Dear Javier. In general I try to be polite at this board, and this may well be the first time I am not so. If anyone knows so little about autists and psychopaths as you, he or she should certainly not be so arrogant.
As regards Rainman I shall quote from Edward Dolnick (1998): Madness on the Couch. Blaming the Victim in the Heyday of Psychoanalysis.
“Compare Hinckley with Dustin Hoffman’s Rain Man (the portrayal of autism was so accurate that the film mighty have been a documentary.”) (p. 13)
“A woman named Ruth Sullivan tells a similar story. The fifth of her seven children, Joseph, is autistic. Now thirty-six years old, Joseph was one of Dustin Hoffman’s models for Rain Man. The movie stuck faithfully to the facts of autism, Sullivan says. The feats that seem most incredible – Raymond’s memorizing the telephone book, or recognizing at a glance that a box contained 246 matches, or multiplying 1,739 by 5,826 in his head as quickly as someoine else could punch the number into a calculator – are all taken from life.” (p. 175)
“Ruth Sullivan, the woman whose son was a model for Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man” (p. 185)
- - - At present the diagnosis “psychopathy” is no longer used in the Western world. It is not included in Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). But I shall not grumble about a word since it is perfectly clear what you have in mind. However, there are different varieties of psychopaths, just like there are different varieties of autists. (I actually wrote a little in my doctoral thesis about one female autist who was said to be “the most dangerous woman in Sweden”.)
reply
share