Empty Fortress

Trauma is the cause of autism. Biological/emotional/behavioral trauma. Stress that deforms personality can come from physical pain or cognitive pain or emotional pain. Anyone undertanding the incredible power of placebos in clinical medicine sees the other side of the power of fear in biology. A parent does not need to feel shame that their child has autism but needs to see the reality of the sensitive human mind. A parent must seek the truth even if that means understanding that the parent innocently betrayed the safety that a child needed to feel. Those of you "seeing red" right now, and looking for a specific "smoking guy" ask yourself, "was my sensitive baby kept warm and held tight and safe and sound and comforted and in a quiet and well protected place and kept from noise and loneliness and solitude sufficiently to enable them to escape the stress of birth and early lives?" Were you there with the baby (as all mammalian mothers are, other than 21st century mothers), 22 or more hours a day until the baby was 12 months old? Sounds bizarre? Not if you study the lives of all our mammals/animal genetic cousins. We are frightening our infants to emotional death, more and more and more. You are not to blame, you didn't realize it, you just went to work, got the best "bottle", used unrelated care givers, had your birth in a brightly lit, crystal clean hospital, with you own heart pounding and your own processes mutilated by societies "disease" model of birth. Don't let your unnecessary shame blind you, the child is withdrawn from the world because the world is too much, and the child is too sensitive and was not protected enough. Autism is seen with the males because they are more sensorily sensitive, but more and more little girls are succumbing. It's not your fault, but blaming vaccines and fluoride and whatever... is your fault. This book, no matter what the ad homium arguments are made against the author, is about the truth. I see my happy kids and how each boy was differnent in sensitivity and how two of them needed me physically so close by in order for them to be relaxed, I slept with both until they were a year and a half, and I know the truth when I read it. I heartily recommend buying this 35 year old book, what you hear in 2008 about autism, censored and warped, will be seen pathetically clear in 20 years as the self-protective scramblings of a confused group that was mislead about birth and child rearing and is too fearful to see the truth. No wonder there is always a different explanation for autism. It's hiding in plain site. God bless you and all our children, you parents of autistic kids need love and protection, as much as anyone could possibly need it, as much as you child needed it and needs it now.

From the beginning of this magnificent book until the last page, the reader will gain knowledge that is significant and of great importance. I highly recommend it to all mental health professionals seeking a deeper understanding of the psyche and the development of the personality. Often lambasted for his views that the child suffers from a lack of love from his or her parents, a truth that offends many support groups, Bettelheim captures a rarity - the truth - and expands upon it in ways that wil enlighten and expand the reader's vision.

Bettelheim did not blame mothers for all autism. He simply blamed trauma. In fact, he introduced his book by describing how *Nazis*--not mothers--induced autism in adults. It shouldn't take rocket science to assume that infants are more susceptible to trauma than adults, and it isn't unreasonable to think that trauma causes autism. In fact, recent discoveries have shown that autism can be linked to infantile surgery, caesarian birth, premature birth, mercury poisoning and infantile blindness! I think it doesn't take too much imagination to include the occasional abusive mother to the list. In fact, it takes political correctness to the point of absurdity to think that mothers NEVER cause psychological trauma to their children. There is, in fact, an infinite number of causes for infantile autism, and at one point Bettelheim suggested that mothers themselves might cause some cases. Was Bettelheim evil to suggest such a thing? Do mothers never drown their children? Do mothers never abandon their babies? Furthermore; Bettelheim did not coin the term "Refrigerator Mom." That was Leo Kanner. It was a simple observation: Many autistics observed by Kanner and Asperger had cold mothers. Bettelheim speculated this might be due to unresponsive, unloving children--children predisposed to autism. Bettelheim has been discredited sure enough, but only by ideologues. There is no scientific proof whatsoever that autism originates from brain damage or any inherent neurological defect. In fact, recent studies have shown that the enlarged brains typical of autism are due to inflammation--a common result of anxiety-generated toxins. What's more, all the differences noticed in the amygdalas of autistic children don't appear until AFTER the onset of autism, typically at age two. Finally, any article or web page which solemnly informs us that autism is "neurobiological" will usually provide the following caution: "Nobody knows the cause of autism, and there is no known cure." Bettelheim was wiser than any modern neurologist studying autism, because Bettelheim understood and could properly interpret the rich and complex inner life of the autistic children who were left in his care by mothers who considered them to be little more than feral animals. Finally, Bettelheim did not propose any new theories about the genesis of autism. He mostly quoted Melanie Klein and Piaget. There is one exception to this: It was none other than Bettelheim who proposed that precociousness at birth causes some children to be predisposed to autism in that such children are born without a safe mode so their birth is exceptionally *traumatic* psychologically. In other words, according to Bettelheim, geniuses are predisposed to autism.

The Empty Fortress remains, to date, one of the best widely known and must-read references about autism. (...) I am positive we will discover more things over time about autism, but whatever you're going to discover is already in this book. 3 clinic cases, with a chapter leading and trailing the whole book, with some of the most refined insights about autism. Trashing a book like this would mean trashing the experience of an intelligent person that spanned trhough 50 years: some can afford it. I can't. And whoever is going to deal with autism in a scientific way (without expressions like "guts") cannot do without this book. Would be like a psychoanalyst who says "hey Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle is trash"; what would it define in your point of view, Freud or the "reviewer"?