[PEN-L:28222] RE: query

["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

Title: RE: [PEN-L:28218] query

Jurriaan Bendien writes:
> Perhaps you should not talk about dereism or autism in the sense of a static condition, characteristic or symptom, rather look at it dynamically as (the product of) a peculiar kind of personal development, which places a person in a certain cognitive predicament, and which could be a passing phase in a process of social adjustment.<

Psychologists see autism as a developmental disorder, representing a very slow process of an individual making connections with the rest of society. It's a cognitive predicament, but it's better described as a neurobiological problem of filtering, processing, prioritizing, and thus understanding information received from an indidividual's societal environment.

 
>Suppose, by way of thought experiment, you have parents who systematically blot out a certain dimension of social reality because of  some extreme emotional (in-)sensitivity, and suppose for example they and their child is uprooted from their environment and placed in a foreign environment with a foreign culture. It might be, that the child grows up being, as it were, "congenitally blind" to a dimension of (social or intersubjective) reality which others take for granted as being a normal part of their experience, something they are in touch with in daily life. It could be an aspect of sexuality, love, having fun, a social practice, a way of relating, being or perceiving etc.<

While this thought experiment might produce autistic-like symptoms, the evidence for the idea that one's upbringing causes autism is weak if not non-existent. Bruno Bettelheim, a Freudian, blamed inadequate mothering (and somehow not fathering) for the disorder, but he's been totally discredited. (It's possible his view could be revived sometime in the future, given more research, but his perspective gets almost no respect at this point.)

It is true that people with autism tend to approach the world speaking a different language, as "anthropologists from Mars," (to paraphrase Oliver Sachs' phrase for Temple Grandin, a famous high-functioning autistic). But the problem seems to be biological in origin.

> But it might be quite possible that, although the child is blinded to an aspect of reality, he is subjectively able to make up for this deficiency by intelligently, playfully and creatively inventing social behaviours, escape mechanisms and coping mechanisms which would make it almost impossible for anyone but the experienced observer to notice something odd or inexplicable - it might only show up in close social interaction where  some degree of intimacy was involved. It might be only that the motivation behind what the child does is often unfathomable and puzzling for others, they cannot work him out. He would appear normal in some, even most  contexts, but in others subjectivist, borderline or autistic. He might be viewed as solipsistic at times because he cannot recognise or react  normally to something that people normally are able to recognise and react to. He "sees" something else (maybe something no one else sees, and that he would have difficulty explaining therefore), but he doesn't see what they see. Others would think "he lives in a world of his own". (He might even be a "pinball wizard" in some sense).<

this describes someone with high-functioning autism or Asperger's syndrome. The different perspective sometimes goes along with amazing "splinter skills," such as the Rainman's ability to do lightning calculations.

>Suppose now that through receiving certain reactions, having certain crucial experiences, challenges or criticisms, the child (or  maybe the grown adult he becomes) suddenly begins to cotton on very fast that there exists a slice of reality which he has not been aware of all his life. Well, the shells might fall from his eyes and he might have a tremendous shock, so that he becomes very disoriented indeed. The problem would be that he is now aware that there is a dimension of reality the existence of which he was not aware of, but he has never learnt to cope with it or adjust to it all his life, never "grown up" in this sense.<

the usual adaptation of someone on the autism spectrum to external reality is gradual, not sudden.

> He might be effectively "crippled" in his life for a long time afterwards, because (1) insofar as he knows at all what is missing, he  has to learn a whole set of new behaviours than he never saw as part of his identity, even rejected (2) he has to undo a lot of his own behavioural "innovations" and habits, (3) he has to review his whole life anew in the light of the "shock of the new", (4) he has to renegotiate his whole relationship with the external world (the "inner" and the "outer") and with other  people. That is to say his whole identity is at stake and put in question, it  would be an identity crisis of a specific, peculiar kind - because he already has a worked out identity (one admittedly at odds with a basic dimension of social reality), yet he has to make a new one more in tune with the real  world. It might be a terrible struggle hardly comprehensible for anyone else. Depending on the strength of the personality and coping  mechanisms available, the person might or might not become psychotic or delirious, his brain biochemistry might be affected in the wellknown ways. The "uneven development" might never fully clear up, then again it might.<

A psychotherapist I know read A BEAUTIFUL MIND, the biography of the mathematician John Nash, and concluded that Nash wasn't really schizophrenic, but actually had Asperger's syndrome (borderline autism) with some psychotic symptoms. She may be right. Anyway, Nash's psychotic episodes followed a series of shocks in which his previous mode of being just didn't work in society.

JD