When my son was diagnosed as autistic some ten years ago, a friends mother — a retired social worker — lent me a battered copy of Bruno Bettelheim's book The Empty Fortress (Free Press, 1967). This was the book that popularized the psychodynamic theory that autism was a result of defective parenting — a notion that caused much distress when children were removed from their 'refrigerator mothers' and' aloof and obsessive fathers', and subjected to intensive psychotherapy in residential institutions. By the time I read Bettel-heim, these theories had long been discredited and his book was of merely historical interest.
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