ARW – Project France 
PDF Il Sole 24 Ore is the third italian dailynewspaper (circa 300 000 sold per day). In the Sunday culture page, Gilberto Corbellini, Professor in Medical History, tackles the issue of autism in France in an article titled “The Autim of Lacanians”.
First, he ask himself “Is there something rotten in France ?”. Obviously, his answer is yes. He goes on detailing the decision against the film “The Wall” of Sophie Robert and why censorship is a political attack. He explains how the influence of the lacanian psychoanalytical theories explains the lag of France in the treatment of autism. He details how France has already been sentenced by the Council of Europe in 2004 and refuses to accept international definitions of autism. He then attacks the nationalism of French psychoanalysts.
Excerpts (translated from Italian):
“In fact, the decision is not only a heinous attack on freedom of speech, led by arguments that offend the logic and transparency of the law. Probably it is also a political act. Because it falls at the beginning of the year in which autism has been declared by the French prime minister, “Grande Cause Nationale 2012″.
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What determines the delay of the French? Simply by the pernicious influence, culture and politics of psychoanalysis.
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Ignoring even the decisions of the World Health Organization, the French psychoanalysts insist on considering autism as a psychosis caused by excessive coldness of the mother towards the child in utero and / or after birth. With what evidence supports this ridiculous claim? None. Only dogma invented in the sixties by dubious characters: the case of Lacan, who explained the concept of autism with the “mother crocodile,” intrusive and castrating, or Bettelheim with the hallucinatory image of the “empty fortress”, to define autistic children, and the “refrigerator mother” to explain the disease by reducing it to a disturbance of emotional mother / child, the origin of which there would be precisely the “frigidity” maternal.
It is evident how, by practicing psychiatry with these ideas, you can only do harm. Everyone can think whatever they like. But in the age of evidence-based medicine, a doctor should be able to empirically demonstrate that its treatment works. Otherwise he/she is a charlatan. It goes against the ethical constraint of not doing harm to patients and delivering the best existing treatments.
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Moreover, the widespread aversion of the French humanist circles, and even among psychoanalysts, to the ideas that are born in the Anglo-Saxon world is almost a cliché.”
Read the article of Gilberto Corbellini in Italian on Il Sole 24 Ore
Given that the author uses in his title, ” The autism of lacanians”, the term “autism” as something that points to a deficit, as something that makes you inferior, an underdog, bad positioned, in short, as an insult, it is not an exaggeration to assume that even if you are not psy, even if you have not a case of autism in your family, your guts will get you to the not reckless conclusion that all what he writes down after his title is ethically flawed. It should be rejected completely, with or without the so called evidence based whatever. This article is ethically repugnant from it’s title. His author despises the subjects he pretends to care about.
Don’t take it too seriously. The author probably tried to show some humour. It is a great piece otherwise.
I prefer self- humor.