IVAR LOVAAS:  Well, I’m Ivar and I am a professor of psychology at the University of California in Los Angeles and here I’m operating a clinic for children with autism.  We've been doing that now since about 1962, so the last quite a few years we are very fortunate that we have a major funding from the National Institute of Mental Health in Washington D.C. a federal agency that helps support it. I’m fortunate that my teaching work here has been very minimal. I have ample opportunity to do research; I've had access to and the help of hundreds of very bright students. So we have worked together in a co-operative fashion and young people who are open minded, creative and like children. And then I have had a lot of support from parents who are already in their middle 60's, Bettelheim and currently Bershaw holding fort, and their parents came to us, and we comforted each other so there has been enormous strength that we have gained from working with parents. In fact in early studies we found that parents, when they work with children, they help them develop treatment programmes did better than the professionals. In the 1975 studies a very elite list and well known institution and then we look at the children 2 or 3 years later and they all regressed and are falling apart, in contrast to parents who receive the children and who we helped with the parent training, they did better.

EILEEN HOPKINS:  They have an emotional investment?

Also, they weren't biased, they didn’t marry it up to a theory of autism, they didn’t make money on defending that theory. I think the parents are open minded and biased, yeah.

You've been working in the field for almost 40 years now, can you describe your view of the past 40 years in autism?

You mean what has happened.

Yes,

Well, I think, well lots of things have happened. I think the major development, the most significant development is that the profession is moving more and more to a scientific inquiry and less of philosophical positions by scientific inquiry. I mean that persons are talking, they are specifying more and more what exactly they are doing to the kids, and then having specified that, what kind of data, objective scientific data can you present after that, now we are far, far from having come to this position but yet I can see the beginnings of this scientific foundation for work in autism, which I think autism won't go anywhere we are not going to make any progress unless we use, all the fields are used like medicines we have to become scientifically orientated and this a relatively recent development.

So do you think these will be the key areas of work for the next few years?

Oh, yeah there will be every indication is that, well I’m somewhat biased perhaps in this, but the field is moving away from what's called psycho dynamics psychiatry and it's moving into brain behaviour relationship and neurophysiology and persons in these fields have always been scientists and have always tested the hypothesis and so on... so that’s a shift from psycho dynamics psychiatry and into a brain behavioural relationship I think that we are going we can take some considerable comfort in that, science has solved a lot problems and ultimately we will solve the problems of autism as well.

From the intuitive into the….

Objective, yeah

We've talked a bit about the next few years but what do you think the key developments will be?

Well I think I answered that, the key developments will be that people document what they are finding using data, now you know I have never really and I don't know anyone else who has really been able to predict what the cause of autism is or what effective treatment is going to be and I think most discoveries are going to come by accident and this has characterised other sciences, so I think the key development is that people move away from a theory orientated kind of pursuit to a database pursuit.

We've been talking about causation being found by accident do you ever think there will be a cure?

Yeah, I do I think there will be a cure for autism when the neurological basis of autism is discovered and removed and if I were to guess on how quickly that's going to happen I guess it would be gradually. My opinion is that there is no such thing as autism, so one way is to say there are several kinds of autism. What we are finding out is that taking just the language of autistic children, or trying to help them develop language, we're finding even in the language there are tremendous differences so there probably, just looking at the language alone, there are probably three, or four or five or even ten differences in aetiology so the causation is going to be much more varied and much more complex and more difficult to get hold of so, or to identify the notion that autism is a unitary syndrome will cause definitely 10 or even more. I think pursuing the problem as if you were a person with autism is not fruitful, I think you have to break the problem down into attention problems, language problems, the social problem, the emotional problems, the ritualistic problems, the self injury and the tantrums.  We have to then go at it piece by piece and what I’m trying to say even if we take one behaviour like language you’re probably going to get a multiplicity of causes. Here's a good example; some kids learn receptives before expressives but we have kids that don't make any progress on receptives until we teach them expressives so expressives are in and handle receptives. We have some children who learn to imitate and some children who don't learn to imitate; some children can acquire concepts of prepositions but if you go to pronouns and time concepts they can't manage it so you see here with language alone there's probably a multiplicity of different type of problems that occur, so it's going to be along trip ahead and it's going to take time, 30 years.  Well obviously, the field is very, very active I think there will be major progress in 30 years but the cure for autism no, I don't think we’re going to find that for some of the children we’re going to understand what their problems are, for others we won't.

So do you think that the cure might, you might cure one aspect of autism say the language, so you may be partially…

Partially there right exactly, or you may cure autism in some children you know the problems called autism and you may make minimal progress on others until you find a cure for them and that's exactly what our data shows. If you treat the kids they all look alike in the beginning — they’re treated for a year or two and there's enormous individual differences here. So I take that to mean that the definition of autism; I think autism is a blind alley I do think that it's held us back and I think that I would say I see the beginning of what's called a paradox shift in science. The whole theory of autism or schizophrenia or whatever is not a useful way to find the answers.

Do you think we try to fit children into autism rather than the other way around?

Yeah, something like that.

How would you sum up your contribution to the field of autism?

Well, I think from the very beginning, well it's a long answer, I worked psychoanalytical for many years. I was trained psychoanalytic starting about 52-53 I worked which pretty much tie in with psychoanalytical theory's of this and that and neurosis, autism, and schizophrenia till about 1961-62 and then over a few years. The post doctorate of the years at the University of Washington.  I had a fortunate opportunity of working with persons who are quite really theory based and I think your very well known English psychologists have published many uses and abusive psychology and everybody and all graduate students read that.  And then the fact of the matter is that we were doing treatment and we didn’t know whether the treatment was effective or not.  I worked with schizophrenics at the time and if you made money on it you probably would want to believe, but I was fortunate I was a student and I didn’t make any money on it, so I could be more flexible, I didn’t have to marry up to it so about 1961-62 we kind of developed an assessment and it was called a multiple response apparatus.  We could objectively record several of the behaviours of the children, concurrently, so we looked at the self standard of the tantrum, we looked at the echolalia, we looked at toy play and so forth and we could record exactly the beginning of toy play, end of toy play and the kind of toy play, so we developed an accurate measure of the children’s behaviour because behaviours meaning whatever you see the child doing, being happy and laughing or self stimulating and so on and so once we had that recording apparatus and we could actually specify exactly what the kids were doing then we introduce the treatments variable to see if they change or not, you see that was a breakthrough we had back then and that is that we developed this which came out of need and we’re not doing our clients a service anymore because we did not know what was happening to them. When we did the treatment now we have at least begun to see this is what we have, we have this accurate recording of emotional life and a language, intellectual development of these kids that was the main thing. 

The other thing we did, we did what is called experimentation. That is: Sometimes we did group designs, that is, we have some kids that got the treatment and some kids didn’t get a treatment. So we look at the group afterwards but then when we did this, it was difficult to do when you deal with the slightly more subtle things and individual differences were so enormous that the group leader didn’t really help that.

We set up what was called a multiple base line design and we played around with that and already in 1963-64, kind of in a naïve way, but the field developed more and more sophistication using the same child as his own control, so that we have some children that we would hold treatment away from for 3 weeks for the baseline and then we introduced the treatment and then for the other children we would hold them in baseline for, say 6 weeks, and then introduce the treatment so we could do a multiple baseline across a few children and show it’s the onset of the treatment that makes the difference and so I think I was fortunate. I had two kinds of things happened at the University of Washington, when I went to school; one was the psychoanalytical involvement and the other one was, there was a lot of behaviour oriented psychologists (we would call them objective psychologists) at the time, I believe the word was at the time and so you couldn’t escape some of their influence. See I was very, very fortunate to come to America and I came by accident with my father during world war 2 after being in the Norwegian Army and there was no future there and I got a scholarship in a college in Ireland called Luther College where I had a whole year there free board, room and everything, washing dishes to get pocket money and buy cigarettes but came to the University of Washington and after a while when you are at the university we get responsive in a department. The responsive really takes care of you and so you develop a relationship with a person who really guides your inquiry and I had 2 or 3 mentors that I got to know extremely well and after a while you pass your exams and then you do research with them and some of them accept you into the group and then to have this close relationship with the scientist. One was a guy called Espiro who did a lot of psycholinguistics and that became my interest in languages where I developed a language programme for children with autism. The other one of learning theories, Mark Chris Smith, we spent hours and hours days and months together, years in fact.  I learned a lot about them as people and their philosophy and ethics and there was an incredible marvelling besides academic stuff, so I was very lucky.

It’s true there’s nothing as a course of discovery.  It’s just that you look a lot at what is going on and by accident you see something and say “Oh my God, I didn’t know that”.

A bit like those pictures you stare at and look at them until you see a field.

That’s right exactly.  So you have to be very patient and I guess I am very patient and then of course, if you work with autism you have to be an extremely patient person and of course the answers are so slow in coming but what I am doing now, it really reflects what I have learned from my mentors at University of Washington who I developed personal relationships with after so many years as a research assistant.

And you are now able to offer that to colleagues everywhere.

Yes, I am, I have learned a lot because I have a class of 190 students, I am going to see at 3 o’clock or 3.15.  I see them twice a year, spring and fall, and then I have what I call a practical lab session, so the students are doing really well on this introductory course. They can call me at the clinic and they work very very hard, they have to have a B or A in exams.  They then develop this tremendous interest in the kids and so I take full advantage of all their discoveries.

Well you see, I can write it up because one thing you learn is in the field, if you learn to write, you see they can’t write.  But we work together in everything.  We are co-authors in everything.

So I have been very fortunate at UCLA, it was a new University when I came here. California had an enormous amount of funds and the people in California have given incredible sums to the University I mean they get millions and millions and millions of dollars to develop this and that and everything, so the teaching load is low, opportunity to research is favourable and so you know it’s just how it happened.  I take no personal credit for it.  I just get that from my environment going back to my mum and dad.  I have a very good mom and that’s very important and I owe it all to her.

That’s a good way to end.  Thank you very much