peers, autists, human companions: lend me your cognitive architecture (ears are not enough).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
what we now call “autism” originally described a way of thinking that its own framers acknowledged that everyone experiences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If “autistic thinking” is something that everyone experiences, where is the line drawn between “everyone” and the autistic person? Is everyone temporarily autistic in the moments when they experience autistic thinking? Does a person become autistic when their thinking operates in autistic mode for a certain percentage of their experience? And if so, what percentage represents the threshold where a person can be called autistic as a label of status?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Can we pause here and reflect on how problematic this is? If this is the starting point for a field of study, and a classification of a segment of the population, let’s use critical thinking to ask what kind of change in perspective would bring this framework for a diagnosis into alignment with human nature \u2014 remembering that we’re talking about something that supposedly everyone experiences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The term “autism” was coined by Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler (1857-1939), a white, European psychiatrist in the Freudian tradition, to refer to what he characterized as a tendency of social withdrawal among schizophrenic patients \u2014 a retreat into a “subjective world” of “illogical thought processes.” Bleuler worked within, and lent scientific authority to, a psychiatric establishment that implemented forced sterilization under hereditary-hygiene law, even while acknowledging that what he called “autistic thinking” is something that everyone experiences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Pause and reflect on this. Ask yourself: if we’re talking about something that everyone experiences, why has the line between “normal” and “autistic” never been fixed?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Because it never needed to be logically sound. It simply needed to be administratively useful to an establishment already sorting populations by fitness to perform productivity in an increasingly industrialized world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In Western scientific practice, the prescribed method is to cite and work from existing research. Existing work can be seen as a foundation to build on, or as a flawed model to be abandoned. At what junctures was Bleuler’s work built on, and at what moments was it abandoned for a more sustainable model? From what I’ve observed, the academic community has done some work to move the autism framework into a realm that aligns with the complexity of human nature \u2014 Kanner and Asperger extracted it from schizophrenia, Wing’s spectrum concept dissolved the hard boundary into a continuum, the neurodiversity paradigm reframed it as natural variation rather than disease. That being said, in the realm of institutional infrastructure \u2014 diagnostic manuals, disability determination, special-education law, insurance billing \u2014 we’re still working with the same racist, eugenicist, ableist framework that Eugen Bleuler articulated over a century ago. The spectrum got re-gridded into support-needs tiers; the line moved slightly, but it didn’t disappear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Some frameworks cannot be patched. If we try to practice incremental change, the starting point might be too far a departure from natural processes to mold into a healthy framework. At some point, the critical thinker abandons the given model and starts from scratch. I don’t believe that work has been done \u2014 not in the places that are important. I see the gatekeeping infrastructure built on Bleuler’s premise as irredeemable. The recognition that neurodevelopmental variation is real, and universal in degree, is not the thing to abandon \u2014 it’s the thing worth building from. Abandoning that premise means we stop tying support to a diagnosis and start giving people what they actually need \u2014 support based on what someone’s dealing with day to day, not on some overarching designation that assigns them a lowered status. Only then can we begin to understand, accept, and include a diversity of human traits into the body of human behavior and expression, and contextualize variety in a way that serves the human project in an inclusive way\u2014something that everyone experiences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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