#31for21 #themmlinky Folxs; folk psychology and folk physics / No-one is to blame

Perrault. Is. So. Hard.

That is probably what a whole lot of folklorists are feeling at the moment, especially the ones who translated Cendrillon for an Anglophone mass audience and adapted it accordingly.

The Germans and Central Europeans were on solid ground. Thinking of Wanda Gag's version of Cinderella - the girl who rose from the ashes and worked so hard.

Cinderella was probably one of the first literary folk/fairy tales I connected with.

Like a lot of people, there would be story tapes that had the story on both sides from the Walt Disney Company.

When I became ill in September 1989 a grandmother supplied me with a Disney record player. This took up the first week of the holidays - four days as I recall. I do not remember using it very much, and it was at least two years since I had used a real record player.

And it was well into the 2000s - some eleven - twelve years - later, that I was to access and share one.

Psychologues - they are well in their rights to ask about people's musical preferences and patterns. Audiologues also. After all there is a thriving industry for audiophiles which has catered to their needs and desires for many decades - and it all came from the world of audio engineering.

Carly Fleischmann wrote a consumer review about a really good audio device. She knows this stuff - because in 2009 she told the world about audio filtering. This is a feature which plays prominently into her communication and reception.

And I will admit I love the way she one-upped Stephen Hawking!

There is a 94-year-old English folklorist - Iona Opie - who died this 23 October.

I learnt about Ms Opie in the 1990s. And she was discovering stuff at Bod Library until the very end and making this enormous collection of childrens' literature.

Thinking about my real first tape - the Marshall Cavendish part work of Twigwood. I joined a Yahoo Group about the partworks - and it was a really good Christmas tape. I've tried to identify it to the mid-late 1980s.

I also got to know the characters through a big storybook which had the Large family bears on it by Jill Murphy.

Here is the technology Fleischmann is talking about:

https://www.facebook.com/carlysvoice/posts/10155122887207749 :prose it is called.

https://www.facebook.com/carlysvoice/photos/a.80816742748.80194.68996682748/10155108481352749/?type=3 - Fleischmann reflects on her experiences with Oral Motor Apraxia

https://www.facebook.com/carlysvoice/posts/10155094520502749 - Real Raw Footage of Stephen Hawking - even Arthur Fleischmann was impressed - and chagrined - when Carly one-upped Hawking.

And in very recent times I discovered The Specials and their Xtra Special premium website which is good for things like If I knew then what I know now ... no, that's the Elton John song which was on Goodbye England's Rose.

[and in December 1997 it was a powerful one for me that week before Christmas].

Really loving the closed captions en francaise and probably several other tongues/langues. In May 2017 I tried some subbing and captioneering for children's nursery rhyme videos especially the Finger Family.

Elton John You can make history [young again] from 1996. This is really the first time I have seen Dobkin's directions in the music video styling business. It is like in orinthology - heard only - and that is such a very partial way.

And how the Video Cassette Recorder taught me so many languages in December 1990. Yes - it was the standard EU set - Italiano; castellano; deutsch; Nederlander as well as English and French. And because it was AKAI - I might have expected to see some Japanese.

Timeshifting in the 1990s was very much scheduling and it was so linear. And yet non-linear editing was to be discovered. Which is more true to the way we tell stories?

Of course there is never ever only one way to tell a story.

I am thinking of my first ever musical which I understood was a musical - The sound of music. I remember sitting near the TV on my sheepskin rug and seeing the children in their curtain clothes.

And then in 1996 I had it recorded for me. It is a good thing for students to do - or to have their family do.

We kept a video book which was to be well-organised.

In 2004 I dropped the VCR for a DVD player - seven years too late in my opinion. My first DVD was probably My big fat Greek wedding.

When it came to Sound of Music the Maria-as-nun storyline resonated with me and the whole How do you solve a problem like Maria opener which the nuns did. There was also some nice intertextuality with Sister Act 1 and 2.

One thing I will always remember from mid-1996 is:

If you want to do something
if you want to go somewhere
you have to wake up and pay attention.

And now I am thinking of Stranger things 2 where Eleven had her Robin Humphries moment. It was sort of dealt with in Beyond Stranger Things.

Another source of musical exposures which weren't TV or movies would be advertisements and catalogues. And probably reviews, when I learnt to read them.

[You can tell that I've not forgiven Rupert Murdoch for not making his papers accessible; especially the quality ones like The times and The financial times. 2012? No - 1985-92. Thanks for seven years of functional illiteracy, Dirty Digger and his mates and backers. Though tout court, when you have the equipment and milieu you have...]

And because you never forget your first Elton John - Sacrifice.

It's a human sign when things go wrong...

Kerima Cevik of THE AUTISM WARS writes THE RIPPLE EFFECT.

James Harris writes for the Journal of American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychology about NEUROTRIBES - 1943 and all that. Kanner; Asperger; Bettelheim; Frankl; Irena S and all those cool people - and by Irena S I mean the woman who made these theories about schizophrenia; schizoaffective; schizotypal personality; schizoid personality.

Meriah Hudson writes about self-contained classrooms and applied behavioural analysis and how developmentally appropriate practice is working out for Moxie. So far - ah, her therapists are human. Blue Lake life.

I especially appreciate the link to Unbound Books.

And thinking about that Camelot musical with the release of the John Fitzgerald Kennedy files.

I had seen a really awesome 50th anniversary documentary which looked at the gun shots. Paddock and his ideas...

What Silberman does not understand is that Kanner was not blaming the parents for causing autism; he was describing their behavior. Kanner and Asperger agreed that a parent whose child had autistic features shared the same underlying genetic background. Surprisingly, Silberman does not hold Asperger to account for his descriptions of parents. For example in his description of Fritz, his first patient, Asperger wrote, “The mother herself was similar to the boy … in the way she moved and spoke, indeed in her whole demeanor, she seemed strange and rather a loner.”25(p41)

By 1948 Kanner had seen 50 children with autism.37 In a presentation to medical professionals about nosology that year, Kanner referred to the innateness of autism (lack of responsiveness and failure to initiate social contact from early life) and to the rearing environment that is contributory to outcome (positive or negative) but not causative of autism. He used his frequently misinterpreted emotional refrigerator metaphor (described later in this essay) in reference to some parents’ own upbringing in describing their emotional distancing from their children. Despite media reports about this presentation, Kanner maintained his views on innateness. Kanner did not blame the parents for causing autism at that time. Later he recognized that the characteristics of many of the parents he described were a forme fruste of the full syndrome.

Thus, in 1956, Kanner and Eisenberg proposed that “if one considers the personalities of the parents who have been described as successfully autistic the possibility suggests itself that they may represent milder manifestations and that the children show the full emergence of the latent structure.”38(p560-561) Kanner’s prescient recognition of what we now refer to as the “broader autism phenotype”39 in a subset of parents set the stage for later studies investigating the broader autism phenotype using behavioral measures and psychological tests,40 language evaluation,41 and, more recently, brain imaging42 and family genetic studies.43,44 These studies demonstrate the extent to which autism is a genetic disorder.

In the 1960s, Kanner expressed concern about psychiatrists and psychologists blaming mothers for causing autism when he wrote, “There was a tendency in this country to view [autism] as a developmental anomaly ascribed exclusively to maternal emotional determinants.”45(p413) He clearly rejected that viewpoint. The confusion about Kanner blaming the parent might have arisen because Kanner and Eisenberg38 considered autism to be a psychobiological disorder in which both genetic makeup and life experiences matter and interact. They wrote, “It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the emotional configuration in the home plays a dynamic role” in the ongoing development of children with autism. They continued, “But it seems to us equally clear that this factor, while important in the development of the syndrome, is not sufficient in itself to result in its appearance … the children are different from the beginning” of life.38(p563) Autism is innate, but the rearing environment matters, and child-rearing practices are important. Beginning in 1955, Kanner began working closely with Jean Simmons in Baltimore to provide an optimal treatment environment for children with autism as described in The Hidden Child: The Linwood Method for Reaching the Autistic Child.46

In his annual orientation lecture for new child psychiatry trainees, Kanner described the optimal attitudes for child rearing (Dr. Kanner's Orientation Lecture, unpublished manuscript, Johns Hopkins University). Taking the child’s perspective, he pointed out that every child needed affection (they like me), acceptance (they want me), and approval (they think I am OK). These attitudes ideally should exist in each home, making it a “triple AAA” home. However, he said, some child-rearing attitudes were detrimental. He said that the attitude of parental overprotection (modern helicopter parents) was for the child like being raised in an emotional oven, and he said that a home where parents were perfectionists who expressed little emotional warmth was, for the child, like being raised in an emotional refrigerator. This formulation was not intended to be a statement about parents of children with autism but rather a general statement about issues in child development; however, he did refer to it when discussing parents with autistic children in his 1948 lecture. However, he emphasized that parents of children with autism were not rejecting, mistreating, or abusing their children; they were perplexed by them. Eisenberg and Kanner recognized that although the emotional configuration of the home mattered in autism, “it is not sufficient in itself to result in its appearance.”38(p563) However, Kanner could not ignore that parents with autistic traits themselves needed additional help, because child-rearing practices were important: the child with autism needed a triple AAA home environment, too. Kanner’s recognition that the rearing environment matters, despite the innateness of the disorder, is essential to our current interventions. Early positive invention makes a difference in outcome and is the focus of current treatment trials.

In summary, that Kanner blamed the parents for causing autism is a misconception that arose in the eugenics era when children with genetic disorders were being killed in Nazi Germany as life unworthy of life. In that era, reference to genetic etiologies was not welcome. The field of genetics was in its infancy, and psychoanalytic theories of the psychosocial causes of severe psychiatric disorders were ascendant. Medical research showed little interest in inborn psychiatric disorders.

The anti-genetic zeitgeist of those times was that environmental factors matter most. This led to the use of terms such as “schizophrenogenic mother,”47 and with media attention the term “refrigerator mother” came into use. However, parents of children with autism were not rejecting their children. They were coming to Kanner for help. [Harris 2016]

And Grunya Sukhareva - did she call autism pathological avoidance sixty years before Newson? Hold the presses, please! [1925 for Sukhareva; 1980 for Newsom - though there was that paper in the later 1980s or 1990]. 1891-1981 are her dates.

There seem to be three good WorldCat books of hers. Now the only Polish psychologist I tried to read is Kazimierz Dabrowski of Positive Disintegration and over-excitabilities fame. Bill Tillier is good at disseminating him. And Janusz Korczak of course - King Matt the First they tried to market as a Harry Potter-type in recent years [2013? 2014? maybe].

Unbound Books from Lana Thomas - it is a Neurodiversity Library - and these are perspective pages on Applied Behavioural Analysis

Institute of Ideas with the Sp!ked people happened on the 28th-30th October, and the Sp!ked Review of Books was all about the Reformation 500 years ago. That is Martin Luther and his 95 theses - 1507.

Amazon wishlist of Unbound Books the autism acceptance library

And there was a really cool video from WORLDbytes about the hundred years since the Russian Revolution.

Battle of Ideas 2017 events and more

Living Freedom is a residential for 18-25 year olds




And Perrault. Is. Still. So. Hard.

That reminds me of the aspie182 video series Exceptionally bad portrayals of the autistic. One of them is about Exorcist the second; the other is about Mozart and the whale [who reminded me of #actuallyautisticadult Britany - note the one T - Actually autistic adult - Britany's blog space on Wordpress] and the last is about Rain Man.

Golan-Globus!

And there was a lovely one called The Magic Riddle by the late Yoram Gross.