Autistic autobiography.

نویسنده

Ian Hacking

چکیده

Autism narratives are not just stories or histories, describing a given reality. They are creating the language in which to describe the experience of autism, and hence helping to forge the concepts in which to think autism. This paper focuses on a series of autobiographies that began with Grandin's Emergence. These are often said to show us autism from the 'inside'. The paper proposes that instead they are developing ways to describe experience for which there is little pre-existing language. Wittgenstein has many well-known aphorisms about how we understand other people directly, without inference. They condense what he had found in Wolfgang Köhler's Gestalt Psychology. These phenomena of direct understanding what other people are doing are, Köhler wrote, 'the common property and practice of mankind'. They are not the common property and practice of people with autism. Ordinary language is rich in age-old ways to describe what others are thinking, feeling and so forth. Köhler's phenomena are the bedrock on which such language rests. There is no such discourse for autism, because Köhler's phenomena are absent. But a new discourse is being made up right now, i.e. ways of talking for which the autobiographies serve as working prototypes.

برای دانلود متن کامل این مقاله و بیش از 32 میلیون مقاله دیگر ابتدا ثبت نام کنید

ثبت نام

اگر عضو سایت هستید لطفا وارد حساب کاربری خود شوید

منابع مشابه

Abraham A. Ungar's Autobiography

This autobiography presents the scientific living of Abraham Ungar and his role in Gyrogroups and Gyrovector spaces.‎

متن کامل

Islands of loneliness: exploring social interaction through the autobiographies of individuals with autism.

Assumptions of difficulties with social interaction, or lack of interest in social interaction, are central to many definitions and conventional understandings of autism. However, many individuals with autism describe a strong craving social interaction. This article uses autobiographical accounts written by individuals who identified as autistic as a source of qualitative research data and spe...

متن کامل

What can we learn about autism from autistic persons?

BACKGROUND To date, few studies have focused on the viewpoints of autistic persons themselves despite an increasing number of published autobiographies. The aim of this study is to highlight their personal experiences, and to compare them to scientific and medical knowledge and representations. METHOD Adopting an anthropological approach, we analyzed 16 autobiographical writings and 5 intervi...

متن کامل

Stereotypes of autism.

In their landmark papers, both Kanner and Asperger employed a series of case histories to shape clinical insight into autistic disorders. This way of introducing, assessing and representing disorders has disappeared from today's psychiatric practice, yet it offers a convincing model of the way stereotypes may build up as a result of representations of autism. Considering that much of what socie...

متن کامل