You might just think I am bonkers for what I am about to say and dismiss it. However, many of us in the autistic community know what it means to live in a world that sees us as broken, deficient and faulty, and that autistic people need neurotypical people to help us adapt, in order to be happy (actually it’s to be more compliant). Although the history of the understanding of autism goes back to 1911 when the word was first used, much of the world’s understanding of autism is still based upon the writings of 2 men in particular, Kanner and Asperger in the 1940s. Even the ableist thoughts of Bruce Bettelheim, Michael Rutter and much of the more recent work of Simon Baren Cohen is still rooted in the work of Kanner and Asperger.
Kanner and Asperger’s studies were carried out during an era when eugenics was a horrifying reality, sweeping across Europe. This became a foundation on which many other beliefs about autism were based. Autistic children (white boys) were initially thought to be schizophrenic and devoid of emotion, due to the lack of love and affection in their parental homes (later in the 1970s this would lead to the Bettelheim’s term ‘refrigerator mothers’). The later belief that autistic people are devoid of emotion has never really gone away.
The 1960s would give birth to what would eventually become ABA (Applied Behavioural Analysis). It’s founding father being Ole Ivar Lovaas, who also conducted studies on what we now know as conversion therapy (attempting to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity).
ABA is an intensive therapy that seeks to change the behaviour of an autistic child, by using rewards and punishment. It is about forcing compliance and stifles the autistic child’s freedom of expression! ABA therapists will tell you it is never about force, but any kind of ‘intervention’ is about change rather than acceptance and embracing differences. Intervention means to ‘interfere, interpose, taking action about something in order to have an effect on its outcome’. ABA assumes incompetence and that the autistic child does not know how to be or behave and needs an intervention in order to learn how to conform. And what do you think happens to an autistic child subjected to this conversion therapy? Well, I can tell you that trauma is a given outcome.
ABA has other names too and its roots have found their way into most of our schools and many other institutions. Like a disease, the teachings behind ABA, that autistic people need to be controlled and shown how to be human, have spread like wild fire. Ole Ivar Lovaas actually believed that autistic children were less than human, saying in an interview for Psychology Today in 1974 that “Autistic children are severely disturbed. People seem to be no more than objects to them” and when working with autistic children “You have a person in the physical sense - they have hair, a nose and a mouth - but not people in the psychological sense”.
When you want to get rid of a weed, you have to get to the roots - or they grow back. But the roots of ABA have crept into so many areas of life, even in psychiatric units, prisons and schools, etc. ABA and other forms of it such as PBS and RDI, are nothing more than forms of torture for autistic children. Forcing an autistic child to conform, fit, adapt, be moulded and what is essentially being made to be neurotypical, is not just cruel, it’s barbaric.
It can never be positive to put an autistic person in a position where they’re not able to be their authentic self, it leads to masking and trauma. It delays the process of self discovery and identity formation, and instead the person develops a sense of shame and poor self worth.
Our way of being is not wrong. Our way of communicating is not abnormal. Our way of socialising is not impaired. Our way of learning is not deficient. Our way of regulating is not broken.
So why is the foundation of ABA unspeakable? Because it is about non existence. The history of autism and autistic people is about the struggle to exist, against an army that believes we are abnormal and devoid of emotion and empathy. ABA is rooted in eugenics. An autistic child who is not allowed to ‘be’, is not allowed to express their existence freely- is an autistic person not existing. To seek to delete the true nature of a person is to seek to delete them entirely.
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