Rating: 
Summary: Are we honestly saying . . .?
Review: That is exactly what I'm saying. You are a psych student -- look at the DSM-IV criteria for autistic disorder. Autism obviously existed prior to 1943, when Leo Kanner first identified and described the condition. Prior to that date, however, autistic children were lumped in with schizophrenics and/or other seriously mentally ill children. Because autism was first recognized as a separate phenomenon in 1943, when Freudian concepts reigned, the "experts" looked to Mommy as the cause. A fellow named Bruno Bettelheim wrote a book called The Empty Fortress, which was considered the authoritative text on autism for years. It stated unequivocally that children become autistic as a result of rejection by their cold, repressed mothers. During the 50's and 60's, when Axline wrote Dibs, anguished parents of autistic kids (like Dibs's unnamed mother) were cruelly blamed by child psychologists for causing their child's impairment. Despite a multitude of controlled studies showing no correlation between maternal behavior and autism, it wasn't until modern imaging techniques revealed the actual structural differences between the brains of autistic and non-autistic children that Bettelheim's theory of the "refrigerator mother" was entirely abandoned. (Some psychologists are still influenced by it. See the review below.)
Certainly parents can inflict cruel emotional abuse on their children, and certainly that abuse causes pain and dysfunction in those children. What we know today, however, is that emotional abuse does not cause autistic traits like those exhibited by Dibs! (According to the American Pediatric Association, one would look for lack of self confidence, nightmares, headaches or stomachaches with no medical cause, abnormal fears, attempts to run away.) At the outset of the book, 5 year old Dibs has no peer relations, little speech, delayed gross motor skills, and never makes eye contact. He adheres rigidly to his routines and has kicking and biting tantrums when they are disrupted. His expressive language skills are about the level of a three year old ("No go home!" "No lock doors!") Nonetheless he has islands of intellectual achievement. He recognizes numbers and has taught himself to read.
You may or may not believe that Axline's book is a legitimate account of a child being cured of these symptoms in 12 play therapy sessions. Leaving that aside, however, the fact is that today a child with those traits would be diagnosed on the autistic spectrum. He would receive at minimum language therapy, social skills therapy, and occupational therapy. And his unhappy mother and father would be referred to a support group, where they would learn (among other things) that Dibs is not being intentionally "bad," that there are better ways to cope with tantrums than locking him in his room, and that they are not to blame for his impairments.
"Let Me Hear Your Voice" by Catherine Maurice includes a poignant description of the grief parents of autistic children experience; and "Madness on the Couch" includes an account of the Bettelheim years, when despite all the evidence to the contrary, parents of autistic kids were treated with contempt.
Rating: 
Summary: wait a second...
Review: are you people honestly saying that by reading a condensed version of therapy sessions you can diagnose a child with 100% accuracy? admit for just one second that this intelligent woman is capable of seeing things that you might not see. i'm not claiming to be an expert, because i'm only a college psych student with little experience with autism, asperger's, or even emotional disturbance, but are you saying that the way a parent treats a child cannot have severe effects on their self-image and expression? childhood trauma is real, and you don't know what really happened in this child's home. there is a possibility virginia axline may have been wrong, but let's admit for a second that we don't know everything. if you read this book as a depiction of the struggle any of us can go through as we learn, grow, and become comfortable with our own selves, it is an amazing read. there is very little commentary on the symbolism of dibs' play, leaving so much room to learn about ourselves! i loved reading this book. luckily, there are still enough people in this world who see the beauty of this book to keep it in print.
Rating: 
Summary: Beautiful, captivating, misleading and outdated.
Review: This is indeed a beautiful and fascinating read. I totally agree with the "A reader from Rhode Island" however.
The book is so beautiful and fascinating because Dibs himself is so beautiful, inspiring and fascinating.
However the power of the therapy used is not truly convincing to anyone who has any real knowledge and understanding of mental "disorders."
What a lovely thought it is to think that if we just listened to people and let them "be" that they would be healed from mental difficulties. As a teenager I would have wholeheartedly taken on board these theories and ideas. However life has taught me that there is more involved in how the brain malfuctions and works then childhood experiences or relationships with parents.There is much that talking therapy cannot "cure"
"A Reader from Rhode Island" is certainly correct in saying that Dibs showed signs consistent with the autistic spectrum disoders. I know those of you who do not know about these disorders will be appalled at the wonderful, gifted Dibs being "labeled" austistic by anyone. The term I would use for Dibs is not autistic but Aspergers' which is on the Autistic spectrum.
Again you are appalled that I would use any such term to describe the wonderful gifted Dibs.
Well he obviously was gifted and wonderful and a special person. I also belive he has all the symtoms of Asperger's syndrome. A syndrome very common in families of scientists interestingly enough. (Dibs parents were both scientists.)They are very good at organising and putting things in sequence and order and analysing data. One or more of Dibs parents probably had Aspergers' themselves. It is a genetic condition. Such people are often gifted but have a lot of problems expressing emotions and dealing with people socially.
Certainly it is true that the way Dibs confused and distressed parents kept locking Dibs in his room would have made him worse.
"Miss A" helped this family interact socially and deal with their emotions a little bit more. She certainly did not cure Dibs with her dubious therapy (therapy most children get today at kindy, playgroup and from their parents)
She congratulates herself a great deal and yet at the end of the book Dibs is still not talking to people who say hello to him or to his father.
I wish the ideas that Axline puts forward were true it would be so fascinating, simple and such a fun area to work in. I have been offered the oppourtunity to study Play Therapy and it would be so interesting and fun and right up my alley and consistent with my talents. I'm no scientist I could never become a psychiatrist.
But in my heart and head I know that it is really outdated rubbish. No amount of talking or "letting a child be" is going to cure them of a neurological problem such as Aspergers syndrome.
What makes dealing with problems like this so complex is that one or both of Dibs parents may have been suffering from Aspergers' disorder themselves a condition which can make it very hard to express emotion. Therefor their emotionally withholding behaviour may have been part of there own conditions impacting Dibs mental health and making it worse.
So there may well have been truth to the Axline's analysis that Dibs was suffering from emotional deprivation. However I don't belive it is the whole story. This is a good example of why today's psychiatrists, counsellors, psychologists and psychotherapists should LISTEN to each other and work together instead of assuming that their individual fields of knowledge has all the answers.
Rating:
Summary: Beautiful, captivating, misleading and outdated.
Review: This is indeed a beautiful and fascinating read. I totally agree with "A reader from Rhode Island" however.
This book is so beautiful and fascinating because Dibs himself is so beautiful, inspiring and fascinating.
However, the power of the therapy used is not truly convincing to anyone who has any real knowledge and understanding of mental "disorders."
What a lovely thought it is to think that if we just listened to people and let them "be" that they would be healed from mental difficulties. As a teenager I would have wholeheartedly taken on board these theories and ideas. However life has taught me that there is more involved in how the brain malfuctions and works than childhood experiences or relationships with parents.
There is much that talking therapy cannot "cure"
"A Reader from Rhode Island" is certainly correct in saying that Dibs showed signs consistent with the autistic spectrum disoders. I know those of you who do not know about these disorders will be appalled at the wonderful, gifted Dibs being "labeled" autistic by anyone. The term I would use for Dibs is not autistic but Aspergers' which is on the Autistic spectrum.
Again you are appalled that I would use any such term to describe the wonderful gifted Dibs.
Well he obviously was gifted and wonderful and a special person. I also belive he has all the symtoms of Asperger's syndrome. A syndrome very common in families of scientists interestingly enough. (Dibs parents were both scientists.)They are very good at organising and putting things in sequence and order and analysing data. One or more of Dibs parents probably had Aspergers' themselves. It is a genetic condition. Such people are often gifted but have a lot of problems expressing emotions and dealing with people socially.
Certainly it is true that the way Dibs confused and distressed parents kept locking Dibs in his room would have made him worse.
However although "Miss A" helped this family interact socially and deal with their emotions.
She certainly did not cure Dibs with her dubious therapy (therapy most children get today at kindy, playgroup and from their parents)
She congratulates herself a great deal and yet at the end of the book Dibs is still not talking to people who say hello to him or to his father.
I wish the ideas that Axline puts forward were true it would be so fascinating, simple and such a fun area to work in. I have been offered the oppourtunity to study Play Therapy and it would be so interesting and fun and right up my alley and consistent with my talents. I'm no scientist I could never become a psychiatrist.
But in my heart and head I know that it is really outdated [stuff]. No amount of talking or "letting a child be" is going to cure them of a neurological problem such as Aspergers syndrome.
Rating:
Summary: Just like Freud, captivating, gripping, and deeply harmful.
Review: I was appalled to see Dibbs as required reading for my daughter's eleventh grade psychology unit. The book was written in 1964!!!! It's way outdated, and reflects cruel but persistent beliefs about families with autistic children. Someone commented that Dibbs couldn't be autistic, because "Dr. Axline makes clear that he's not." Of course she did - - the whole book is a tribute (and a commercial) for its warm, loving author and her play therapy method. To anyone who knows anything about autism spectrum, the symptoms she describes are red flags for this disorder. One quick example -- Dr. A describes the child's difficulty with transitioning from one activity to another. He goes into total meltdown when he has to go home from school. She takes this as evidence of the inadequate parenting which goes on at home. But of course she never sees the scene that goes on when Dibbs has to leave home for school. She reports that when he arrives at school he "just stands there" whimpering, waiting until someone came to him and led him into the classroom. She also reports that after the battle to go home from school, Dibbs sometimes screamed all the way out to the car, and sometime became "silent -- limp and defeated." But, she never makes the connection between the "limp and defeated" Dibbs going home, and the equally limp and defeated Dibbs arriving at school. Along those lines, she takes the mother's begging her to treat Dibbs at the family home as evidence of maternal selfishness or laziness. That's because she was never there for the biting, kicking and screaming that his bewildered mother has to endure every time she takes her son somewhere. Sure, the book is a beautiful and inspiring story, but it's probably largely fiction. A child who is as severely impaired as Dibbs is not going to recover through six or seven episodes of play therapy. Although Dr. Axline is far less cruel and judgmental than most 1960s child psychologists would be regarding the parents, this is still a harmful book. Like Freud, it's fascinating and engaging to people who never had to deal with an actual child with mental illness. Prior to Freud, serious mental illnesses like schizophrenia and autism were reseached as the brain disorders they are. Thanks to this arrogant, poetic, and imaginative man, decades of research opportunities were lost. One day, in the not too distant future, I am certain that play therapy for children like Dibbs, just like psychoanalysis for schizophrenics, will be likened to the use of leeches for curing pneumonia.
Rating:
Summary: dibs in search of self
Review: This review is in reply to the reviewer who suggested that Dibs problem was that he was autistic, not emotionally troubled. As a psychologist familiar with both autism and emotional impairment, my opinion is that Dibs clearly suffered from an attack on his selfhood--his spirit. I do agree that to blame parents for a neurological disorder such as autism is wrong! However, isn't it possible that the symptoms Dibs displayed were from emotional impairment, not autism? (neuroscience suggests that lack of contact/affection CAN impair the brain in areas related to emotional regulation, for example). Also, how do you explain the incredible disparity between Dibs behavior with Miss A (where he felt safe) and his father (where he didn't)? This book is a remarkable testimony to the human spirit.
Rating:
Summary: My thoughts about Dibs
Review: The first book I read in High School was Dibs: In Search Of Self. It was therapy reading it, because a lot of what Dibs went through was what I went through. When parents don't believe in their children or raise them in an atmosphere of self-doubt, children often turn out the way Dibs did. What makes the book good, in my opinion, is that Dibs through play therapy learns to be comfortable in his own skin and embrace the world around him. His parents ruined him, but not beyond repair. I firmly believe that every child can be saved. Too bad there aren't enough Dr Axline's in this world to help, guide, encourage, and save children.
Rating: 
Summary: Book perpetuates outdated myths about Autism
Review: Dibs in Search of Self is moving and enduringly popular.
However it helps to perpetuate one of the longest lasting myths
in the Mental Health profession. Dibs is AUTISTIC. He is not emotionally disturbed, and his condition is caused by a neurological disorder, rather than by his cruel parents. In fact, Ms. Axline actually is cruel to the parents by blaming them for a biological, neurolgical condition that today is seen as most likely due to a genetic cause. I am distressed to see the reviews of all the well intentioned readers who are unfamiliar with Autism. Studies show that nearly no autistic children who received play therapy alone as a treatment intervention emerge from their autism. Dibs is one of the few such cases ever. Every behavior Ms. Axline describes, from difficulty making transitions, poor eye contact, pronoun reversals, delayed language development, poor play skills, poor peer relatedness, precotious reading, high intelligence but uneven performance, delayed motor skills (his poor coordination, per Axline is sympotamatic of being "tied up in knots" emotionally, rather than the truthful, gross and fine motor delays), and the delayed self help skills- such as taking off his coat, are all classically sympomatic of and autistiv spectrum disorder diagnosis. The book is disengenuous to characterize this problem as emotional. Autistic children do have emotions and inner lives. Sadly, thousands have wasted years of potentially fruitful behavioral treatment based on the misleading information in this book. I suggest to any reader who is truly interested in autism to spend some time researching recent books and not one which conveys many of the erroneous fallacies of the past. Based on this erroneous assumption of the 50's and 60's, that Autism was caused by cold and rejecting parents, "refridgerator mothers", the entire medical profession failed to do ANY medical Autism research until the last ten years. Only now are scientists revealing the biological causes of Dibs atypical behavior and helping to find a cure. Thanks to Axline's false assumptions, the parents of Dibs were blamed for a medical condition, their grief or inability to relate to a son who did not respond to anyone, was blamed on them- and thousands of other autistic "Dibs" who did not repsond to Axline's magic wand were condemned to live out life untreated. As with other neurolgical disorders, such as strokes, behavior modification is the primary treatment of Autism today and has yielded very positive results for many children. Hopefully one day we will have a cure.
Rating: 
Summary: Dibs in search of Self
Review: I think dibs is a very good book. When i first started the book I thought it would be a very boring book. Virginia M. Axline did a very good job writing something that would normally be extremely boring into something that is very interesting and fun to read. The back of the book gives a good summary. Overall this book is 4.5 stars. After the about the second chapter I couldn't put the book down.
Rating:
Summary: A wounderful book
Review: I first read this book when I was about 10. And I couldn't put it down. It was wounderful how this very educated boy, who people thought was retarded came out of his shell. I think everyone should read this book.
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