Chalk one up for the good guys!

The Internet is abuzz with the latest film on autism to come out of France. This film tips the “pomme” cart, and I say “Bravo”! The film is called: “The Wall; Psychoanalysis put to the test for autism.” It is a must watch film. I suggest you do it quickly before it’s forcibly removed from the Internet. This film has been banned by a French court, hard as that may be for a non-European audience to comprehend. The filmmaker is appealing the ruling.

Decades after the debunking of the theory that mothers cause their child’s autism, first posited by Bruno Bettleheim and embraced by the field of psychoanalysis, the insular French psychiatric community is still flogging the dead horse, with an incomprehensible disregard to the scientific advances that have been made in the rest of the world over the past 60 years. Quantitative data collection seems to be utterly irrelevant for these folks; however, with the growing popularity and reach of the Internet, parents in France have learned the basics. They’ve got us beat when it comes to food, perfume, fashion and pretty much all the finer things in life, but when it comes to autism treatment, well… not so much!

Francophone parents with autism have been historically so isolated in terms of up-to-date materials that I actually had my book,
Teach Me Language, translated into French as Apprends-moi le langage, because I had so many requests from French speaking parents and speech language pathologists. I also felt that it was a tremendous injustice that children in the Francophone world had been left to the mercy of the psychoanalysts for so-called “treatment.”

I was delighted to read about a film comparing the backward, flat-earth type, psycho-analytic approach to autism intervention with the science-based approaches we’re accustomed to in the U.S. and Canada. The courage of this documentary filmmaker, Sophie Robert, is remarkable.
She is standing up to the powerful French psycho-analytic community. The psychoanalysts were given almost the entire film to describe their dubious theories, and now three of them have the gall to sue the film maker because they claim that they have been misrepresented!

This is a real test for France: is the nation truly a republic with an independent judiciary that will consider science and data, or will they be intimidated by the powerful psycho-analytic traditionalists who’ve had free reign over children with autism since the term autism was coined. F
ilmmaker Sophie Robert has done something important for the community of parents of children with autism worldwide. We need to support her.