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

Everyone in the field of mental retardation, and for that matter every student and teacher of psychology, should read this smart, informative, fascinating little book. If you persist in reading this review instead of rushing off to your bookstore, I'll try to explain why I make such an extravagant recommendation.

For many years, Herman H. Spitz has been investigating claims of new pedagogical and psychological methods for raising the intelligence of people with mental retardation. "Alas," he writes (p. vii), "I found no magic cures; what I found instead was an astonishing variety of human behavior on the part of those making the claims, ranging from outright fraud to honest self-deception." When facilitated communication (FC) came along, Spitz recognized another "popular delusion [that] was happening not in the past but right before our eyes, presenting an opportunity not to be missed" (p. vii). Spitz recognized that the basis of FC was the simple, universal, but widely misunderstood phenomenon of involuntary muscle movement - in this case, the unconscious movement of the "facilitator's" hand over that of the child with autism.

Involuntary (unconscious) muscle movements are ubiquitous and normal; they are essential to survival. You couldn't live a day if your conscious mind had to process all the things your body is doing at any given moment - uncrossing your legs so your knee doesn't go numb, adjusting your shoulders while you sit at the computer, waving your hands to emphasize an argument, nodding your head ever so slightly (or shaking it in disapproval) while you listen to a friend's latest adventures, driving the car while your mind worries about a deadline. Many nonconscious movements are minute, even unobservable: a dowsing rod eventually bends down not because it has found water, but because the hand holding the rod becomes fatigued. Likewise, Clever Hans - the turn-of-the-century "thinking horse" who allegedly had astonishing mathematical talents - was a clever horse, all right, but not at math. He was clever at reading the slight involuntary head movements his human observers made when he pawed the right answer.

We are so oblivious to most of our physical movements, especially when our attention is diverted elsewhere, Spitz argues, that many people refuse to believe they occur at all - or they ascribe these movements to "other worldly beings or to mysterious forces that have escaped scientific scrutiny" (p. 26). When facilitators deny that they are influencing the responses of autistic children, Spitz notes, they aren't lying; they really believe it. Likewise, he notes, "Automatic script writers, Ouija board users, and facilitators do not consciously know what they write and deny that they are directing the writing. Pendulum holders reject the idea that they move the pendulum and dowsers that they move the branch. Table movers believe that they follow, not move, the table. Mind-readers make use of the fact that their guides unwittingly generate muscle movements that can be read by a sensitive and skillful muscle reader . . . These follies never end" (pp. 100-101). Indeed they don't. Today, for instance, there is renewed enthusiasm over dowsing rods, not for finding water but for almost everything else. People are dowsing for stock market buys and to make the "right" selection in personals ads!

Spitz sets out to understand the reasons that most facilitators refuse to believe that they are unwittingly guiding their partners, and the reasons that the people who promote FC continue to deny the "clear objective evidence" (p. 24) that the method is a sham. His quest takes him on an enlightening examination of FC's all-too-numerous historical and contemporary relatives: the many delusions and outright hoaxes that have been perpetrated by people who fail to recognize (or who intentionally disregard evidence of) the ubiquity of nonconscious movements.

Nonconscious Movements consists of eight chapters. The first four concern phenomena produced by involuntary muscle movements: a detailed and damning analysis of facilitated communication; a history of Clever Hans and Lady the Wonder Horse, who supposedly could receive messages telepathically (you will learn far more about the fascinating story of Clever Hans and his handlers, by the way, than you ever got in introductory psychology); a discussion of the mechanisms shared by facilitated communication and clever horses; and "Other Phenomena," such as pendulums, mind-reading, table moving, dowsing, Ouija boards, and automatic handwriting. Chapter 5 reviews scientific studies of involuntary muscle movements. Chapter 6, "Additional Psychological Mechanisms Relevant for Understanding Facilitator Behavior," explores possible reasons for the alarming number of false allegations of sexual abuse that facilitators have communicated. Chapter 7 reviews the normal cognitive processes that make people receptive to beliefs in FC and its relatives, including the self-fulfilling prophecy, cognitive dissonance, and biases of self-deception. Chapter 8 is a brief conclusion.

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.

Carol Tavris is a social psychologist, writer, and CSICOP Fellow. She is co-author of the Addison-Wesley textbook Psychology, in its fifth edition in 1998. This review originally appeared in the American Journal on Mental Retardation and is published here by permission.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group