John wrote, "At least one professor made a personal attack upon Maurice. You can read about it in the book she edited “Making a Difference”. "

Maurice writes in said book - and I think this must be the reference you mean - "One California authority, author of one of the ubiquitous "let's describe the symptoms of autism one more time" books, publicly derided my children, who she has never met, and mocked the notion of their recovery."

Evidently this anonymous authority did not do so in print or in a public statement. So it's impossible to tell what precisely this "derision" consisted of.

But if "mocking the notion of their recovery" means expressing scepticism about claims that any autistic child has become 100% Normal - then I for one am certainly guilty of that.

It is not, however, the same as a personal attack on Maurice or her children.

Maurice devotes a good page in the same introduction to attacking Shirley Cohen for the heinous crime of writing about Lovaas-style ABA as one possible treatment among many, and appears to accuse her of having an especially evil plan to covertly attack ABA by "damning it with faint praise".

So I have a suspicion that Maurice's "derision" threshold may be rather low (she can also clearly give as good as she gets, given how insulting she is in that introduction towards anyone she deems to be an enemy or critic).

Incidentally, if one may make an inference from http://www.mnip-net.org/ddlead.nsf/linkview/Recovery (her "autism = cancer" piece) the "California authority" in question is Bryna Siegel. Siegel is - in print, at least - a moderate ABA supporter.

In any case, so far as I know, no authority in the autism field has gone on record in print or on the net and accused Maurice of a "personality disorder", or of, say, having conned someone in the government into thinking her children were autistic so that she could "live off" the autism field.

If you know of a counter-example, I stand to be corrected.