viewed as a refusal to engage in social or physical contact rather than an inability. Therefore, the assumption was that the familial environment being hostile was the cause of the child's refusal to become engaged. Professionals labeled this concept " the refrigerator mother." Needless to say, this view caused much anxiety and pain for the parents of the autistic and further led to their treatment along with their child. Naturally the treatment was also psychoanalytic in its focus, attempting to have mothers admit to their subconscious "rejection" of their child.
             Today, much enlightened thinking, coupled with scientific research has disproved this notion. The evidence today suggests that autism results from certain subtle types of brain damage, which can be produced by a number of different factors including genetics. These factors affect cognitive functioning, and help explain why a high percentage of these children are also mentally retarded. Many researchers have suggested the involvement of the cerebrum. Computerized tomography brain scans have found gross abnormalities in 26 percent of the studied cases.
             Some researchers have also found a variety of cerebral abnormalities. They have found that autistic children showed significant developmental delays in this area. They found that reverse asymmetry of the two cerebral hemispheres, specifically in the parietal occipital areas, was significantly more prevalent among autistic patients than non-autistic patients. They felt that since this area of the cerebrum is near the posterior language zone, this would account for the relative strength of visual-spatial capacities as compared with language capacities in autistic children.
             The comparative strength of information-processing capacity in the two hemispheres also showed that autistic children are predominantly right-hemisphere processors. Experiments involving listening preferen...