Book review: Respecting Autism

This book was developed by Gil Tippy and the late Dr. Stanley Greenspan and presents numerous case studies of how Tippy and his colleagues have implemented the Developmental Individual Differences Relationship-based (DIR) model at the Rebecca School in New York. The book begins with an introduction from Tippy and his reasons for advocating for the DIR approach, and what this approach entails. Tippy explains how he had previously worked as an ABA practitioner, yet presents a critique of the limitations of this intervention, and why he argues for the superiority of the DIR approach. The focus of his criticism concerns how ABA does not teach generalisable concepts and abstraction, and how this could not be done by an approach that concentrates on ‘memory’, which it is argued by Tippy to not be a deficit in autism. This criticism leads Tippy to question the relevance of the evidence used by ABA advocates in their claims of ‘evidence-based practice’.