be similarly doomed. Autistic perspective: I wonder why all these people talk so much… psychoanalyctic perspective: the child is attempting to withdraw from properly developing an oedipus complex by self stimulating the latent sexuality by flapping his hands.

By: This Week’s Top Posts

This Week’s Top Posts — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 16:35:49 +0000

[...] Therapy Moms and Psychoanalysis (for autistic children)Martha R. Herbert, M.D., Ph.D., of the Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, uses the phrase to describe mothers of autistic children in an article on WebMD (CBS News) about why psychoanalysis should be part of the treatment for autistic children. And New York city psychoanalyst Susan P. Sherkow, MD, says that psychoanalysis can help parents understand the “‘meaning of what these children are trying to convey.” [...]

By: Regan

Regan — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 09:23:47 +0000

Kristina,
Do you have access to these articles or just the summaries? Our university library does not subscribe. To be square, without reading the full text, it is just gobbledeegook to me, as to the goal of the “watched play” as reciprocal play and the “watched play” as observation to develop mentalization.
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Review of The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child:Volume 59
http://www.apsa.org/Portals/1/docs/JAPA/541/Ascherman-Bk–pp.337-343.pdf
The volume’s section of clinical contributions opens with Susan P. Sherkow’s development of her concept of “watched” play: She distinguishes the “watched” play of her 2001 paper, a reciprocal play, from “watched play” in which “the young child wants mother to ‘participate’
in his play by quietly observing him” (p. 56). The“watched play state” is related to development, including the capacity for “mentalization” (Fonagy and Target 1998). Sherkow notes, “the child’s growing
ability to mentalize, corresponding to ego development, is a function of an internalization of the mother’s mentalization itself. In the same way, the child’s internalization of ‘watched mother’ in play is an internalization of the patient, focused, watching mother’s cognitive processes, including the ego functions of affect regulation and compensatorystabilization. The internalization of ‘watched play’ and the internalization of mentalization coincide . . . ” (p. 61). While Sherkow’s ideas have obvious relevance to intriguing to consider how her ideas may apply to other clinical work.
FONAGY, P., & TARGET, M. (1998). Mentalization and the changing aims of child psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic Dialogues 8:87–114
SHERKOW, S. (2001). Reflections on the play state, play interruptions, and the capacity to play alone. Journal of Clinical Psychoanalysis 10:531–542.

By: AnneC

AnneC — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 08:09:30 +0000

I was evaluated by some folks with a rather psychoanalytic mindset when I was four, and some of the stuff they came up with was utterly ridiculous. They gave me an inkblot test and noted that at a certain point, I just started making up “nonsense words” — my dad pretty accurately surmised that this meant I’d “had enough”, but the evaluators still decided to read all kinds of weird stuff into whatever it was I said. And I mean really weird stuff, including insinuations of penis envy. (Did they say that about all females during a certain period of years? I’d wager probably).