Struggle with self
Self-satisfied, self-absorbed, egocentric. I was disturbed to find these adjectives being used to describe a child with autism in Leo Kanner's groundbreaking paper, published in 1943. Kanner surmised that because children with autism show little interest in other people, they must be overly concerned with themselves.
In fact, individuals with autism struggle with their sense of self, according to a review published in January in Neurocase.
Adults with autism are less likely to remember autobiographical details about their childhood compared with typical controls, according to a 2009 study summarized in the review.
Biologically, this could be the result of less activity in the brain's default network — connections that are active when people are at rest, and believed to be involved in daydreaming and self-reflection. Individuals with autism show weaker connections between regions of the default network.
In another study, people with autism show less activity in one of these regions, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, when replying 'true' or 'false' to statements about both themselves and others. They also show fewer connections between this region and others in the default network.
By contrast, they are able to grasp the concept of their physical selves, and have no problem recognizing their own faces or describing their involvement in various activities. Still, some studies have suggested that children with autism are older than typically developing controls before they are able to recognize themselves in mirrors.
Studies have shown that people with autism are just as interested in objects as they are in people. These and other findings suggest that people with autism have a unique way of viewing the world — and themselves — that doesn't fit neatly into the usual labels. As we understand more about this worldview, I hope judgments like those made by Kanner will become a rarity.
Comments
Jesscia Wright (1) did not read Kanner's work, or (2) did not understand Kanner's work.
Kanner described autistic children as being unable to relate themselves to people in the standard ways. Autistic children were described as being self-sufficient, happy alone, and lacking social awareness. Autistic children were not described as being self-satisfied, self-absorbed, or egocentric, nor were they described as being overly concerned with themselves. Instead, they were concerned with objects, and they preferred to relate to objects without the intrusion of people into their happily oblivious object-dominated autistic aloneness.
Jessica Wright's misrepresentation of Kanner's work, which she either did not read or did not understand, is indicative of neurotypical social cognition. It demonstrates a projection of herself onto others, psychological projections being a dominant mode of neurotypical social cognition. Neurotypicals who do not relate well to others do not relate well, because they are underly concerned with others and overly concerned with themselves. Autistics who do not relate well to others do not relate well, not because they are underly concerned with others or overly concerned with themselves. Instead, they prefer to be concerned with objects and concepts over both others and themselves.
I hope misrepresentations like those made by Jessica Wright will become a rarity.
Praying Mantis-
Unfortunately, the words I used at the start of the piece are a direct quote from Leo Kanner's paper. However, as you point out, that is not the main conclusion of the study. I quoted those words to illustrate the fact that it is too easy to look at a child not paying attention to others and come to the incorrect assumption that they are being "egocentric".
The piece goes on to support the exact point you are making, which is that children with autism "have a unique way of viewing the world -- and themselves" in which they pay less attention to people in general.
You might be interested in a very good summary of Leo Kanner's paper on our site, in which we link to the actual paper.
http://sfari.org/news-and-opinion/classic-paper-reviews/2011/leo-kanners-1943-paper-on-autism-commentary-by-gerald-fischbach
Thank you for reading SFARI!
Unfortunately, I would have to disagree with Praying Mantis, not so much as an 'in toto' disagreement, but rather as with regard to the way (s)he explains autism.
PM: "Autistics who do not relate well to others do not relate well, not because they are underly concerned with others or overly concerned with themselves. Instead, they prefer to be concerned with objects and concepts over both others and themselves."
The attempt to describe autism as a preference to be concerned with 'anything' is a misrepresentation of what an autistic mind is doing. I wouldn't explain the neurological workings of an autistic brain in terms of "preference" at all, as that completely misses the point of what's going on and why an autistic brain develops in the manner in which it does.
An autistic brain is contending with an overly-abundant amount of incoming information [perceptually and associatively (the brain repetitively processing existing information where continuous processing is NOT inhibited - like stuck in a feed-forward processing loop)], which may sound similar to ADD/ADHD, but is qualitatively and considerably different. By recognizing that this effect is present at birth and will necessarily contribute to how all experiences are experienced and processed from birth forward, it should be easier to understand both how and why autism impairs or delays development. The complexity and nuances of the actions, behavior, etc. of the 'other' in social experiences provides an extraordinary amount of data to process (and which the neurotypical brain quite readily stops processing), which interferes with the availability of resources for the processing of the information by extrapolation, summation and meaning-making. Hence, the increasing developmental delay in social interpretation processing, resulting in an accumulative, developmental trajectory of social deficits. And since much of human learning is through some sort of interpersonal interaction (role-modeling, direct instruction, interpreting social feedback, etc.), the likelihood of apparent learning deficits and cognitive and interpersonal growth should be much easier to acknowledge. Also, pay close attention to the idea that patterns and patterned structure do NOT draw distracting attention for the neurological functioning of the brain, and allow the brain NOT to experience new experiences to assess and process (as in the manner mentioned above).
To help the neurotypical understand what I'm saying: Consider a horror movie where a paranormal creature is shown moving in a disjointed manner which also moves "extra-worldly." This abnormal portrayal of movement forces the brain to pay extra attention to and question why the creature is not moving in a fluid motion. This happens in the movie much quicker than the brain can come up with accepting the situation as normal and safe (from a biological survival standpoint), so it continually processes this perceptual difference by continually rejecting the normalcy of it, using the contextual data from the movie and the person's unconscious expectation. This jarring movement, and the forcing of the mental processing (on a rapid, unconscious level), prevents the person's mind from moving past the idea (schema) that the object is just a person walking. Remember - if you see a person walking, you no longer think "hey, that's a person who's walking." You automatically accept it because it meets your brain's "mental representation of the world" or expectation.
So ... hopefully people can understand that it's not a matter of a "preference" to be concerned for objects, at all. It's a matter of the way the brain processes data. If anything, the "preferring" would better be explained as an "accidental consequence" that develops over time into a coping strategy - a "thing" to focus on in an attempt to avoid the distractions caused by all the other randomness, chaoticness, unpredictability, violations of expectations, inexactness of human language, etc. that a person can experience in this world.
And if you're wondering, I am on the autism spectrum and have a graduate degree in human development (developmental psychology, cognition) from an Ivy League, research university. I'm not bragging, here, but it's difficult to be humble when exposing credentials.
I hope this helps the readership understand more appropriately.
... by the way, Jessica, I very much appreciate your (this) article. It helps me better understand this phenomenon within myself, which I have a difficult time processing and explaining to others. It's like I don't believe other people will believe me ... which then has a cascading effect of making talking about it a difficult and confusing endeavor, which contributes to muddling my attempt at trying to explain it, which then makes it much more difficult for me to explain it with the necessary confidence, which then is more likely to prevent the other person from understanding and "in the final account" believing me.
So it was helpful to read your blog and validate my own experience.
Thanks.