Not to mention a bag of untrue ideas of institutions. Gratitude? Ridiculous when they treat you badly, unless you’re a matryr of course. And gratitude, in a healthy recipriocal relationship, goes both ways, doesn’t it?

So I decided to address at least part of the worldview. I couldn’t address a lot of the other parts of it, the ones that come in general from being someone who runs an institution and actually thinks your inmates appreciate you (or should) for it (!), or in general someone who comes up with your own ideas of who people are and who they should be and how you should make them who you think they should be, but I did address the strange way in which conceptions of autism have mutated over time into something barely recognizable.

Buten deserves all he gets.

So do all the non-autistic experts who presume to know our reality. Some of them get close, but the majority are just off the mark. Sorry.

Indeed the premise of Buten’s book is scary as is most psychoanalysis. It’s a well worn path, since Bettelheim. I had thought him decent and civilised. It looks like I was wrong, and blinded by a certain urbane sheen.