2011 Orwellian Prize for Journalistic Misrepresentation

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So the time has come round for the announcement of the 2011 Orwellian Prize. The prize is given for an article in an English-language national newspaper that achieves an unusually high level of inaccuracy. Only articles that describe a piece of published scientific research are eligible. Points are given for every statement in the article that does not match the original source, as follows:

•     Factual error in the headline: 3 points
•     Factual error in a subtitle: 2 points
•     Factual error in the body of the article: 1 point

Last year, I got two nominations, but, as described here, neither adequately met the criteria. This year, I’ve had just one nomination, from Neurobonkers, but it’s set a standard for inaccuracy that will be hard to beat. The article that I first selected in 2010 to illustrate the scoring system scored 16 points. This one achieves a startling 23 points. The source article by Kucewicz et al (2011) can be found here. Here is a screenshot of the account in the Daily Mail, with errors marked in red (3 points), orange (2 points) and blue (1 point).

There is a detailed analysis of errors in this blogpost by Neurobonkers, which I urge you to look at. Suffice it to say,  the academic paper is not about cannabis, smoking or schizophrenia. Rather it is about an artificial compound that is not present in cannabis, which was injected into rats, and which led to changes in their brain waves.

There were some complaints to the Press Complaints Commission, and presumably in response to this, the article was modified. The headline, which originally read Just ONE cannabis joint 'can bring on schizophrenia' as well as damaging memory was altered to Just ONE cannabis joint 'can cause psychiatric episodes similar to schizophrenia' as well as damaging memory. Perhaps even the Daily Mail found the notion of a schizophrenic rat implausible. But the rest of the article remains, as a scare story about cannabis. And here is what makes this article such a prime candidate for the Orwellian Award: this is not about a hyped press release by a university, or misunderstanding of complex science. It's not even about sensationalising a scientific finding to draw readers in. No, this is about using a scientific paper as a prop in the Daily Mail's anti-cannabis campaign. A ploy that the newspaper has previously used in another ideological battle, on climate change. When reporting research, no respect is given to the truth: scientists are simply used to bolster a preconceived opinion, and if they don't do that, their findings are distorted.

Twelve of this article's 23 points came from the headline. Journalists don’t write the headlines. They therefore dislike my scoring system because it penalises errors in headlines more than errors in the body of the text. My view is that it’s the headlines that count for most: far more people will read the headline than the text, and for many readers it's the only part of the article they will process. It’s important that it's accurate. Although few would defend frank lying, some editors seem to think it doesn’t matter if a headline is hyperbolic, provided it sells the paper or gets someone to read further. This very issue has been a topic of debate in the recent Leveson Inquiry into culture, practice and ethics in the UK media. I feel strongly that it's a cop-out to just wash one's hands of it and blame anonymous sub-editors for misleading headlines. I shall therefore continue to award points in proportion to the prominence of the material. But I appreciate it’s not then fair to make the award to the journalist. Indeed, given the Mail's agenda on cannabis, the journalist in this case may well have been under duress to write a scare story.   I will accordingly be making the award to Paul Dacre, Editor of the Daily Mail. I will be happy also to send the token of appreciation for the nomination to Neurobonkers if he/she is willing to email me to tell me where to send it.

I'm pleased not to have had more nominations this year: it suggests that, despite all the grumblings about science journalism, the field is in rude health. I've certainly read a lot of good science reportage in our national newspapers, and where articles have made me angry, it's often because of hype by a press office or scientist, rather than distortion by the press. There are, however, still a few topics, among them drugs policy, where the political stakes are high and scientific reporting is cynically exploited to support an otherwise weak argument.

Coming up with an award certificate and item turns out to be an excellent way of avoiding doing serious work.....

Reference
Kucewicz, M., Tricklebank, M., Bogacz, R., & Jones, M. (2011). Dysfunctional Prefrontal Cortical Network Activity and Interactions following Cannabinoid Receptor Activation Journal of Neuroscience, 31 (43), 15560-15568 DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2970-11.2011

Psychoanalytic treatment for autism: Interviews with French analysts

Last week a French documentary called “Le Mur” attracted attention in the New York Times. Plans to screen the film later this week in Philadelphia are being contested by three of the interviewees. They are all psychoanalysts who treat children with autism, and they complain that the film has been unfairly edited to make them look ridiculous. They are suing the film-maker, Sophie Robert in her native France. All the signs, though, suggest that their legal action is causing a Streisand effect, drawing attention to them and generating considerably more criticism of their activities than would otherwise have been the case. A website called “Support the Wall” has links to the documentary, with English subtitles, and to other sites highly critical of France’s idiosyncratic approach to autism intervention.

At nearly an hour long, the film is quite demanding to sit through, so I thought it might be helpful to post a transcript of the interviews with psychoanalysts, so people can judge for themselves whether the analysts have been ridiculed.

This text should, however, be read bearing the following points in mind:

• The translation was not done by a native English speaker, and I simply copied the text from the subtitles, rather than attempting to improve on the translation. It is important to realise that some apparently incoherent utterances could be due to poor translation.
• The subtitling is very amateurish and uses multiple colours in a way that can make it difficult to read at times. Unintelligible material is denoted as (xxx)
• The speakers are indicated in brackets, with (I) denoting the interviewer (presumably Sophie Robert). All other speakers are psychoanalysts.
• My ability to keep track of all the analysts is imperfect, and so I may sometimes have misattributed a statement - please refer to the original movie if you want to be certain of who said what.

(Update, 26th Jan 2012: World Service Health Check podcast on this topic)

The Wall

Introduction

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 line¹ 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.

¹ Comment by DVB: I assume this refers to the superior temporal sulcus. I regard the statement about anomalies in all autists as an over-simplification

------------------------------------------------------------------

The Interviews

(Dr Alexandre Stevens) I think that autism is a mode of reaction of the subject that is obviously very early in his logical history.

It is that (xxx) response to what comes as invasion of the world and of the other.

He clams up.

He clams up, he gets into a bubble and refuses to enter the mechanisms of speech.

But (xxx) some autists speak, don't they

So it is more than speech, in the subjective mechanisms

I mean, speaking, yes, but without being really involved.

(interviewer) Do you make a structural distinction between psychosis and autism?

(AS) No, I don't.

(I) Are autists psychotic?

(AS) Yes. That is to say, autism is an extreme situation of something that is in the scope of the set of psychoses.

*****

(Professeur Pierre Delion) The structural distinction that one can make between autism on the one hand and child psychosis on the other hand

that is (xxx) the aspect of the description of the underlying structure does not stand up to analysis in the continuity of this first structure and the second one.

It seems to me that there are paths between the autistic structure, the psychotic structure, and the dysharmonic structure.

Now, when we say that, we upset many associations of parents of autistic children who think that autists have nothing to do with psychotics

To me, this is a mistake; there are many things in common.

*****

(Dr Genevieve Loison) It is the crocodile! (gets out toy crocodile)

So the crocodile tells us right away what it is all about.

They play with it and when they put the hand or an object in, I am worried.

(demonstrates with hand in mouth of croc)

When they get on top of it and hit it, I feel reassured. They are fighting!

(I) Why? What does it mean, the crocodile?

(GL) The crocodile is the mother's belly, the mother's teeth

(I) Is that what Lacan used to call the mother: a crocodile?

(GL)Yes, so the goal of our work is to forbid her to eat.

(I) To eat the child?

(GL) We put a stick in him

When the child starts getting out this, sometimes he puts his hand

(demo hand in croc mouth). Sometimes he puts a figurine in.

(I) And this pen, what does it stand for?

(GL) (Puts pen across croc jaws) So this means "You can't any more" It is the bar.

(I) Is it the father's phallus?

(GL) That's it. You can't do that any more.

(I) It is the father's law, that bars the child from his mother and that forbids the mother to destroy the child.

(GL) Right, and to devour him.

(I) Does this also relate to autistic children?

(GL) Of course, yes. For autists it is a matter of stage, you see.

We take the children at some stage.

The autistic children, they often put the child in there (has what looks like a tortoise in shape of a bag?)

They go in there. Then, we get worried, right?

(Interlude with family with autistic children)

(05:15)(I) Regarding both psychosis and autism, there is an explanation that is traditionally used is that a maternal depression during pregnancy or the first months of the baby’s life would have altered the mother-child relationship, and could be responsible for severe disorders.

(Prof Daniel Widlocher) So, this is what serious colleagues tell us, so consequently I listen to them.

*****

(AS) It can be the case, when the child comes in such conditions where the other, his first “other”, the mother is very depressed. I mean she will be absent from him, will be in another look at him, that it could sometimes make it so that the child chooses to withdraw.

Sometimes, when the mother is depressed, when she is pregnant or at birth, sometimes the child can be autistic.

*****

(GL)Woah, well, we have seen a few of them. I remember, it was when I was in a psychiatric clinic that I have seen them, mostly.

I have seen massive things, massive voids, disorders.

I have seen abandoned mothers! For each autist there was, I would say, a different cause.

I have seen many mothers abandoned at the end of their pregnancy.

And the child… depressive mothers too, mothers in the baby blues afterwards, abandoned at the end of pregnancy, who have a baby blues after delivery, who are themselves in the emptiness and who put the child in the relational emptiness.

*****

(DW) For example, deep deficiency

For instance, a mother who, for reasons of depression does not take any care of her child, stays mute in front of him, clotted, while the child is there, starting to hang on to her, looking for contact.

It can, if it lasts long during childhood have consequences on the young adult who will keep being very cold, inhibited from an affective perspective, because, when he was a child, he unfortunately had a very cold mother.

*****

(I) Is there a higher incidence of the cases of psychosis or autism in countries where there is a war?

In the favelas of Rio? In all circumstances where mothers have good reasons to be depressed?

(GL) I am not aware of that, I cannot answer.

I can only answer about what happens in my practice, you see.

(07:55) (interlude)

(08:41)(I) How can one explain that a maternal depression could cause a child to be autistic?

To start with in utero?

(09.04)(AS) So, first of all, in utero some things already happen

I am not a specialist of in utero, but there are things happening.

The child moves, mothers speak

Mothers talk to him and react to a number of stimuli

In fact, what do children know about this link to the other, in utero?

It does not completely go through language.

But it goes through the whole environment of corporal sounds

Finally, a depressed mother, when the child is there in utero, does the child feel anything?

I am totally unable to tell you, but I do not feel like it is odd to think so.

*****

(Dr Aldo Naouri) Most of the time, the symptom of the child is no more no less than the symptom that allotted to have by the maternal unconscious mainly

Because children are in a relationship that is very very permeable in the communication with their mother

Gestation literally conditions a child and forms him.

And really gives him something entirely produced by the body, that comes from his mother's body.

This weakens the field.

It puts the child in a state where his resistance is altered by the conditions that come from his environment

*****

(10:22)(Prof Bernard Golse) For the baby, there is one half of his genes, of his chromosomes are from his mother the other half from his father

So, there is one part that is like the mother, this one does not pose any problem

but there is one part that is like the father and that immediately poses a problem

As soon as the baby is conceived, the motherly organism will immediately secrete a very strong wave of antibodies to expel the baby that is half stranger to the mother's body

It is a little sad to say, if I can say, the first thing that biologically, the mother cannot stand in her baby is the part that comes from the father

So what is anthropological in there is the double "no"

No, I do not recognise this baby; I want to eject him, and at once a no to the no.

Which we will find later in the language

There is a whole interesting question

and in language one will find such double negations.

This comes at the biology level.

(further interlude with family)

(I) Why don't severe autistics speak?

(Prof Daniel Widlocher) I don't know

My first idea is that they do not speak because they are not stimulated for speech.

Like children that are very little surrounded by a stream of language often have language difficulties even though they do not have autism

Consequently there is language stimulation, a parental stimulation of the environment that is very important

*****

(AS) We are not neurologically wired for language

Psychoanalysis does not belong here, if you want

We are not wired for language.

Of course it takes the capacity to speak but the essential thing is that precisely language is outside of the organism

*****

(GL) Why would they communicate, they are in fusion!

They communicate without words, there is no need to acquire speech

Speech implies access to the symbolic, access to the father.

I am not only with my mother

There exists a father who created me in the origin, who was the founder, with his paternal might, who has created a child.

Only progressively with the child discover this.

(I) In what does the father embody the symbolic?

(GL) Ha, this is difficult

He is access to abstraction, access to the distance

Access one has to speak when one is no longer glued

He comes to interpose between the mother and the child

*****

(Prof Bernard Golse) Speaking with the other means that one is no longer merged with the other.

As long as one is no longer separate, as long as one is combined in the other

which is the problem for autistic children, precisely for whom the other does not exist

but when the other starts emerging they are still in such a pathologic distance that they can't speak with the other

*****

(I) About autistic children it is said that their mother cannot catch their eye?

(GL)Yes, they are not at all in the relationship

they are staying in an egg

(I) They flee the mother because they are merged with the mother?

(GL) They have not taken off at all.

They have stayed in the egg, in the uterus

Why do you want them to look or speak?

*****

(14:22)(BG) You can not think of the other one, you can not speak with the other one unless you have some free range.

As long as you are still included, interpenetrated, merged with the other one, you can neither think to the other one, nor speak with him

this is almost a truism

If language touches us so much all our life long, and psychoanalysis goes through language it is that language is only about separation.

That is a vision.... very very well.... it is a vision of development that is extremely specific to the psychoanalytic vision of things

(interlude with family)

(I) The Psyche does not evolve independently of the brain. It does not wander alone in the void.

If we have one side a normal child with a well-functioning brain and on the other side an autistic child with a malfunctioning brain, doesn't it make a fundamental difference in its capacity to communicate with the outer world?

(Esthela Solano) This way of conceiving the causality of autism is very reductive.

What we can notice when we take care of autistic children is precisely that autistic children are sick of language

That autism is a way to defend themselves from language

 

 (interlude with family)

(voiceover) The Austrian-American psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim was the precursor of the psychoanalytic treatment of autism.

Bettelheim compared autistic children with concentration camp prisoners that were swinging back and forth, staggered by terror, waiting for an imminent death.

Reasoning by analogy, he was convinced that autistic children were the victims of torturer parents, freezing mothers who had desired the death of their child.

Bettelheim's work has been largely rejected in the USA since more than thirty years.

But how is it in France?

*****

(PD) Bruno Bettelheim is a victim of injustice of contemporary history.

I think that he did his work at a time when no one cared for autistic children, an absolutely exemplary pioneering work.

He got interested in autistic children because he was coming out of an artificial deficiency experience that he had gone through in concentration camps.

He arrived on the autistic planet thinking that finally here are children that maybe suffered from deficiencies in a manner similar to what I have lived myself.

I will try to treat them from this hypothesis, meaning by separating them from their parents.

*****

(GL) There was absolutely no tie.

Mothers who have them so fear them, even during pregnancy

And after, there is absolutely no tie.

And the child is abandoned and can even wonder how he has been conceived.

But the fact is that they were conceived.

He is totally empty, pregnancy is only organic, the child does not exist as a person.

He is totally in the relational emptiness.

And this gives what Bruno Bettelheim, yes, of course

*****

(Yann Bogopolsky) No no, Bruno Bettelheim has said much more than that.

This is the caricature.

I do not say this for you but for those who well

It is not only about mothers, it is also about the father's place in the mother's desire.

And it is about a certain amount of data, not only those with which the child is born, and the link that has been created, or the desires of death that such mother could have had for this new born child.

But all the mothers who have desires of death for their child, all these desires will not necessarily make their child psychotic!

 (interlude)

(voiceover) At the end of the 60s, psychoanalysis is starting to decline everywhere in the world.

But it takes a phenomenal success in France, with the impulsion of an ambitious and charismatic psychiatrist.

For Jacques Lacan, psychotic and autistic children are victims of the alienation by a psychogenic mother.

A woman who refuses to stop her pregnancy because she is unable to split from a child who is a substitute for a penis that she has not received when she was born.

*****

(YB) At the beginning, the child thinks that he is his mother's phallus.

Namely that he is this object that would give everything, fill his mother with joy, make her have orgasm.

*****

(I) Therefore autism is maternal fusion?

(GL) Wait, there are a lot of theories, right?

To me, I have either fusion or total abandon and emptiness.

It's one or the other. The two poles. It's not the same.

But when they are totally in emptiness

but what I deal with here at the practice, is rather fusion

For total abandons, I do not see them, they go to institutions.

(I) Bruno Bettelheim says that autistic children are victims of mothers that are too cold, and on the other side we have Jacques Lacan who theorizes psychosis and autism as maternal fusion, through some sort of a relationship that is almost incestuous between the mother and the child?

(GL)Yes, yes, absolutely

(I) So on the other side, we have a mother who is too warm?

(GL) Yes, too warm or too cold is not good.

It takes a mother, as Winnicott says, good enough.

Neither too good too warm, neither totally empty of course.

If there is nothing, no relationship, it will not give anything good.

(I) How can you explain that two attitudes, two totally opposed behaviours, could yield the same result?

(GL) There are different mechanisms; it is our job to put things back in the middle.

 *****

(voiceover) The English analyst paediatrician Donald Winnicott is the author of the concept of "good enough mother", according to which a mother who wants to do too well is toxic for her child.

He claims that motherhood would take mothers and infants through a transitional madness stage, prototype of forthcoming psychic disorders.

*****

(GL) (approaching with scary toy spider) Unconsciously, this is what you are doing to me, in your legs.

*****

(voiceover) With Winnicott, we have come full circle

Motherhood is psychogenic by nature.

*****

(I) Do you agree with the idea of maternal madness?

That every woman, every mother goes through the first months after delivery a stage of madness that can later be problematic for the infant if it lasts?

(AS) Yes, yes ,but this name maternal madness does not disturb me at all.

(I) You are a psychiatrist, madness is definitely something with a negative meaning isn't it?

(AS) Not for me

*****

(Laurent Danon-Boileau) There is this idea that is usually called the maternal madness of the first times

There is a moment when the mother is so glad to have her brat that she is the one with the brat and there is no way anyone could intervene

(I) Why call this madness, by the way?

(LD) Because of this idea of some sort of wholeness that gives some kind of powerful might.

There is this idea that, starting when you have done such a thing, you are almighty, nothing can reach you, etc etc.

*****

(GL) You know, madness, it's the first  month of life

But the thing is we have all been mad, or almost

(I) Why call this thing, this capacity for the mother to decrypt and understand her child's behaviour without language, why call this madness?

(GL) Because if we stopped there, the child would go into madness

Madness is precisely what you were asking about earlier about autism; they stopped there

*****

(LD) Maternal madness, is maternal madness a major roadblock to the emergence of language?

Said like that, of course, yes!

*****

(25:40)(AN) The mother is one the side of nature.

and from this standpoint, she is animal, if you want.

whereas the father was the one who founded culture

This is what made Claude Levi Strauss say this superb definition when he speaks about the couple.

He says that it is the dramatic union of nature and culture.

You see, when law supports culture, claiming that there is something fatherly, it means we are in the culture, return to nature shall not happen.

(interlude)

(voiceover) In the course of my interviews, several psychoanalysts had asserted that autism was the consequence of a maternal incest

*****

(AS) The maternal function consists of intervening in two ways

On the one hand saying no to the fusion between mother and the child

The father is the one forbids the mother

(I) He forbids sexually? Right?

(AS) Who forbids the pleasure of the mother

Namely, without ambiguity, who forbids that the child takes pleasure exclusively with his mother

as well as the mother takes pleasure exclusively with the child

*****

(Jacqueline Schaeffer) At the child's birth there is a honeymoon, right?

Sometimes, it is not so much of a honeymoon, it can be dramatic

But there is a honeymoon, there is a fusion, there is an extraordinary

Well, at the same time, there is a huge pleasure together

The baby very quickly, well, there is what we can say

There is not sex difference but there is a big erotic pleasure taken together

*****

(I) The fact that a mother takes care of her child like a human being, this is not sexual

(YB) Well, yes it is!

Sexuality, in a first place, is not in the sense that all take it, as genital sexuality

It is everything that, to Freud, because he is the one who theorized this, will be the body's parts that will give pleasure to the child

So the child and mother bodies are there in a tight unison and even the infant child does not know that he is not his mother's body.

He thinks they are one.

Well, he thinks - we attribute t his to him - he thinks he is one with his mother.

(29:36)So, it is a work of separating the bodies.

And the pleasure that the child will get in his relationship with the other, who is first his mother, will happen, one, in a clinch

And two, the pleasure will be related to the different orifices of the body.

*****

(LD) There are psychoanalysts who, a long time ago, have talked about something they called the lover's censorship.

This means something very simple.

It means that the mother is changing the infant and that all of a sudden; she takes too much pleasure by touching the infant

And she feels, oh la, this is strange

It is not logical; I am not treating him like

(I) An incestuous thing?

(LD) Something a little incestuous, what's going on?

Well, she will think of the man with whom she conceived him, in other words her lover.

And therefore, this will create a distance between herself and the infant.

This is what we call the lover censorship.

(I) She has to have a man on her mind for her not to be in an incestuous relationship with her child?

(LD) It's not "she has to" - one cannot avoid it!

*****

(JS) During maternal care, the mother can very well arouse the penis of a little boy.

I mean, maternal care, and the little boys do not avoid this!

We see many little boys who, when they get changed, when they get washed by the mother, the little penis reacts

*****

(YB) The father is there to forbid and at the same time protect the child.

That is, to protect the child from the incestuous desire of the mother.

(I) Do you think that all mothers have incestuous desires towards their child?

(YB) Oh yes, whether they are aware of it or not! Yes!

(I) Why are you so sure?

(YB) Well, first from psychoanalytic writings.

I mean, desire is not forbidden, its fulfilment is.

(I) But, that the love of a mother for her child is an incestuous desire, this is-

(YB) Well yes, because she already has some trouble to separate from her child.

There is a unity that gets done only if the father of the child, or the one in charge of this who is not necessarily the genitor, does not come and tell the mother that enjoyment has to happen between them.

Does not remind his desire to the mother, and the pleasure that she will be able to have through the desire that ties them together.

The mother will have pleasure by caressing her child

By having him on her body all day, what else, she will have pleasure

And, back to your previous question, this is how the body will present and that sexuality, insofar as it is related to body pleasure, and that is reused in language, is naturally present in the questions of psychoanalysts.

(I) Then, why are most of the incests perpetrated by men?

*****

(AN) First we have to notice that father-daughter incest is definitely more frequent than mother-son incest

And why are there not, or no more, mother-son incests?

For a very simple reason, which is that the motherly attitude to children, whether they are boys or girls, is spontaneously an attitude of incestuous essence.

Every mother's dream is that her child does not lack anything

The motherly tendency towards the child is an incestuous tendency

And there is no need to act. In her attitude, there is already enough, she does not act.

*****

(JS) Paternal incest does not cause so much damage. It makes the girls a little moronic.

But maternal incest creates psychosis. That is, madness.

There cannot be a maternal incest between a boy and his mother without an enormous mental disorder. It is not possible.

Precisely because of this barrier.

But the daughter with the father, she did not come out of the father, right she has not been in the father's belly

So there is something, you see. I'd say it is a secondary incest.

Whereas the primary incest, the real one, it is the mother

It is to penetrate the mother.

And boys who penetrate their mother are psychotic.

Whereas the daughter is not.

The girls can, we have many experiences with daughters with a paternal incest, they can manage somehow.

Now, I can't say that it works very very well

Some of them are very very bad, some a little less so

And there are those who manage by some other way

What I was saying, a little moronic.  But it is very different.

(interlude)

(voiceover) To psychoanalysts, the father is guilty too.

Guilty of being absent or transparent, guilty of being submissive to his wife.

Guilty of having been unable to intervene between the child and the maternal ogre.

*****

(GL) He failed.

Often, do you know how many times we see fathers who would have liked to?

and this is what we call forclusion

Forclusion of the father’s name

(I) What does it mean?

(GL) Good question!

It means that the father, in simple terms has made the child but that he (the father) does not exist.

It is denied, his existence is denied.

(I) Does the mother deny his existence?

(GL) Denies his function, his existence. There is only her and the child who count

The father does not exist.

Maybe he is there to bring some money in, he is here like an extra

He does not have the function of the husband, loved, considered in his speech

When the mother considers the father’s speech, the child discovers speech.

(I) If the child does not speak, it is because the mother discredits the father’s word?

(GL) Well, there are not so many here; it is mostly in institutions; in psychiatric clinics, where I had severe autists.

*****

(ES) Fundamentally, the father’s function is symbolic.

And sometimes the real father does not carry this symbolic function.

He can be adorable and nice, but nevertheless the child faces a symbolic deficiency on the side of the paternal function.

*****

(36:26)(GL) Either he does not have room or he only exists through violence, or he is violent himself.

We sometimes realise that he is violent to exist.

And that he pries doors open in a way, when no one opens them for him!

*****

(ES) When on speaks about the paternal function it is about something that drives you in your life.

It is like a highway, a compass.

(I) Why wouldn’t the mother, as a woman, provide the child this basis? Even on her own?

(ES) There are some mothers who can transmit a paternal function.

(I) But why isn’t it a maternal function? Why isn’t it a maternal symbolic? Why give it a gender?

(ES) The law of the mother is the law of whim.

*****

(AN) In 1984, a biologist established this extraordinary proof that placenta is from exclusive paternal origin.

So that it is under the control of genes brought by the spermatozoon.

In other words, the placenta is what prevents the mother from destroying her child, and a child from killing his mother.

(I) What enables the mother to feed her child?

(AN) Yes, that allows, that transfers and filters all the food the mother brings him.

In other words, it is a regulating element between them, this placenta it is an interposition.

I mean it feels like the father’s attitude within the decisions he takes, this patriarchy that he sets up, this male domination, etc., has always been the empirical search of the function that the placenta holds.

And that lets every child come into the world without being destroyed.

(interlude)

(voiceover) Since Bruno Bettelheim, the major psychoanalytic principle for the treatment of autistic children consists in separate children from their parents.

Parents are sometimes subject to pressure to undergo therapy because they are considered the source of the problem.

Today still in France and Belgium a number of psychiatric institutions are places that are not accessible to families, who are not informed of what goes on.

What does the psychoanalytic treatment of autistic children consist in?

*****

(ES) Let’s say that when we receive an autistic child we practice a psychoanalysis that is pure invention.

We are facing a subject who, most of the time, cannot speak.

*****

(LD) I am rather like in an observation attitude.

I mean, with an autistic child, I do very little.

What does very little mean?

That I sit my butt down close to him, and I wait for something to happen.

And I forget, I try to forget everything.

I forget time, I forget that we are pressed by time for him to acquire language, I forget everything.

Because I tell myself that, since I am in this kind of weightlessness, there could well happen something that I can not foresee.

*****

(41:20)(AS) You have authors like Tustin or Magaret Mahler who explain how it is first about winning over the child.

Here we are in a practice, but it is the same in an institution.

Winning over the child. I do not remember which of them describes this.

It is about stepping a little back, not in his line of sight.

Not speaking too loud, rather following what he says than anticipating it.

*****

(ES) No willingness of control, no educative willingness

No compelling of anything.

*****

(BG) We finally try by all means to make the autistic child feel that another one exists who is not threatening.

*****

(ES) It is precisely about taking into account the most insignificant details and figure out that this insignificant detail can be interpreted with some meaning.

And bit by bit we can proceed by supposing that there is a sign and we take it as something like the intent of a speech.

*****

(LD) Personally, if the kid does not do anything during the session, if I drowse beside him, I don’t care.

I am used to that in my work as a psychoanalyst.

But this implies a few things.

One, it implies not getting bored when we think with our own ideas.

Two, it implies rowing against this whole social thing that pushes you to be pressed by time it is all very nice, but if nevertheless if the child is still like that in ten years, it’s not on you to … etc.

All this is true; I stay in the position of a psychoanalyst, which means having no memory, no expectation.

And starting from then, something happens.

And that is an attitude, I believe, that is a deeply psychoanalytic attitude.

*****

(BG) When… Perhaps… Well..

I am sensitive to what you tell me that the audience should feel that we accept to fully endorse our convictions.

*****

(LD) If you sing a little song, and that the autistic child doesn’t feel bad with it there is something happening.

So you’re going to tell me, there is no need of a psychoanalyst for that.

Yes, if you are not using it as an educative method.

Yes, if you that that after all I don’t care about what the child will do with it.

It seems like he seems interested

We do that and we’ll see what happens then. Or we won’t see then.

The fundamental point in my attitude as a psychoanalyst with respect to these children it is to abdicate the idea of a progress.

And this is not easy, you can believe me.

My analytic ideal demands to abandon this dimension, but it turns out that I belong to a society in which I am paid to give care.

Consequently, I am in a conflict.

But this, a situation of conflict an analyst must be able to endure it or he takes another job!

Because this is the basis of our analytic practice.

*****

(I) What is the impact of psychoanalysis on autistic children?

What can an autistic child reasonably expect in terms of result?

(PD) But I can’t answer this, this is not a matter for a psychoanalyst!

*****

(I) What can an autistic child reasonably expect from an analytic work?

In terms of results?

(45:20)(LD) (very long pause) the pleasure of taking interest in a soap bubble.

I can’t answer anything else.

(interlude)

(voiceover) Nevertheless, there are solutions.

they are called PECS, TEACCH, and ABA.

These educative and behavioral methods have been set up in the USA over thirty years ago to enable people with autism to communicate, open up to the world.

Thanks to these tools that are appropriate to their handicap, young autistic children make, in a few months, significant progress.

Unfortunately, psychoanalysts fiercely stand in the way of their establishment in France.

*****

(AS) In the French speaking world the invasion of cognitive behavior techniques is a new invasion.

Recent, but very present today.

Psychoanalysis fights against this invasion

A number of colleagues, in particular Jacques Alain Miller have taken the lead of this struggle, this fight.

Others too in others organisations.

It is a very important fight to keep alive the dimension of subjectivity or the singularities of each subject with respect to the behavioral idea of managing by squares.

*****

(Eric Laurent) You know, it is for psychoanalysis to be this device of disenchantment.

there are hopes that come from biology, it could be marvellous to believe in them!

If one can believe that tomorrow, tomorrow we will have the solutions!

Well, psychoanalysis, as a speech that illuminates all beliefs tries to enable humanity to live without believing too big whims, it’s part of our effort.

So, the dialogue with neurosciences, is not only to inform ourselves of the results and let know that it does not alter our fundamental practice, the orientation of our practice, it is also about trying to make humanity live without having too big hopes in the various good news that are published every day that are intended to keep a rate of good news in an environment that has so little.

*****

(voiceover) In the 80’s, 100% of the French psychiatrists and psychologists were trained in psychoanalysis.

Since the 90s this trend is declining, but they are still near 80% today.

This situation, unique in the world, except Argentina, has tremendous consequences in the care of the handicapped.

(updated 24th January 2012)

Novelty, interest and replicability

So at last, your paper is written. It represents the culmination of many years’ work. You think is an important advance for the field. You write it up. You carefully format it for your favoured journal. You grapple with the journal’s portal, tracking down details of recommended reviewers and then sit back. You anticipate a delay of a few weeks before you get reviewer comments. But, no. What’s this? A decision letter within a week: “Unfortunately we receive many more papers than we can publish or indeed review and must make difficult decisions on the basis of novelty and general interest as well as technical correctness.” It’s the publishing equivalent of the grim reaper: a reject without review.

It happens increasingly often, especially if you send work to journals with high impact factors. I’ve been an editor and I know there are difficult decisions to make. It can be kinder to an author to reject immediately if you sense that the paper isn’t going to make it through the review process. One thing you learn as an author is that there’s no point protesting or moaning. You just try again with another journal. I’m confident our paper is important and will get published, and there’s no reason for me to single this journal out for complaint. But this experience has made me reflect more generally on factors affecting publication, and I do think there are things about the system that are problematic.

So, using this blog as my soapbox, there are two points I’d like to make: A little one and a big one. Let’s get the little one out of the way first. It’s simply this: if a journal commonly rejects papers without review, then it shouldn’t be fussy about the format in which a paper is submitted. It’s just silly for busy people to spend time getting the references correctly punctuated, or converting their figures to a specific format, if there’s a strong probability that their paper will be bounced. Let the formatting issues be addressed after the first round of review.

The second point concerns the criteria of “novelty and general interest”. My guess is that our paper was triaged on the novelty criterion because it involved replication. We reported a study that involved measuring electrical brain responses to sounds. We compared these responses in children with developmental language impairments and typically-developing children. The rationale is explained in a blogpost I wrote for the Wellcome Trust.

We’re not the first people to do this kind of research. There have been a few previous studies, but it’s a fair summary to say the literature is messy. I reviewed part of it a few years back and I was shocked at how bad things were. It was virtually impossible to draw any general conclusions from 26 studies. Now these studies are really hard to do. Just recruiting people is difficult and it can take months if not years to get an adequate sample. Then there is the data analysis which is not for the innumerate or faint-hearted. So a huge amount of time and money had gone into these studies, but we didn’t seem to be progressing very far. The reason was simple: you couldn’t generalise because nobody ever attempted to replicate previous research. The studies were focussed on the same big questions, but they differed in important ways. So if they got different results, you couldn’t tell why.

In response to this, part of my research strategy has been to take those studies that look the strongest and attempt to replicate them. So when we found strikingly similar results to a study by Shafer et al (2010) I was excited. The fact that two independent labs on different sides of the world had obtained virtually the same result gave me confidence in the findings. I was able to build on this result to do some novel analyses that helped establish direction of causal influences, and felt we at last we were getting somewhere. But my excitement was clearly not shared by the journal editor, who no doubt felt our findings were not sufficiently novel. I wasn’t particularly surprised by this decision, as this is the way things work. But is the focus on novelty good for science?

The problem is that unless novel findings are replicated, we don’t know which results are solid and reliable. We ought to know: we apply statistical methods with the sole goal of establishing this. But in practice, statistics are seldom used appropriately. People generate complex datasets and then explore different ways of analysing data to find statistically significant results. In electrophysiological studies, there are numerous alternative ways in which data can be analysed, by examining different peaks in a waveform, different methods of identifying peaks, different electrodes, different time windows, and so on. If you do this, it is all too easy for “false positives” to be mistaken as genuine effects (Simmons, Nelson, & Simonsohn, 2011). And the problem is compounded by the “file drawer problem” whereby people don’t publish null results. Such considerations led Ioannidis (2005) to conclude that most published research findings are false.

This is well-recognised in the field of genetics, where it became apparent that most early studies linking genetic variants to phenotypes were spurious (see Flint et al). The reaction, reflected in a recent editorial in Behavior Genetics has been to insist that authors replicate findings of associations between genes and behaviour. So if you want to say something novel, you have to demonstrate the effect in two independent samples.

This is all well and good, but requiring that authors replicate their results is unrealistic in a field where a study takes several years to complete, or involves a rare disorder. You can, however, create an expectation that researchers include a replication of prior work when designing a study, and/or use existing research to generate a priori predictions about expected effects.

It wouldn’t be good for science if journals only published boring replications of things we already knew. Once a finding is established as reliable, then there’s no point in repeating the study. But something that has been demonstrated at least twice in independent samples (replicable) is far more important to science than something that has never been shown before (novel), because the latter is likely to be spurious. I see this as a massive challenge for psychology and neuroscience.

In short, my view is that top journals should reverse their priorities and treat replicability as more important than novelty.

Unfortunately, most scientists don’t bother to attempt replications because they know the work will be hard to publish. We will only reverse that perception if journal editors begin to put emphasis on replicability.

A few individuals are speaking out on this topic. I recommend a blogpost by Brian Knutson who argued, “Replication should be celebrated rather than denigrated.” He suggested that we need a replicability index to complement the H-index. If scientists were rewarded for doing studies that others can replicate, we might see a very different rank ordering of research stars.

I leave the last word to Kent Anderson: “Perhaps we’re measuring the wrong things … Perhaps we should measure how many results have been replicated. Without that, we are pursuing a cacophony of claims, not cultivating a world of harmonious truths.”

Simmons, J., Nelson, L., & Simonsohn, U. (2011). False-Positive Psychology: Undisclosed Flexibility in Data Collection and Analysis Allows Presenting Anything as Significant Psychological Science, 22 (11), 1359-1366 DOI: 10.1177/0956797611417632

Time for academics to withdraw free labour

© www.CartoonStock.com

Jack is a sheep farmer. He gets some government subsidies, and also works long hours to keep his sheep happy and healthy. When his beasts are ready for slaughter, he offers them to an abattoir. The abattoir is very choosy and may reject Jack’s sheep, which is a disaster for him, as there is no other route to the market. If he is lucky the abattoir will accept the animals, slaughter them and sell them, at a large profit, to the supermarket. Jack does not see any of this money. The populace struggle to afford the price of meat, but the government has no control over this. When Jack feels like a nice piece of lamb, he buys it from the supermarket. Meanwhile, Jack provides his services for free as an inspector of other farmers’ animals.

Crazy story, right? But that’s the model that academic publishing follows. Academics work their butts off to get research funding, often from government. They then do the research and write up and submit it for publication. They run the gauntlet of picky reviewers and editors to get the work accepted for publication. Once it is published, it appears in a journal which is sold on to academic institutions for large profits. Post publication, the academic often has to pay a cost equivalent to several hardback books to get a formatted electronic copy of the article. Meanwhile, the journals justify this by arguing they have extensive costs. But in fact, it is the academic community that does the bulk of the work for free, acting as editors and peer reviewers. Increasingly, they are expected also to do copy editing and graphic design, tasks that were previously undertaken by professional journal staff.

It has taken many years for the torpid academic community to wake up to this ludicrous situation, but things are slowly starting to change. In some fields, academics are starting to take things into their own hands and cut commercial publishers out of the loop, but this still the exception rather than the rule. A more widely adopted innovation has been Open Access publishing. On the one hand, electronic publishing has made it possible for journal papers to be posted online and made freely accessible. On the other, major funders, notably NIH in the USA and the Wellcome Trust in the UK, have insisted that researchers whom they fund must make their published work Open Access. Obviously, something has to give: the publishers are not going to do their work for nothing. But the system does work, with a combination of new journals that are Open Access from the start, and older ones agreeing to make selected articles Open Access, in both cases for a fee. In general, the funders agree to pay the charge.

This week, however, a story broke suggesting that the traditional publishers are trying to fight back and force NIH to backtrack on its Open Access policy. Things hotted up with this post from Michael Eisen who noted that one major publisher, Elsevier, has been lobbying a NY Congresswoman, Carolyn Maloney, to persuade her to support a bill that would limit Open Access publishing. Harvard University gave a detailed response to the bill, which can be found here.

I want my response to this story to go beyond just tut-tutting and shaking my head.  Academics do have some power here. We provide the articles for Elsevier journals, and we do a lot of unpaid work reviewing and editing for them. None of us wants to restrict our opportunities for publishing, but these days there are a lot of outlets available. When deciding where to submit a paper, I suspect that most academics, like me, take little notice of who the publisher of a journal is. I focus more on whether the journal has a good editor, my prior experience of publication lags, and whether Open Access is available. But as from now, I shall include publisher in the criteria I adopt, and avoid Elsevier as far as I can. Also, if asked to review for a journal, I’ll check if it is in the Elsevier stable, using this handy website, and if so, I’ll explain why I’m not prepared to review. I suggest that if you are as annoyed as I am by this story, you do likewise, and refuse to engage with Elsevier journals.

Addendum, 10th January 2012

Some people on Twitter have asked if people should be paid for the work they do as author/editor/reviewer. Definitely not. It would just make matters worse, because publishers would factor in these costs and charge even more for journals.

No, I just want a change in the model whereby publishers make enormous and undeserved profits from academics. There are various ways this could be done.

1. The publishers could charge less: currently if you try and download a single journal article, you are charged around £20, even though the production costs are minimal.

2. Retain the current model but remove commercial publishers from the loop, with publication of research limited to learned societies, universities, funders.

3. Retain the current model but make all journals Open Access, with the funder or university paying a one-off publication fee.

4. More radically, move to a system such as arxiv, which I discussed here.

On the whole, academics are an interesting bunch. We’re not all that interested in money, but we are skilled and can produce things of commercial value. It’s a golden opportunity for someone who does want to make money to step in a make a profit. Publishers like Elsevier would have been fine if they hadn’t been so greedy and had charged modest sums for their product. Instead, they pushed costs as high as the market could bear, making huge profits, while at the same time giving authors less and less. (Copy-editors have become an endangered species). Instead of facilitating scientific communication, they have put obstacles in the way. But part of the blame lies with the academic community, who have been far too passive. We should have tackled this years ago before it got out of hand.

Will I still be tweeting in 2013?

A new phenomenon has occurred in my Twitter timeline of late. These are tweets from people I don’t follow that are labelled ‘Promoted Tweets’. When I see one, I block the sender. At present, they are rare enough for this to be only mildly irritating. But, as someone who remembers email in the days before spam (well, actually, I remember the days before email, and even the days before personal computers...), I worry that things could change fast.

When discussing Twitter with fellow academics, one thing they always ask is whether it isn’t just another tedious thing that you have to wade through, like email. Email is currently the curse of academics everywhere: in her New Year’s blogpost, Athene Donald noted her resolution to delete spam emails unread first thing in the day, and commentators on her blog clearly resonate to this, as I do. I have been cheerfully telling people that the wonderful thing about Twitter is that you only get messages from people you choose to follow, and it's not at all like email. Other people can’t get at you. Well, they can, a bit, in that they can get into your ‘mentions’ list by mentioning you, but your timeline has always been totally under your control. But the folks at Twitter have other plans, as explained here.

Needless to say, Twitter is a business. It’s not my God-given right to have a free Twitter account. If I engage with the system, I need to play by its rules. But I really am not that addicted. To me, having to fend off people who want my time, money or attention is extremely tedious. Twitter has been a delight precisely because it has been virtually free of such irritants. Make Twitter more like email, and I will just leave. Really.