Neurotypical-conforming therapy frames autistic difference as a problem to erase.

Evidence

The most telling line in Ellenby’s piece may be one in which she describes her son, having lost the pitched battle, sitting quietly in the auditorium. In these “precious moments,” she writes, he “is indistinguishable from his peers.” It is a direct echo of a notorious claim made by the psychologist credited with inventing applied behavior analysis (ABA), Ole Ivar Lovaas: in a 1987 article, he wrote that nearly half the children treated with his version of ABA became, according to their teachers, “indistinguishable from their normal friends.” … This is a terribly painful message to send to young people whose minds are different: that their very existence is a problem for others to solve, a disorder to cure, or at least to hide. Having a child who does not fit conventional definitions of normalcy, who is distinguishable from their peers, can be an extraordinary gift. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 655

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘indistinguishable from peers’ mirror reading echoes the doppelganger/double theme running through the whole book — a parent’s nightmare of forced sameness that Klein folds into her central device. Also connects to the ‘perfectibility race in a world of so many little mirrors’ line in the same chapter. — connects to: Emotion recognition research originated for autism therapy before commercial appropriation — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 896
• DEEPTHINKING: Klein loops the anti-vax parent’s ‘indistinguishable’ ideal back through Lovaas’s original ABA goal, then turns it against itself — the device of finding the enemy’s language inside the mainstream. This is a density of recursion unusual even for her.