Regarding the sixth chapter (five pages) of the second book of Consumption, I would like to quote this passage:
Mum was patient with me in her response, a brief irritation crossing her face as she considered Dad’s encouragement of atheism in me. She paused for a second, thought hard, and then replied, “you can believe whatever you want, Benjamin. I’m not stopping you. But I’d say to pray tonight and ask God to help you come to terms with things.”
“He’ll [his father] hate me, Mum.”
“No, no, it’ll be ok, son, he’s a patient person, and he loves you boundlessly; I think he’ll listen to you, provided you’re polite and respectful. Just see if this helps, ok?”
The big problem with “poisonous pedagogy” is that it idealises the figure of the father to the point of considering him a kind of God the Father in his relationship with his son. The quoted paragraph reminds me of a scene from LOTR, which also appears in Peter Jackson’s movie, in which Gandalf lies to Faramir, claiming that his father loves him when in fact he wants him dead (five years ago I talked about the lie of the “sage” Gandalf here).
In real life, unlike in fairy tales some parents not only love but hate their children at the same time: that’s why they have broken minds. As Ronald Laing once said, despite the claims of biological psychiatry, those who are labelled schizophrenic do have broken minds: their psyches are divided by this Jekyll-Hyde behaviour of the abusive parent.
What I have been quoting from Consumption gives an idea of the nightmare Benjamin lived through.
But for those looking for Hollywood-style entertainment, I would suggest watching Shine, which Ben and I saw yesterday (albeit separated by the Atlantic). Like Consumption, that film, which won an Oscar for Best Actor, gives a fairly good idea of how an abusive father can schizophrenise the son he loves most!
8 replies on “Consumption, 12”
My mother and I have an extremely turbulent relationship. Sometimes we go from loving each other to hating each other several times within the same day! Raising an autistic child has been very hard for her, but this is what she signed up for. She just never considered the possibility that so much could go wrong. No parent does. They all think they’re giving birth to a saviour. That was actually what some clairvoyant woman told my mother while she was pregnant with me. My mother gobbled it up, of course, as any expectant mother would.
Has it ever occurred to you that your mother caused your condition?
It took me a long time to realise that my mother’s engulfing behaviour had caused my handicapping self-consciousness in my teens. The first time I sensed it was when, already in my twenties, I wrote the draft of a long epistle that would eventually become my Letter to mom Medusa.
I don’t see how she could have. I was diagnosed when I was very young, around four or five years old. I think there’s a very good chance that vaccines are connected to autism. I’ve been on substack for about nine months now and there is a huge amount of material on there about autism and vaccines. I’ve never really bought Dutton’s paternal age explanation, since older men fathered many children in the Victorian era and there was no autism back then.
You haven’t read anything about how some mothers treat their babies so distantly that they cause autism.
My mother wasn’t distant at all. She was very doting and protective. It was quite overbearing, actually. A few months after I was born, the Bulger murder happened. Two ten year old boys murdered a toddler. The story was international news for weeks. It definitely had an impact on the way my mother raised me.
How do you know? A baby doesn’t have memories like that!
My grandmother and other family members were there, you know. They have testified as to how protective she was.
“Protective…” Do you think your grandmother (perhaps your mother’s mother) could portray family dynamics? A leap of faith. The point is that you were not there as an adult.