[easyazon-image align=”left” asin=”B001DDTDD8″ locale=”us” height=”160″ src=”http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41Z9O3RZCJL._SL160_.jpg” width=”114″][easyazon-link asin=”B001DDTDD8″ locale=”us”]Refrigerator Mothers[/easyazon-link] focuses on the mothers of children with autism in the America of the 1950s and ’60s, when the theory that autism was caused by cold, distant treatment of a child prevailed. The collateral damage of Bruno Bettelheim’s now-discredited theories not only included mothers being unfairly blamed and judged for their child’s disability, but research dollars squandered down the wrong diagnostic path, and most horrifying of all, a generation of autistic children locked away in Bettelheim’s “treatment center”. With no education, visitation, or engagement with the world; only an amorphous shape of stone meant to substitute for the mother these children had been ripped from. A history of Bettelheim’s Orthogenic School is beyond the scope of this documentation, but first-hand accounts can be found in [easyazon-link asin=”1425191762″ locale=”us”]Crazy: My Seven Years at Bruno Bettelheim’s Orthogenic School[/easyazon-link] and [easyazon-link asin=”0312307497″ locale=”us”]Not the Thing I Was: Thirteen Years at Bruno Bettelheim’s Orthogenic School[/easyazon-link].
