Dr. Bernard Rimland passed away just a few days before this past  Thanksgiving and will be mourned by many.  At times controversial, always searching for answers, he changed the way autism was viewed  worldwide. Those of us who knew him as Bernie will always feel a twinge of sorrow around this holiday, a reminder of how  much we have  to thank this pioneer who  played  David to the medical establishment’s Goliath.  As  research would prove, fighting Goliath  was not a lost cause  but a righteous endeavor.

The first time I heard  Dr. Bernard Rimland’s name  was the  day after a visit with my son to a psychoanalyst  for the only treatment on offer for autism  in Paris at the time. The bookshelf in the  waiting room   included  a few copies of ‘The Empty Fortress’ by Bruno  Bettleheim,   who believed that autism was a reaction to bad parenting and expounded  the ‘refrigerator mother’ theory of autism.

Dr. Rimland’s  book,  ‘Infantile Autism: The Syndrome and Its Implications for a Neural Theory of Behavior’(1964),  would have been a  better choice in this psychoanalyst’s  waiting room. In his book,  Dr. Rimland  lambasted  the then generally held view that autism was a psychological disorder, brought on by cold and unloving parents. His conclusion was  that autism was the result of   biochemical defects underlain, perhaps, by a genetic predisposition, but ultimately triggered by environmental assaults. This book grew out of the research he did searching for answers when his son, Mark,  born in 1956, displayed behaviors which are now easily recognizable as symptoms of autism but were rarely seen in those days.

The psychoanalyst I visited informed  me that  my son had autistic behaviors due to separation issues from breast feeding. This she  gleaned form watching my son play with two round objects, and  crawl across the floor  in an attempt to retrieve  one that he accidentally dropped.  Following this Allen Woodyesque moment, and looking for some  useful advice, I called an old friend and former colleague from a state hospital  for the developmentally disabled in California.   She gave me the telephone number  for  the Autism Research Institute, the non-profit  founded by Dr.Bernard Rimland in 1967. Continue reading »