A Disturbing Reference: The Changeling Myth Again
At the end of an article about Portia Iversen’s book Strange Son: Two Mothers, Two Sons, and the Quest to Unlock the Hidden World of Autism in which she narrates how she met Tito and Soma Mukhopadhyay and how, through Soma’s Rapid Prompting Method, her son Dov was taught to communicate everything going on in his mind by pointing to letters on a piece of cardboard, Iversen is quoted as saying:
“To discover a hidden mind, especially in your own child,” she says, “is at once shocking, deeply disturbing and joyous.”
The article appears in the February 2nd Seattle Times and is by writer Richard Seven, who wrote about his son Derek in Unraveling the deep,
daily mysteries of autism: While parents sort the pieces, UW researchers hunt for connections (2001).
Iversen’s words stood out to me: Of course it is a “joyous” occasion for any parent to realize that one’s child has skills before unbeknownst; “shocking” is understandable, as Iversen portrays Dov as unable to communicate and struggling to learn even his numbers in her book until ch. 14, “A Galaxy Is a Group of Stars,” in which Dov (who is approximately 11 years old) starts communicating under Soma’s instruction. I am curious as to what Iversen means by it being “deeply disturbing” to discover a “hidden mind” in one’s child: Disturbing because you, the parent, had not known or even thought that one’s child had such cognitive abilities and who knows what the child might have been taking in all the time?
Iversen’s references to the myth of the changeling to describe Dov, whose mind some “very, very dark things” come to steal in her Preface, and to Soma as “the pied piper of autism” are straight out of fairy tales, as I wrote in The Changeling and the Pied Piper: Fairy Tales and Science in Strange Son. These fairy tale references are in stark contrast to the constant mention of brain research, neuroscientists, and laboratories in Strange Son. Iversen has previously evoked the changeling myth (as noted in More CAN changeling rhetoric) and the images of a human child stolen in the night by trolls and replaced with an ugly, non-human child stand in contrast to her extensive descriptions of hemispheric laterality, autonomic arousal in autistic subjects, and more.
On the other hand, it occurs to me that I should not be so surprised. Descriptions like this of autistic children as “stolen,” and also like this of autistic children “kidnapped” by some evil agent still exist, and indeed persist. While the name for the evil has changed to other words, the question is the same: “What took away my child and left me with this?”
My friend and sister-blogger-mother Mom-NOS notes that “we move in the direction of our dominant thought” and offers two examples from recent writing about autism as (so to speak) bad OR beautiful:
Think “I hate autism” (or “I fear autism” or “I am exhausted by autism” or “I resent autism”) and you move, psychologically and emotionally, toward those dominant thoughts - toward hate, toward fear, toward exhaustion, toward resentment.
Think instead “I love my child” and you move toward love. You move toward your child.
Which way do you think, on waking to find a monstrous being in the cradle, father and mother in the fairy tale move?
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POSTED IN: Autism Lit, Books, Literature, Science, Stereotypes
3 opinions for A Disturbing Reference: The Changeling Myth Again
Daisy
Feb 2, 2007 at 9:55 pm
I had dreams while pregnant, foreshadowing a handicapped child. I thought the handicap would be something physically obvious, like a cleft palate or a club foot. Instead, I gave birth to a healthy boy who is blind and has Asperger’s Syndrome. And– he’s an absolutely awesome kid.
Julia
Feb 4, 2007 at 7:17 pm
I liked what MOM-NOS had to say.
I recommended her blog to a friend recently, in fact. (I myself haven’t been following it very well lately, though. But I think it’s about what my friend needs right now.)
As for the book, I am absolutely not reading it this year, as I cannot read even a little excerpt here and there without wanting to beat my head against the wall to make it go away…. Thank you for reading so much to give me an idea as to what I do and do not want to get my hands on soon! :)
Jez Rourke
Feb 5, 2007 at 7:51 pm
Whenever I look at my child a smile magically appears on my face. There’s no thinking involved. My heart overflows with love. It’s not an intellectual thing for me, it’s emotional.
Once the very loving caring mother of an autistic teenager said to me “Y’know, autistic kids don’t just fall out of the sky…” meaning they came from us.
So when I think about my daughter I tend to wonder how neurotypical I really am….. or am I? I’ve had numerous issues of my own navigating my way through my life. I have an IQ of 140, I had serious problems with anxiety from the time I was 4, serious enough that I cried everyday in school for 3 years. I recently devoped a whopping sensitivity to chemicals, to the point where I’d be called universal reactor…. I react to everything, clothing, fragrances, electronics, the list goes on.
I tend to be a sort of cerebral type person. I think too much, I obsess way to too much.
Essentially I have never functioned very well in this world myself. I expected a child who had issues…. she’s my child. I didn’t expect autism, I expected a miniature me.
I would tend to believe I’m not as neurotypical as I would appear. In fact, I’m not typical in any way. So it always makes me wonder a woman who is not too typical in somes ways with an autistic child who’s not so typical in some other ways. It seems to make sense doesn’t it?
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