BBC - h2g2 - Blaming mothers for autism

The sorry state of developmental psychology

A prominent UK psychologist still blames mothers for autism

A review of:
Peter HOBSON, 2002, The Cradle of Thought. London : Macmillan.
pp. xviii + 296. UKP 20-00.

"�.chimpanzees [will] gesture no more towards a human who can see them than towards one whose sight [is] occluded (for example, by a bucket on his head)." (Hobson, p. 267)

The lofty purpose of this book is to suggest how humans develop thought, self-awareness and language � whereas other primates do not; and its idea is that thought arises in mother-baby interaction as the infant realizes, after some eighteen months of life, that the world is populated with human agents who have feelings, perspectives and thus their own thoughts and beliefs. On the practical side, the book's implication is that such understanding of child development will prove therapeutic for infants who are currently deprived of proper handling and thus end up autistic. Unfortunately, the book is a flop, both in failing to realize its two main objectives and in lacking any kind of entertainment value.

The author, Peter Hobson, is actually an expert on autism � the sad disorder first identified fifty-five years ago in which child victims fail to make a range of social contacts (e. g. eye contact), regard people primarily as physical objects, suffer a wide range of upsetting symptomatology (insisting on endless presumably comforting rituals � e.g. switching lights on and off) and have disastrous scores on IQ-type tests. With all the time available to the well-funded developmental psychologists who have for thirty years made infancy their playground, Hobson lovingly recounts his many experiments detailing the social handicaps of autistic children. For example, autists can see no similarities between different faces showing the same emotion (e.g. happiness, sadness or surprise) whereas they perform almost normally in identifying merely physical similarities (in nose size, eye colour etc.). Some of Hobson's studies show ingenuity: in blacked-out rooms, human adults with some twenty lights attached to their extremities engage in such actions as 'sobbing' and 'climbing' � and, again, autistic children especially fail to recognize the emotional enactments.

The problem with such affecting work is simple. Though the researches provide occupation for developmental psychologists and win them students who believe they are on the path to understanding babies (psychology is now a 75% female subject), they do not in fact address the issue of cause and effect in a scientific manner. Such explorations would be a useful *prelude* to a science that went on to show that mothers must do such things as make eye contact with babies and look where the baby points. Presumably, normal human mothers would not be thus attentive to babies if, in evolution, they had found one can get just as good a result by providing the soulless conditions of an orphanage in Communist Romania of the 1980's. Yet the fact is that we already know that autism is largely genetic � though perhaps on the increase because of overuse of antibiotics (allowing infant candida [thrush] to flourish). It is thus that mothers of autists have lately been spared the burdens of guilt which psychiatrists typically heaped upon them around 1960. No doubt some level of intersubjective gurgling is important for an infant to master intersubjectivity � just as it will not learn English if it never hears English. But it is probably as Noam Chomsky observed for language: a low and corrupted level of exposure to subjectiburbling stimulation will be quite sufficient for most infants to extract what is necessary.

Just why Hobson should want to worry his readers back into primitive environmentalist anxieties is a mystery. He once studied with the autism expert (and top British psychiatrist), Sir Michael Rutter; and he acknowledges the likelihood of genetic influences on autism, IQ and much else. His contrasts between the social abilities of autistic and normal children wisely control for IQ so as to highlight the special autistic deficits. Hobson is no raving social anthropologist who would entirely dismiss biological realities. Yet somehow, apparently quite recently, for reasons obscure, Hobson decided that genetics were not enough and that his work gave him something else to say. One might think he had learned something from studying the mothers of autists but, astonishingly, Hobson's book includes no such study. Instead, mothers suffering 'personality disorders' and depression are wheeled in to exemplify just how naughty mothers can be (even while videoed) � hectoring their babies or ignoring what their infants try to say. This is very wise of Hobson, for considered opinion long ago became that the mothers of actual autists had *no* need for shame. (Far from their being 'refrigerator mothers', it was eventually appreciated that it was their bookishness and high IQ's that had led to them realizing something was wrong with their babies long before the experts spotted anything.) Hobson finishes his book with some nice demonstrations that young non-human primates function a bit like autistic children � lacking key ingredients of humanity such as gesturing shared with particular partners. But Hobson has no novel overall case about causation. He is baffled, but just doesn't care to think about biological factors.

Sometimes it is as if Hobson prefers research grants to reading. He has certainly not read America's top autism expert, Bernie Rimland (who has stood up to the social environmentalists for a generation on behalf of autists' parents); he has not read the American educator John T. Bruer, who in 1999 admitted that the early social environments supplied for children by their parents are *unimportant*in causing lasting differences in personality or intellect -- except when the parents are cruel (The Myth of the First Three Years, New York:Free Press); and Hobson's repetitious meanderings about why humans possess thought and other primates don't would have been usefully sharpened by reading Elaine Morgan � the student of Sir Alister Hardy's who believed that man once spent a long time escaping predation by standing in seas, swamps and rivers, thus elevating the human female's breasts and requiring adults to develop ways of referring to things unseen below water level. Certainly, Hobson should carefully consider his former teacher's latest pronouncement (M. Rutter, Times Higher, 29 March, 2002): "The independent importance of genetic effects has the strongest factual basis. Evidence concerning both schizophrenia and autism, for example, indicates that the genetic risks for these disorders are not dependent on the children encountering environmental hazards." Genes beat environment � and developmental psychologists.