Who Was Stanley Greenspan, M.D.?

Question: Who Was Stanley Greenspan, M.D.?

Dr. Stanley Greenspan was one of the foremost figures in the world of autism research and treatment. Founder of the Floortime treatment for autism, he was also an author, teacher and clinician. Learn more about Dr. Greenspan.

Answer: Stanley I. Greenspan, M.D., who passed away in April, 2010, was a distinguished psychologist, researcher, and founder of the Developmental, Individual Difference, Relationship-based (DIR®/Floortime™) Model of autism treatment. Greenspan was also the founding president of Zero to Three: The National Center for Infants, Toddlers and Families, and a director of the NIMH Mental Health Study Center and the Clinical Infant Development Program. Greenspan’s Interdisciplinary Council on Developmental and Learning Disorders conducts research, provides training, publishes papers and books, and runs conferences on early intervention, autism and education and other related topics.

Dr. Greenspan authored over 100 scholarly articles and chapters and was author or editor of over forty books, translated into over a dozen languages. Two of his books, “The Child with Special Needs” and “Engaging Autism,” both written with Serena Weider, are valuable tools for parents with autism. Both provide parents with an introduction to Greenspan’s unusual perspective on autism – and his wonderfully positive focus on building opportunities for joyful communication. Through Greenspan’s work, parents learn to engage, bond, and have fun with their children on the autism spectrum; at the same time, children discover their own abilities to connect emotionally with other human beings.

To get a feel for Greenspan’s perspective on children with autism, you may want to take a look at this open letter of parents:

Prevailing wisdom regarding the potential of children with these disorders is deeply pessimistic. The widely used behavioral approach to treatment teaches rote skills with the main goal of changing behaviors, the assumption being that these children’s difficulties in the areas of reading emotional cues, empathy, and creative thinking represent permanent limitations that can not be treated.

But they can. Children originally diagnosed with ASD can learn to relate, love others very deeply, and many can learn to communicate and think creatively and logically. In contrast to the older model, the new approach recognizes that each child has a unique path to the disorder, and therefore each child’s path to improvement must also be unique. In addition to overcoming symptoms, the goal of treatment in this new model is to help the child master the healthy emotional milestones that were missed in his early development and that we now know are critical to learning. Building these foundations helps children overcome their symptoms more effectively than simply trying to change the symptoms alone.

While Dr. Greenspan is gone, his contributions to the autism community live on.

_Sources:

Stanley Greenspan. A New Look at Autism. ICDL Website.

"About Stanley Greenspan," from www.stanleygreenspan.com.