Doppelganger by Naomi Klein

Author:Naomi Klein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

[The changeling] must be beaten nine times with birch rods until it bled while the parents called out: “Take yours and bring me mine!” One should hold it over boiling water and threaten to plunge it in. The oven should be heated with nine different kinds of wood and the child placed on the shovel as if it was intended to thrust it into the fire … It should be fed on leather and red-hot iron, it should be given poison to drink.

* * *

If the torments were successful, the stories went, the changeling would be driven out of the house, scurry up the chimney, and disappear back to the fairy realm. In some tales the “real” child would be returned; in others it was enough resolution to be rid of the double.

At the time of their telling, these stories were not viewed as fiction; most, including gruesome ones by the Brothers Grimm, purported to be true. Some parents, moreover, clearly understood them as how-to manuals for dealing with disabled or otherwise divergent children. D. L. Ashliman, a leading scholar of folk legends who has studied the origins and legacy of changeling mythology, writes that they were often based on actual events—sadistic ways that families, under the guidance of other community members, actually treated children with disabilities. “There is ample evidence,” he notes, “that these legendary accounts do not misrepresent or exaggerate the actual abuse of suspected changelings.”

Ashliman continues, “Stories with these fantasy endings provided hope, wish fulfillment, and escape to an era that was plagued with birth defects and debilitating infant diseases.” Reading these accounts, I couldn’t help thinking of my encounters with vaccine-scapegoating parents by the soccer field or at the Y. The stories they told me to explain their child’s sudden strangeness conform almost precisely to that of the changeling: my child was perfect, normal, until an event (the vaccine) happened, and that event turned them into something else—a distorted, doppelganger version of themselves. To quote McCarthy again: “Boom—the soul’s gone from his eyes.”

Steve Silberman, in his 2015 book Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity, writes that ever since autism diagnoses started increasing, “stories began to circulate on the Internet about babies that seemed to be developing normally until they received a routine immunization … Parents referred to their sons and daughters as having been kidnapped, as if a thief—dressed in a pediatrician’s white coat—had stolen them away in the night.”

Some ways that parents have responded to these supposed child-swaps also have eerie echoes of the changeling legends. No, today’s Autism Warrior Parents are not scalding their kids in boiling water, but too many of them continue to put their kids through various forms of abuse in the name of a cure. And these parents are certainly howling, metaphorically if not literally, the ancient changeling incantation: “Take yours and bring me mine!”

This is the chilling consequence of so many parents, coached by con artists of various stripes, deciding that their child’s disability is not actually a part of them, but rather some outside malevolent force that invaded them.

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