wisdom that something can ’t be accomplished
because the Establishment says it can ’t. Often
The Relevance of The
Organon and the Epi-
demic of Autism or ASD
Luc De Schepper, USA
There is neither a greater epidemic nor a more
polarizing one than that of ASD right now.
Parents and families whose children suffer
from ASD have been crying out for help for
their suffering children for a long time. So far
little traction has been made against the
considerable challenges that ASD presents.
Parents are greeted with scepticism and
suspicion when they talk about what their
children are facing. The USA ’s entrenched
establishment’s insufficient response to the
autism surge, as well as other serious chronic
childhood diseases, has forced many parents
to assume the role of their child ’s physician.
With little support from the medical
community parents often find themselves in
the position of researcher, mastering scores of
scientific studies and arguing science with
biochemists and toxicologists in order to
move their children forward. When parents
look to prevailing convention in medical treat-
ment, there are more questions than answers.
What is the real cause? Can we expect to find
a basic pathological mechanism specific to the
illness? Is better diagnosis the only reason
why these numbers are skyrocketing? Is there
a valid therapy available? And so many more
questions!
In relationship to the multitude of symptoms a
child with autism can exhibit at any time,
parents have additional questions: “How do
we deal with our children when they are in
such turmoil?” Did Hahnemann, in his
wisdom dealing with the ”insane” and more
unfortunate souls he met, give us some advice
as how to deal with children with autism?
Would some of his aphorisms translate into a
useful insight in regard to how to establish a
supportive and helpful environment for people
with ASD? Could these aphorisms be more
specifically applied to ASD and be given to
parents as a very useful tool to assist in the
constant choices a mother and families in
general
struggle with? How to foster everyday, with
the greatest care, the most ideal environment
for a child with ASD, creating safety, love and
security, yet not interrupting progress?
Although progress has been made since the
definition of the disorder first appeared in
DSM IV in the 90s, practitioners still struggle
with diagnostics due to the lack of a clear
conventional definition since almost all
children suspected of this disorder fall
somewhere in between the two ends of the
spectrum. Two experts examining the same
child may come to very different conclusions
regarding the type or severity of the disorder
as it is expressed in a single individual. And
autism experts have made the comment that
once you have met one child with ASD, you
have met “one” child with ASD. In other
words, experts will concede that each child is
different from the next. Additionally, this
same child may appear differently to the
examiner on different days and thus receive
varying diagnoses and prognoses at different
times. Can you imagine how a parent deals
with a different child at any moment of the
day?
Truly classical knowledge is timeless and has
the capacity of being fiercely relevant for the
present. It has a claim of durability, of
resistance against the onslaught of time and
Nature and rejects the conventional
SUMMARY
It is not just difficult to navigate the troubled waters of therapy for their
children with autism, but parents are daily confronted with unexpected
volatile situations that need an immediate response. The Organon has wisdom
for these parents.
KEYWORDS Autism, ASD - Autism spectrum disorder, Organon, Behaviour
problems, Individuality, Cyber delusion
there is an understanding with the head,
particularly of the scientific kind, where there
is sometimes too little room for the heart. One
can understand many things through the heart,
but then the head often has difficulty in
following up with an intellectual formulation
that gives suitable expression to what has been
understood. It is the marriage of both, the
head and the heart that can be found in
homeopathy. Though the new always seems to
be the enemy of the old, anyone with a more
than superficial desire to understand cannot
fail to discover that without the most serious
application of classical homeopathic princi-
ples, the new integration cannot take place.
And the 6th edition of The Organon is the
place to start.
Parents are challenged everyday by numerous
situations that ask for an immediate reaction.
What answers to these challenges are fruitful,
which ones are rather negative, even
suppressive and obstructive? When does a
parent in his management go overboard and
under board at the same time? Every parent
wants to know or have a better way of judging
whether the external intervention (whether at
home, school, therapy sessions, socializing) is
helping or harming? How far and how hard to
push? When to give a break? When to allow a
preferred task and how much? And does a
wrong therapeutic response create an addi-
tional layer or an aggravation of the existing
one?
I had a youngster who needed Stramonium as
his remedy. Yet when he was clingy and
violent, his mother would threaten him to put
him out of the house “for the wolves to eat”.
When you know that Stramonium has the
Cyber Delusion (See Note) “Delusion, all
alone in the wilderness”, you can imagine
what the result would be! More violence and
clinginess as a result of the “perceived
abandonment by the person they trust and
depend on”, the essence of Stramonium!
Note: Cyber Delusion or CD: When Carl
Jung talks about “lowering of the mental level”
and “coagulation of thoughts”, he talks about
the formation of fixed ideas or delusions
resulting in stereotyped or obsessive
compulsive behaviour. And it always starts
with one fixed idea, one that reflects the
traumatic event, which he called the primary,
archaic, primitive, mother and what I call the
cyber delusion. For Jung (and homeopathy)
the term “delusion” is different from the
allopathic use of the term delusions where it is
used for severe psychiatric conditions such as
schizophrenia. All delusions, in Jung ’s and the
homeopathic sense, contain a germ of
meaning, a kernel of truth, and have
therefore a much wider range of meaning than
in allopathic medical terms. Behind a delusion
lies a personality, a constitution, a
temperament, a life story and a pattern of
hopes and desires. How do I define cyber
delusion? The word “cyber” is derived from
the Greek, “Kyber- netes”, meaning “that
which steers or the helmsman - the steerer of
the ship”. The helmsman steers your ship by
constantly adjusting the tiller in response to
the information obtained from the conscious,
but even more from the unconscious. In other
words, any trigger causing this lowering of the
conscious level can become the source of the
expectant mother’s cyber delusion, and,
because of its infectious and intensive nature,
of the unborn foetus. This cyber delusion, a
masked figure of the unconscious, now
becomes the driving force behind each
thought, each plan and each action of the
person possessed by it. It is the ancient
dominant force and ruling emotion that rules
her unconscious and now has become part of
the patient and unless resolved by true therapy,
will continue to dominate, to grow and bring
the patient possibly towards a state of
psychosis.
What about the demands put on many of these
children? Additional to normal school hours,
their days are extended with many hours
weekly of ABA (Applied Behavioural
Analysis) and speech therapy, not to mention
the many visits to doctors, who constantly
poke them with needles for more testing.
Because of the wrongly perceived idea that
there is a time limit (of five years of age) that
cure should be achieved for these children,
early intervention means now a staggering
working schedule for children that just start
discovering the world and themselves.
Sometimes the youngster I saw reacts to the
therapist with, “I don’t want you. Go teach
someone else.” Others will just turn mean, hit,
bite and
have temper tantrums. Such young children
need to have fun too and much will depend if
the therapist or the parent (in case of
homeschooling) can turn much of the hardship
into a “game”. Creating fun, while learning is
the name of the game! I compare it to the
Rosetta stone for language learning versus the
old dreary methods of hour-long listening and
repeating foreign words.
Not only the children but also parents are
completely overwhelmed by the dehumanizing
schedule imposed on these youngsters,
overwhelmed by school culture and the autism
culture of intense early intervention claiming
it is the only window of opportunity. The
additional stress is that many parents cannot
afford such interventions [NBC (American
television network) paid $25,000 for one
week’s intervention which was a therapist
observing the child at home, to make
recommendations]. Pushing parents to think
that these early intervention programs are the
only effective solution creates additional guilt,
financial hardship, and yes, turmoil between
spouses. Even more, these early interventions
are always touted as “individualized,” but in
fact they never are. A strict protocol is always
followed and implemented, annihilating the
“individualistic” and necessary approach. As a
result, most of the time outer expressions of
behaviours are addressed, suppressing even
more the deeper lingering issues, “What drives
the child to act the way he does?”
So it is not only the homeopath ’s task to ad-
minister the right remedy, but also to be the
reasonable counsellor of the family. I read
about adult cases that once they could
communicate through the computer, that “they
resented to be considered idiots, who were put
in a school environment where they had to
repeat ad nauseam simple sentences and
additions,” yet they already had advanced way
beyond that level. But because of lack of oral
communication, this could never be conveyed.
What we achieve with such interventions only
creates more frustration, anger and yes, a dis-
like of the adult world that we pushed them
into so forcibly. Let’s see what Hahnemann
says in The Organon, in Aphorisms 226 to
230.
§226: “We can transform these emotional
diseases by psychological means such as
kindness, friendly exhortation (encourage-
ment, persuasion), and appeal to reason, and
often also by skilful deception. In these
cases, with the right living habits, physical
well-being appears to follow as well.”
And he continues,
§228: “... the relatives and the physician must
of course also carefully maintain the right
psychological attitude toward the patient,
surrounding him with emotional support. They
must meet raving madness (in our cases
temper tantrums) with calm fearlessness and
firm, cool determination; agonized
lamentation with mute compassion in
countenance (expression, appearance) and
bearing; senseless babbling with silence that
is not completely indifferent: loathsome, dis-
gusting behaviour and speech with complete
inattention. They must take measures to pre-
vent damage to property, without reproaching
the patient about this, and arrange everything
in such way that corporeal punishment and
torture are completely eliminated. The
hardhearted mindlessness of physicians in
many institutions of this kind is astonishing.
These people, humiliated by feelings of their
own medical inaptitude, seem to vent their
spite at the presumed incurability, of mental
emotional diseases (ASD in our case), by
displaying cruelty to the innocent sufferers
themselves.”
While Hahnemann wrote these aphorisms as
guidelines for the “insane” in his time who
were chained in asylums and abused by their
physicians and keepers, we can recognize
some of the behaviour described in these
aphorisms in many of the children with ASD.
We see temper tantrums, striking and pulling
hair, mistreatment of siblings and animals as
well as inappropriate sexual behaviour.
Senseless babbling is a symptom often
observed. While we do not so much physically
abuse these children (although this still
happens!), such children are often punished by
“professionals” in a cruel emotional way.
One eminent psychiatrist refused to see a
violent child in his office, met with the mother
and patient for five minutes in the hall, and
prescribed the “miracle drug,” that only
brought more aberrant behaviour. Does such
physician understand that possibly this child
intuits more than she thinks and is offended by
being treated as an animal? Another child with
autism was locked up in a room at school for
“misbehaving” and was forgotten for the next
four hours! This is the same kind of cruelty
Hahnemann talks about and we are in the 21st
century. Most average therapists and educators
simply speak “with a loud voice of command”
Luc De Schepper, MD, PhD, Lic.Ac.
P.O. Box31025
Santa Fe, NM 87594
USA
Internet:towww.drluc.com
such youngsters and if undesirable be-
E-mail: haviour persists, they use
drluc@cybermesa.com with increased
intensity the word NO to excess. Indeed as
Hahnemann suggests, “disgusting and atro-
cious behaviour and chatter should be op-
posed with complete inattentiveness.” Rather
observe, eliminate objects in your office that
can be harmful, have toys and other objects in
which they might be interested. A good parent
always brings something to keep the child
busy, but I like to see the “emperor without
cloths,” even if they destroy the blinds in my
office.
In § 229, Hahnemann says further,
“Contradiction, ready agreement, severe re-
proval (admonition), insults, weakness, and
timid acquiescence are all entirely inappro-
priate, all equally harmful to the mind and
spirit of such people. But they are embittered,
and their disease is aggravated most of all by
scorn, deceit, and transparent deception. The
physician and the attendants must always
behave as if they believed such patients to be
sane. One should try to remove everything ex-
ternal which bothers their senses or feelings. ”
Written in 1843, these words are just as im-
portant for this “new disease” of autism.
Parents, physicians, teachers and therapists
must behave as if these children were normal.
Deep inside their world, the child and adult
with autism often feel insulted, forsaken and
betrayed by the degrading approach to their
problem. But also Hahnemann warns us to
have the right attitude towards the patient.
Timid approval (timid acquiescence) of rude
and inappropriate be
haviour is not allowed. Many times, I had to Note: This is an extract for the book, “The
treat the younger “normal” sibling for severe Road Ahead,” a book about autism and ho-
emotional distress simply because the older meopathy, to appear in the Spring of 2011.
violent child was allowed to terrorize his
sibling. It is the one who creates havoc that
gets the attention. The result is that such a References
family ends up with two problem children,
because the younger child was not adequately 1
Hahnemann S. The Organon of the Medical
protected or emotionally nourished. Art. Jost Kunzli (editor) & Alain Nambe
(translator). Washington, USA: Cooper
While Hahnemann’s words still shine through Publishing; 1996
in our life, the simillimum provides many
answers when it comes to guidelines. If the
remedy has ailments from mental exertion in Vita
its provings, then it might not be good to push
the child with a multitude of mental tasks till
Luc De Schepper, MD, PhD, Lic.Ac. is a li-
we have adequately supported the child’s Vital
censed physician in Europe and the US. He is
Force. “When does therapy becomes harmful
in practice since 1971. He is a licensed
and is too much”, is a question to be pondered
Traditional Chinese Medicine physician in
by the homeopath besides just simply giving a
Europe and the US. He has written 17 books
remedy. Uniformly forcing children with
about health, Traditional Chinese Medicine
autism to accept behaviour changes according
and homeopathy, available in several lan-
to the theoretic model proposed is robotic,
guages. He teaches throughout the world and
suppressive and counterproductive! But creat-
has served the poor in Third World countries
ing a healing environment in harmony with
on many occasions. He will be the president
the individual’s nature of discomfort and
of the European Liga of Homeopathy, in Riga,
capabilities, besides the homeopathic remedy,
Latvia, in May 2011.
is building a home in which the diseased or
mistuned organism cannot but thrive and heal.
In conclusion, aphorisms 226 - 230 can be
used as an external backbone and provide the
framework of an external environmental
philosophy that should be considered the base
of all “therapies” that are used for children
with ASD!