Refrigerator mother
Encyclopedia
The term refrigerator mother was coined around 1950 as a label for mothers of children diagnosed with autism
or schizophrenia
. These mothers were often blamed for their children's atypical behavior, which included rigid ritual
s, speech difficulty, and self-isolation.
The "refrigerator mother" label was based on the assumption that autistic behaviors stem from the emotional frigidity of the children's mothers. As a result, mothers of some children on the autistic spectrum suffered from blame, guilt, and self-doubt from the 1950s throughout the 1970s and beyond: when the prevailing medical belief that autism resulted from inadequate parenting was widely assumed to be correct. Some present-day proponents of the psychogenic theory of autism continue to maintain that the condition is a result of poor parenting. However, others merely point out that some conditions are perhaps psychological in origin rather than physiological, and that this is not necessarily a reflection on parenting skills.
In 2003, Kartemquin Films
released Refrigerator Mothers
, a documentary that takes a look at American mothers of the 1950s and 1960s and the blame leveled by the medical establishment for the mothers causing their children's autism. The documentary gives voice to women who no longer accept the blame that was once common for mothers of autistic chidren. Making its television premiere on PBS's P.O.V.
series, Refrigerator Mothers was featured in a January 2010 issue of Psychology Today that focused on the racial and class stereotyping of autism.
called attention to what appeared to him as a lack of warmth among the fathers and mothers of autistic children. In a 1949 paper, Kanner suggested autism may be related to a "genuine lack of maternal warmth", noted that fathers rarely stepped down to indulge in children's play, and observed that children were exposed from "the beginning to parental coldness, obsessiveness, and a mechanical type of attention to material needs only.... They were left neatly in refrigerators which did not defrost. Their withdrawal seems to be an act of turning away from such a situation to seek comfort in solitude." In a 1960 interview, Kanner bluntly described parents of autistic children as "just happening to defrost enough to produce a child."
In the absence of any biomedical explanation for what causes autism after the telltale symptoms were first described by scientists, Bruno Bettelheim
, a University of Chicago
professor and child development specialist, and other leading psychoanalysts championed the notion that autism was the product of mothers who were cold, distant and rejecting, thus deprived of the chance to "bond properly". The theory was embraced by the medical establishment and went largely unchallenged into the mid-1960s, but its effects have lingered into the 21st century. Many articles and books published in that era blamed autism on a maternal lack of affection
, but by 1964, Bernard Rimland
, a psychologist
who had a son with autism, published a book that signaled the emergence of a counter-explanation to the established misconceptions about the causes of autism. His book, Infantile Autism: The Syndrome and its Implications for a Neural Theory of Behavior, attacked the refrigerator mother hypothesis directly.
Soon afterwards, Bettelheim wrote The Empty Fortress: Infantile Autism and the Birth of the Self, in which he compared autism to being a prisoner in a concentration camp:
Some authority was granted to this as well, because Bettelheim had himself been interned at the Dachau concentration camp during World War II. The book was immensely popular and he became a leading public figure on autism until his death, when it was revealed that he plagiarized others' work and falsified his credentials. Also, three ex-patients questioned his work, characterizing him as a cruel tyrant.
Although Kanner was instrumental in framing the refrigerator mother theory, it was Bettelheim who facilitated its widespread acceptance by the public and the medical establishment cognoscenti in the 1950s and 1960s.
In 1969, Kanner addressed the refrigerator mother issue at the first annual meeting of what is now the Autism Society of America
, stating:
, who wrote his major works from the 1950s through the 70s, the terms autistic thought and what he called paleologic thought are apparently the same phenomenon. Paleologic thought is a characteristic in both present-day schizophrenics and primitive men
, a type of thinking that has its foundations in non-Aristotelian logic
. An autistic child speaks of himself as "you" and not infrequently of the mother as "I." The "you" remains a "you" and is not transformed into "I".
For Margaret Mahler
and her colleagues, autism is a defense of children who cannot experience the mother as the living primary-object. According to them, autism is an attempt at dedifferentiation and deanimation. The symbiotic autistic syndrome used to be called the "Mahler syndrome" because Mahler first described it: The child is unable to differentiate from the mother.
Arieti warned that an autistic tendency is a sign of a kind of disorder in the process of socialization
, and that when autistic expressions appear it should be assumed that there is a sort of difficulty between the child and his parents, especially the schizogenic mother. Children who use autistic expressions, Arieti observes, are children who cannot bond socially.
In Interpretation of Schizophrenia Arieti maintained that for a normal process of socialization, it is necessary for the parent-child relations to be normal. Loving or non-anxiety parental attitudes favor socialization. Arieti not only maintained that the parent-child relations are the first social act and the major drive of socialization, but also a stimulus to either accept or reject society. The child's self
in this view is a reflection of the sentiments, thoughts, and attitudes of the parents toward the child. Autistic children show an extreme socializing disorder and do not want any sort of relationship with people. They "eliminate" people from their consciousness. For Arieti the fear of the parents is extended to other adults: a tendency to cut off communication with human beings.
’s Toxic Psychiatry, the psychogenic theory of autism was abandoned for political pressure from parents' organizations, not for scientific reasons. For example, some case reports have shown that profound institutional privation can result in quasi-autistic symptoms. Clinician Frances Tustin devoted her life to the theory. She wrote:
Alice Miller
, one of the best-known authors of the consequences of child abuse
, has maintained that autism is psychogenic, and that fear of the truth about child abuse is the leitmotif of nearly all forms of autistic therapy known to her. When Miller visited several autism therapy centers in the United States, it became apparent to her that the stories of children "inspired fear in both doctors and mothers alike":
Like Arieti and Tustin, Miller believes that only empathetic parental attitudes lead to the complete blossoming of the child’s personality.
The refrigerator mother theory, widely discarded in the United States, still has some support in Europe and is largely believed in South Korea to be the cause of autism.
are complex and are not well understood. Although recent studies have indicated that maternal warmth, praise, and quality of relationship are associated with reductions of behavior problems in adolescents and adults with autism, and that maternal criticisms are associated with maladaptive behaviors and symptoms, these ideas are distinct from the refrigerator mother hypothesis.
Autism
Autism is a disorder of neural development characterized by impaired social interaction and communication, and by restricted and repetitive behavior. These signs all begin before a child is three years old. Autism affects information processing in the brain by altering how nerve cells and their...
or schizophrenia
Schizophrenia
Schizophrenia is a mental disorder characterized by a disintegration of thought processes and of emotional responsiveness. It most commonly manifests itself as auditory hallucinations, paranoid or bizarre delusions, or disorganized speech and thinking, and it is accompanied by significant social...
. These mothers were often blamed for their children's atypical behavior, which included rigid ritual
Ritual
A ritual is a set of actions, performed mainly for their symbolic value. It may be prescribed by a religion or by the traditions of a community. The term usually excludes actions which are arbitrarily chosen by the performers....
s, speech difficulty, and self-isolation.
The "refrigerator mother" label was based on the assumption that autistic behaviors stem from the emotional frigidity of the children's mothers. As a result, mothers of some children on the autistic spectrum suffered from blame, guilt, and self-doubt from the 1950s throughout the 1970s and beyond: when the prevailing medical belief that autism resulted from inadequate parenting was widely assumed to be correct. Some present-day proponents of the psychogenic theory of autism continue to maintain that the condition is a result of poor parenting. However, others merely point out that some conditions are perhaps psychological in origin rather than physiological, and that this is not necessarily a reflection on parenting skills.
In 2003, Kartemquin Films
Kartemquin Films
Kartemquin Films is a not-for-profit organization that was founded in 1966 by Gordon Quinn, Jerry Temaner and Stan Karter, three University of Chicago graduates who wanted to make documentary films guided by their principle of "Cinematic Social Inquiry." They were soon joined by Jerry Blumenthal...
released Refrigerator Mothers
Refrigerator Mothers
Refrigerator Mothers is a documentary released in 2003 by Kartemquin Films for PBS's P.O.V. series. The film paints an intimate portrait of an entire generation of American mothers whose children were diagnosed with autism...
, a documentary that takes a look at American mothers of the 1950s and 1960s and the blame leveled by the medical establishment for the mothers causing their children's autism. The documentary gives voice to women who no longer accept the blame that was once common for mothers of autistic chidren. Making its television premiere on PBS's P.O.V.
P.O.V.
POV is a Public Broadcasting Service Public television series which features independent nonfiction films. POV is a cinema term for "point of view"....
series, Refrigerator Mothers was featured in a January 2010 issue of Psychology Today that focused on the racial and class stereotyping of autism.
Origins of theory
In his 1943 paper that first identified autism, Leo KannerLeo Kanner
Leo Kanner was a Jewish American psychiatrist and physician known for his work related to autism. Kanner's work formed the foundation of child and adolescent psychiatry in the U.S. and worldwide....
called attention to what appeared to him as a lack of warmth among the fathers and mothers of autistic children. In a 1949 paper, Kanner suggested autism may be related to a "genuine lack of maternal warmth", noted that fathers rarely stepped down to indulge in children's play, and observed that children were exposed from "the beginning to parental coldness, obsessiveness, and a mechanical type of attention to material needs only.... They were left neatly in refrigerators which did not defrost. Their withdrawal seems to be an act of turning away from such a situation to seek comfort in solitude." In a 1960 interview, Kanner bluntly described parents of autistic children as "just happening to defrost enough to produce a child."
In the absence of any biomedical explanation for what causes autism after the telltale symptoms were first described by scientists, Bruno Bettelheim
Bruno Bettelheim
Bruno Bettelheim was an Austrian-born American child psychologist and writer. He gained an international reputation for his work on Freud, psychoanalysis, and emotionally disturbed children.-Background:...
, a University of Chicago
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...
professor and child development specialist, and other leading psychoanalysts championed the notion that autism was the product of mothers who were cold, distant and rejecting, thus deprived of the chance to "bond properly". The theory was embraced by the medical establishment and went largely unchallenged into the mid-1960s, but its effects have lingered into the 21st century. Many articles and books published in that era blamed autism on a maternal lack of affection
Affection
Affection or fondness is a "disposition or rare state of mind or body" that is often associated with a feeling or type of love. It has given rise to a number of branches of philosophy and psychology concerning: emotion ; disease; influence; state of being ; and state of mind...
, but by 1964, Bernard Rimland
Bernard Rimland
Bernard Rimland, PhD was an American research psychologist, writer, lecturer, and advocate for autistic children, ADHD, learning disabilities, and mental retardation.Based in San Diego, California since 1940, Dr...
, a psychologist
Psychologist
Psychologist is a professional or academic title used by individuals who are either:* Clinical professionals who work with patients in a variety of therapeutic contexts .* Scientists conducting psychological research or teaching psychology in a college...
who had a son with autism, published a book that signaled the emergence of a counter-explanation to the established misconceptions about the causes of autism. His book, Infantile Autism: The Syndrome and its Implications for a Neural Theory of Behavior, attacked the refrigerator mother hypothesis directly.
Soon afterwards, Bettelheim wrote The Empty Fortress: Infantile Autism and the Birth of the Self, in which he compared autism to being a prisoner in a concentration camp:
"The difference between the plight of prisoners in a concentration camp and the conditions which lead to autism and schizophreniaSchizophreniaSchizophrenia is a mental disorder characterized by a disintegration of thought processes and of emotional responsiveness. It most commonly manifests itself as auditory hallucinations, paranoid or bizarre delusions, or disorganized speech and thinking, and it is accompanied by significant social...
in children is, of course, that the child has never had a previous chance to develop much of a personalityPersonality psychologyPersonality psychology is a branch of psychology that studies personality and individual differences. Its areas of focus include:* Constructing a coherent picture of the individual and his or her major psychological processes...
."
Some authority was granted to this as well, because Bettelheim had himself been interned at the Dachau concentration camp during World War II. The book was immensely popular and he became a leading public figure on autism until his death, when it was revealed that he plagiarized others' work and falsified his credentials. Also, three ex-patients questioned his work, characterizing him as a cruel tyrant.
Although Kanner was instrumental in framing the refrigerator mother theory, it was Bettelheim who facilitated its widespread acceptance by the public and the medical establishment cognoscenti in the 1950s and 1960s.
In 1969, Kanner addressed the refrigerator mother issue at the first annual meeting of what is now the Autism Society of America
Autism Society of America
The Autism Society of America was founded in 1965 by Bernard Rimland, PhD, together with Ruth C. Sullivan and a small group of other parents of autistic children. Its original name was the National Society for Autistic Children; the name was changed to emphasize that children with autism grow up...
, stating:
From the very first publication until the last, I spoke of this condition in no uncertain terms as "innate." But because I described some of the characteristics of the parents as persons, I was misquoted often as having said that "it is all the parents' fault."
Other notable psychiatrists
For Silvano ArietiSilvano Arieti
Silvano Arieti was a psychiatrist regarded in his time as one of the world’s foremost authorities on schizophrenia. He received his M.D. from the University of Pisa but left Italy soon after because of Benito Mussolini's increasingly racial policies...
, who wrote his major works from the 1950s through the 70s, the terms autistic thought and what he called paleologic thought are apparently the same phenomenon. Paleologic thought is a characteristic in both present-day schizophrenics and primitive men
Human evolution
Human evolution refers to the evolutionary history of the genus Homo, including the emergence of Homo sapiens as a distinct species and as a unique category of hominids and mammals...
, a type of thinking that has its foundations in non-Aristotelian logic
Organon
The Organon is the name given by Aristotle's followers, the Peripatetics, to the standard collection of his six works on logic:* Categories* On Interpretation* Prior Analytics* Posterior Analytics...
. An autistic child speaks of himself as "you" and not infrequently of the mother as "I." The "you" remains a "you" and is not transformed into "I".
For Margaret Mahler
Margaret Mahler
Margaret Schönberger Mahler was a Hungarian physician, who later became interested in psychiatry. She was a central figure on the world stage of psychoanalysis...
and her colleagues, autism is a defense of children who cannot experience the mother as the living primary-object. According to them, autism is an attempt at dedifferentiation and deanimation. The symbiotic autistic syndrome used to be called the "Mahler syndrome" because Mahler first described it: The child is unable to differentiate from the mother.
Arieti warned that an autistic tendency is a sign of a kind of disorder in the process of socialization
Socialization
Socialization is a term used by sociologists, social psychologists, anthropologists, political scientists and educationalists to refer to the process of inheriting and disseminating norms, customs and ideologies...
, and that when autistic expressions appear it should be assumed that there is a sort of difficulty between the child and his parents, especially the schizogenic mother. Children who use autistic expressions, Arieti observes, are children who cannot bond socially.
In Interpretation of Schizophrenia Arieti maintained that for a normal process of socialization, it is necessary for the parent-child relations to be normal. Loving or non-anxiety parental attitudes favor socialization. Arieti not only maintained that the parent-child relations are the first social act and the major drive of socialization, but also a stimulus to either accept or reject society. The child's self
Self (psychology)
The psychology of self is the study of either the cognitive and affective representation of one's identity or the subject of experience. The earliest formulation of the self in modern psychology derived from the distinction between the self as I, the subjective knower, and the self as Me, the...
in this view is a reflection of the sentiments, thoughts, and attitudes of the parents toward the child. Autistic children show an extreme socializing disorder and do not want any sort of relationship with people. They "eliminate" people from their consciousness. For Arieti the fear of the parents is extended to other adults: a tendency to cut off communication with human beings.
Persistence of the theory
According to Peter BregginPeter Breggin
Peter Roger Breggin is an American psychiatrist and critic of biological psychiatry and psychiatric medication. In his books, he advocates replacing psychiatry's use of drugs and electroconvulsive therapy with humanistic approaches, such as psychotherapy, education, and broader human...
’s Toxic Psychiatry, the psychogenic theory of autism was abandoned for political pressure from parents' organizations, not for scientific reasons. For example, some case reports have shown that profound institutional privation can result in quasi-autistic symptoms. Clinician Frances Tustin devoted her life to the theory. She wrote:
One must note that autism is one of a number of children's neurological disorders of psychogenic nature, i.e., caused by abusive and traumatic treatment of infants.… There is persistent denial by American society of the causes of damage to millions of children who are thus traumatized and brain damaged as a consequence of cruel treatment by parents who are otherwise too busy to love and care for their babies.
Alice Miller
Alice Miller (psychologist)
Alice Miller née Rostovski was a psychologist and world renowned author, who is noted for her books on child abuse by their own parents, translated in several languages...
, one of the best-known authors of the consequences of child abuse
Child abuse
Child abuse is the physical, sexual, emotional mistreatment, or neglect of a child. In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Children And Families define child maltreatment as any act or series of acts of commission or omission by a parent or...
, has maintained that autism is psychogenic, and that fear of the truth about child abuse is the leitmotif of nearly all forms of autistic therapy known to her. When Miller visited several autism therapy centers in the United States, it became apparent to her that the stories of children "inspired fear in both doctors and mothers alike":
I spent a day observing what happened to the group. I also studied close-ups of children on video. What became clearer and clearer as the day went on was that all these children had a serious history of suffering behind them. This, however, was never referred to.… In my conversations with the therapists and mothers, I inquired about the life stories of individual children. The facts confirmed my hunch. No one, however, was willing to take these facts seriously.
Like Arieti and Tustin, Miller believes that only empathetic parental attitudes lead to the complete blossoming of the child’s personality.
The refrigerator mother theory, widely discarded in the United States, still has some support in Europe and is largely believed in South Korea to be the cause of autism.
Modern alternatives
The modern consensus is that autism has a strong genetic basis, although the genetics of autismHeritability of autism
The heritability of autism is the proportion of autism that can be explained by genetic variation; if the heritability of a condition is high, then the condition is considered to be primarily genetic...
are complex and are not well understood. Although recent studies have indicated that maternal warmth, praise, and quality of relationship are associated with reductions of behavior problems in adolescents and adults with autism, and that maternal criticisms are associated with maladaptive behaviors and symptoms, these ideas are distinct from the refrigerator mother hypothesis.