Dispatches from Ray's Planet by Claire Finlayson

Author:Claire Finlayson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Ray Finlayson, Claire Finlayson, Family, Autistic people, Canada, Biography, Autism, Family relationships
ISBN: 9781773860701
Publisher: Caitlin Press
Published: 2021-04-23T00:00:00+00:00

Just Raymond

In his 1943 paper “Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact,” Leo Kanner, an Austrian psychiatrist on the faculty of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, noted two common themes in the parents of eleven strange young patients:

The first he saw fit to put in italics: “They all come of highly intelligent families.”

I like that one. I think Dad would have liked it too.

The second: “In the whole group, there are very few really warm-hearted fathers and mothers.”16

Uh-oh. The stage was now set for some serious parent-bashing that would continue on and off for decades. (Not until 1969 would Kanner “exonerate” parents of responsibility for their children’s conditions.)

Another Austrian, pediatrician Hans Asperger, after whom the “high functioning” subset of the spectrum is named, had observed that the behaviours and characteristics of his young autistic patients were often evident to some degree in at least one parent.

Dad might have been inclined to argue that point, but there’s a good case to be made for it.

In 1967, the year my brother turned eleven, Austrian child psychiatrist Bruno Bettelheim—those Austrians!—published a bestselling book called The Empty Fortress: Infantile Autism and the Birth of the Self. He pointed an accusing finger at parents: “The precipitating factor in infantile autism is the parent’s wish that his child should not exist … To this the child responds with massive withdrawal.”17

Well, that just wasn’t the case in my family. My parents were proud and happy to welcome their first-born son in July 1956, and they were pleased as punch with me, too, even though I arrived hard on his heels in November 1957. There’s a studio picture of Ray and me when we were toddlers, and I must say, we were pretty cute. Mum tells me that she purchased new shoes for both of us to wear for the portrait and promptly took them back afterwards. She was already pregnant again when that photo was taken. I can only suppose that her enthusiasm—along with her disposable income—dwindled further as Anita, Lisa, Ian and Trish arrived in quick succession because there are no studio pictures of them. I’ll go so far as to say that Mum and Dad almost certainly found themselves with more children than they wished … but none of them are autistic.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.