Autism in France

A friend, a doctor in the UK, wrote me this:

Just back from France where I was horrified to learn that autism is treated only by psychoanalysis there because it is believed to be caused by lack of maternal bonding in the first year of life.  I almost hit a senior pathologist as he held forth.  Medicine isn't always as international as we would like it to be.

Could it be, I thought?  So I did a little Google searching on the topic. The first item was an article from The Lancet in 2007.  Are you ready for this?

In France, autistic children who have psychiatric problems routinely undergo a treatment that has never been tested in a clinical trial and that many parents regard as cruel. Psychiatrists who use the technique claim that it produces positive results, but critics argue that it shows just how far France has fallen out of step with the international medical community in its understanding of the condition.

The therapy, called packing, involves wrapping a child tightly in wet sheets that have been placed in the refrigerator for up to an hour. When children are encased in this damp cocoon—with only their head left free—psychiatrically trained staff talk to them about their feelings. Typically, the treatment is repeated several times a week, and depending on the results and the severity of the child's condition, it can continue for months or even years.

Oh, yes, let's talk about your feelings.

Another report comes from Chantal Sicile-Kira  in 2010: 

When [my son] Jeremy showed autistic tendencies [in the early 1990s], I was told by the powers that be to take him to see a psychoanalyst. The psychoanalyst concluded that Jeremy was autistic because he suffered separation issues from breast-feeding. This the analyst gleaned from watching him spin round objects (which reminded him of his mother's breasts) and chase after one that he had "lost" when it fell and rolled under a piece of furniture.

Well maybe things have improved? I guess not.  A recent movie on the topic, entitled The Wall, begins:

For more than thirty years, the international scientific community has acknowledged that autism is a neurologic disorder that is the cause of a handicap in social interaction. All autists have the same anomaly in one area of the brain, the upper temporal line identified in 2000 by Dr. Monica Zilbovicius. In France, psychiatry, being very largely dominated by psychoanalysis, ignores these discoveries. To psychoanalysis, autism is a psychosis. In other words, a major psychic disorder resulting from a bad maternal relationship.

This confirms the impression received by my UK friend from her French physician colleague.

Now, though, the film's producer is being sued.  According to the New York Times,  

Three of the psychoanalysts whom Ms. Robert interviewed for the film have sued her, claiming she misrepresented them in the 52-minute documentary, which has not yet been screened in cinemas or on television. 

[I]n court filings, Mr. Charrière-Bournazel said the film had been edited to make his clients look absurd. Ms. Robert, he said, presented the project to the analysts as a documentary, though “it was in reality a polemical enterprise meant to ridicule psychoanalysis in favor of the behavioral treatments that are so fashionable in the United States.” 

The film makes no pretense of objectivity, juxtaposing interviews with psychoanalysts with scathing criticism of the field’s precepts. Ms. Robert, 44, describes herself as an anthropologist and said she once wanted to be a psychoanalyst herself. 

“I would have never imagined what I discovered,” she said of her first few interviews for the film. “Then I thought, wow, what I hear is just crazy.

 Yes, it is.