Nonconscious Movements: From Mystical Messages to Facilitated Communication. - book reviews

Chapter 6 is the most provocative and debatable chapter, as Spitz acknowledges. What, he asks, is going on in the conscious and unconscious motivations of the facilitators who make up unfounded charges of sexual abuse? Spitz considers "surface" explanations, based on behavioral principles such as reinforcements, as well as "depth" explanations, based on nonconscious motivations.

Some facilitators, he believes, are driven by motives that are hardly mysterious: Making dramatic accusations through the method of FC gives them a means of controlling others, exacting revenge on parents and colleagues (via accusations supposedly made by the autistic child), and getting attention and power. Other facilitators, he believes, may be releasing the "conflicting and troubling feelings that resulted from their own abuse" (p. 159). And many are acting out a self-fulfilling prophecy; in their training, many facilitators are actually told to expect their students to raise charges of abuse.

According to Spitz, facilitators fall into a form of dissociation, using the keyboard like a form of automatic writing (a phenomenon in which subjects in a trance, under hypnosis, or another "altered state" produce poems, writing, or images of which they are unaware). For Spitz, dissociation, like involuntary muscle movements, is another result of the adaptation during evolution of a subconscious capacity to process information and perform activities without clogging up consciousness. In my view, Spitz tries to do too much in this slight chapter, digressing into dissociative versus sociocognitive theories of multiple personality disorder and false memory syndrome. But I completely concur with its conclusion: that "the founder and disseminators of facilitated communication created a fertile breeding ground for automatic writing in which a ventriloquist communicates through a live mannequin who cannot speak out in denial. If we were asked to design conditions in which individuals could unwittingly release inner material of which they were unaware or which they would not have released under ordinary circumstances, we could do no better than invent facilitated communication ..." (p. 157).

In spite of the mountain of empirical evidence that has discredited it, Spitz warns, FC "continues to spread like a virus run rampant" (p. 175). Its proponents don't back down because they are eager to protect their livelihoods, reputations, and self-esteem, and undoubtedly too because they are scared to face the disappointment and wrath (not to mention lawsuits) of parents and educators if they say, "we were wrong."

These vested interests and face-saving denials of incontrovertible evidence are the reason, Spitz correctly observes, that further research discrediting FC "will simply fall on deaf ears" (p. 167). Precisely - which is why it is so important for the rest of us to be listening. Spitz's book is important because students and professionals alike need to be reminded that FC is only the latest - but not the last - in a long line of hoaxes, to which we are all vulnerable if we do not use reason and evidence to counterbalance our human longing for easy cures, quick fixes, and miracles.