Six years ago J.J. Hanley noticed that her three-year-old son, Timothy, was acting strange. “He was not speaking, and he wouldn’t look at me or anybody else,” she says. “He wanted to be alone all the time and had some repetitive behavior and a sensitivity to certain sights and sounds.”
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Hanley’s son’s condition steadily got worse. After seven months another doctor diagnosed Timothy as mildly autistic. Hanley, who lives in Wilmette, was “devastated” and spent three weeks in shock before deciding to educate herself. A former journalist, she devoured everything she could get her hands on about autism. As she read, she kept coming across references to “refrigerator mothers,” a term coined in the 1960s by Bruno Bettelheim, director for 30 years of the University of Chicago’s Orthogenic School, a Freudian-based treatment center for disturbed children. His influential 1967 book The Empty Fortress: Infantile Autism and the Birth of the Self blamed autistic behavior on the mother’s emotional frigidity. His ideas were later discredited–autism is now widely considered a neurological disorder of unknown origin–but the habit of blaming the mother hasn’t gone away.
While Hanley concentrated on her son–spending 40 hours a week on treatment and occupational, speech, and language therapy–the idea lurked at the back of her mind. Three years ago Timothy’s condition had improved enough for her to do something about it. “Autism is a very visual disorder,” she says of her decision to make a film. “You have to see it to get a handle on it.”
Hanley, Quinn, and Simpson, as well as five of the women featured in Refrigerator Mothers, will appear at Saturday night’s premiere of the film at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State (312-846-2800). A reception and discussion follow the 8 PM screening; tickets are $8. It will also be shown on Tuesday, July 16, at 9 PM on Channel 11.
