Mark Foster’s Registered & Protected Web Page

    



















The historical mission of a Reflexive Sociology is to transcend 
sociology as it now exists. In deepening our understanding of 
our own sociological selves and of our position in the world, we 
can, I believe, simultaneously help to produce a new breed of 
sociologists who can also better understand other men and 
their social worlds.


- Alvin Ward Gouldner (1920-1980), The 
Coming Crisis in Western Sociology


Introduction



I am, for good or ill, a rather inconspicuous fellow. I would neither stand out in a crowd, nor would my actions locate me sufficiently at variance from most people I know to be noticeable. I am well practiced and can, on face value anyway, play the game just like a pro. Nonetheless, I eat alone, live alone, spend holidays alone, have talked to myself since I was a boy, and feel, on occasion, an invisible bulwark of disorientation from others. Still, notwithstanding, or perhaps due in part to, my reclusive habits, inflexible online routines, and a sliver of protracted social awkwardness, I am, into my fifties, remarkably content. Indeed, I might even describe my current mood as blissful.

Yet, I wear a mask. As a tenured full professor of sociology at a Kansas City area college, born and raised in the City of New York and its suburbs on Long Island, I have, in feigning the prescriptive deportment, enjoyed a string of academic successes. Even so, many of my gains were realized despite an ample diligence to cure me. By the same token, one of the more salient motifs within my biography may be characterized as a recurrent failure at conforming to expectations. In my professional life, for instance, it took me roughly 25 years, in the end through an instructional consultant, to enhance my effectiveness at relating to students.

If I have learned anything, it is that an acquiescence to one's distinctiveness should not be mistaken for a preoccupation with one's limitations. At 14, an adult declared, I would likely identify with the lead character in Robert A. Heinlein's, Stranger in a Strange Land. From my early childhood years, my life experience has staunchly situated me as the self-conscious performer, the outsider, looking in while crafting a repertoire of multiple impersonations through the mirror. In graduate school, I instantly identified with sociologist Charles Horton Cooley's depictions of the looking-glass self. Still, even while accounting for these literal and metaphorical reflections, my temperament, distressingly, rarely matched my intent. Once, I embarrassed myself when, in the presence of a role model, Tom, I called myself "Tom."

"All the world's a stage," I am, more so than the majority, well aware. Life's scripts, I have frequently observed, always seem more second nature to others than to me; but scripts, the prepared kind, furnished an escape to an otherwise unavailable world. After watching The Paul Winchell-Jerry Mahoney Show, I became a ventriloquist at age 8, performed, rather skillfully, following method and other acting classes, and was a radio newscaster in my teens and thirties. Being able to play to an audience has served me well. While my social insight may be astigmatic, my acting acumen has, over time, become a corrective lens. 

My activist methodology is a reflexively constructionist public sociology, namely, by recounting, through self-advocacy, the taken-for-granted narrations of knowledge and power in my own social contexts. Accordingly, information which is assumed to be commonsensical is often a residue of elite power, influence, and suggestion. Occupying elite statuses confers dominance in defining that which is real. As European Americans and men have historically been positioned to frame the identities of, respectively, racial minorities and women, so the parameters of disabled individuals have been contoured by others. Herein, I contemplate my experiences with this process.






The Third Awakening



Doctor Foster
Went to Gloucester
In a shower of rain.
He stepped in a puddle
Right up to his middle
And never went there again!
~ Poet unknown
England, xiii c.



This nursery rhyme was purportedly written in
reference to King Edward I (b.1239 AD d.1307),
"Doctor Foster," after he tumbled from his horse 
into a muddy puddle. Angered and embarrassed by 
the incident, he refused to pay any further 
visits to Gloucester. In a bygone era, the story 
became a warning to children that the puddles
found on roads might be deeper than they appeared.




As a child, my problems must have appeared insurmountable, and I was seen by several psychiatrists. Collectively, in the process of serving up, and then force-feeding me, their mind-numbing neuroleptics, antidepressants, and electric shocks, they circumscribed my societal context through disability and disempowerment. Consequently, I had, over the intervening years, sworn to myself, many times over, that I would never again darken the door to a psychiatrist's office. However, in March of 2007, following the recommendation of my family practitioner, whose prescriptions of a sleep medication and, subsequently, a mild tranquilizer were ineffective at resolving my symptoms, I visited a psychiatrist for the first time since I was 14 or 15. 

The complaint was direct and specific: I trembled when attempting to lay down for the night, felt dazed and stoned for most of the following day, and compulsively scratched my scalp. The cause was self-evident and repulsive: My apartment was infested with cockroaches. They would crawl into my bed, onto my back, and into my hair and rectum when I was asleep and going to sleep. It was perhaps my most intensive experience with sleeplessness but by no means my first. I have often laid awake, or paced back and forth, panicked with sinus congestion or angered by background noises (possibly hyperacusis).

I was not seeking a diagnosis, but I received three of them. The verdict was Asperger's autism (Aa), as the primary condition, with comorbid obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and comorbid chronic insomnia. Statistically, OCD is dependent, more prevalently, on Aa than the reverse. As to the insomina, both Aa, perhaps due to its nearly universal association with anticipatory anxiety, and OCD, encompassing intrusive thoughts as well as undesired behaviors, can often be unequivocally implicated, but, regardless of the culprit, a seemingly interminable focus on those vile cockroaches kept me awake night after night. 

The diagnosis of Aa has, for me, been the unraveling of a neural koan, where the one hand clapping, in a sequestered silence, has, at long last, encountered the other hand. It came a few weeks after the other diagnoses and was, my psychiatrist said, deduced from my self-reports, not from my demeanor in his office. That is to say, based solely on our dialogue, and on my appearance, he would never have suspected it, he said. Moreover, although not all clinicians differentiate between Aa and some other categories of autism, among a portion of those who do, I would, owing to my normal verbal and cognitive development as a toddler, be considered Aa. 

The Aa factor shed light on my eye contact practice sessions, at a time when gazing straightaway into the eyes of others, emanating the incandescence of miniature suns, commonly burned my own eyes; my rote memorizings of long lists of items; my off-beat jokes; my emotional meltdowns, as in disappearing from the Internet for extended periods, and frequent catastrophizings; my insecurities regarding addressing certain people by their first names; my lengthy tangible and online catalogings of information; my cultivated prosodies; my pedantic monologues and never-ending analyses, prompting some adults to call me an encyclopedia or a computer; and my unintended faces. Years ago, on a commercial break during the taping of The Joan Rivers Show, Ms. Rivers, staring directly at me, comically parodied my facial expression by crossing her eyes.
My perseverations, defined as reiterations of words or actions after their stimuli may have quit, and routines varied throughout my life. If, in autoecholalia, turning a phrase delights me, I may repeat it verbatim, silently or aloud, over and over again. Ritualistically, since I was, ages ago, uncertain of how to handle a coin-operated washer and dryer, I had fallen into the revolting habit of never washing my clothes. Even though the catalyst has long since vanished, I have, for decades, been piling up dirty clothes while purchasing brand-new ones. As a child, I stridently whined if I could not sit in my favorite seats. Other routines have involved stimming, such as pacing, special interests, and OCD.
For my entire childhood, my egodystonic, or self-repugnant, OCD manifested as in a fear of heights and in compulsions to manually "make it even," belch, curse, chew on pencils, and step on sidewalk cracks. The OCD was both comorbid with my Aa and aggravated by it. What is more, given my introversion and limited social facility, I coped with the OCD largely on my own. Admittedly, I still, to this day, have small traces of OCD, including my obsession over not driving into parked vehicles and a lifelong picking at my scabs and nails, but I credit the rationality of the Aa with helping me intellectualize most of it away.
Fabricating voices either ventriloquially or otherwise, mimicking or echolalia, concocting puns, and then regurgitating all of them pacified me. I mastered a radio call-sign: 60,000 watts, clear channel. This is the flagship station of the National Broadcasting Company, WNBC, New York. I also reprised my own sign-off ad nauseam: WHPC now concludes its programming for the day. Up next, WBAU carries you over till 1 in the morning. Then WHPC returns tomorrow at 9. This is Mark A. Foster reporting for WHPC news. Have a pleasant evening and a better day tomorrow. The soothing predictability sterilized ambient babel.
Aa interests may confound some persons not on the autism spectrum. They are egosyntonic, or self-consistent, and more trancelike than hobbies or pastimes. Their determinateness is my custodian of untold joy and my architect of resolute percipience. Their want is my harbinger of inward privation. A sample might include JFK, UFOs, helicopters, constructed languages, theme songs, and consecutive plays of a Triumph of Man record (a souvenir from the Travelers Insurance pavilion at the 1964-1965 New York World's Fair). With television shows, such as Superman, What's My Line?, and Babylon 5, missing a single program was disquieting. 
Many of my interests and activities have been shaped by a convergence of my academic involvements and my autism. Beneficially, my marginalization, and derivative alienation and introspection, have, while I earned a Ph.D. in sociology and history and pursued an academic career, provided relevant texts for personal reflection. Sociology may seem an odd field for an autistic. However, I have, as a sociologist, examined subjects which, interpersonally, I could never satisfactorily apprehend, and, by specializing in social theory and religious studies, I tailored my youthful absorptions with conceptual systems construction and the study of religions into my full-time livelihood.
In a similar vein, my hoardings of books, domains, listservs, and other items, costing me several fortunes, have always coincided with my infatuations du jour. As a testament to my procession of fixations, I currently own 24 domains, run 21 websites, operate about a dozen listservs, and possess in the vacinity of 25 ventriloquial knee figures (dummies). Meanwhile, as the years have gone by, my library had grown so prodigious, incorporating well in excess of 30,000 books, that, in 2007, I was pressed by the apartment manager, under threat of my lease not being renewed, to move most of it into a storage facility.
I had previously ascribed my rituals and routines, such as the endless book acquisitions, to having an addictive personality, but I no longer utilize that narrative. While I have been a long-standing critic of the recovery movement's discourse on the loss of willpower and its essentialist reification of addiction, treating addiction as a real thing, I was, at the same time, unable to decipher my inclination to become thoroughly engrossed in behaviors, and, in all candor, I fell short when fighting to eliminate, or even moderate, them. Since cognitively restructuring them as Aa preoccupations, I find myself strangely in control.
My fascinations with a concatenation of elaborate doctrines forged order out of my social chaos. With each and every one of them, I have become proficient and loquacious. Structurization, my current perspective, was preceded by transmodern critical realism, structural dialectics, the Neoplatonic framework of alethionomy, the popular neuroscience of mental energetics, and the occult philosophy of soulology. Once selected, the paradigm, comprising parts adopted and parts invented, has been transformed into a comprehensive taxonomy. Without the standardization, the routine, and the constancy of an integrative outlook, as my unwavering ground and serene center, I have struggled against an unrelenting encumbrance and unease.
In search of contextuality, I have designed many alternate universes. My aforementioned ventriloquism, in which I have played all the parts, has conspicuously been among them. It also provided a comedic escape from my life's tragedies. Futhermore, I created a Bajoran Star Trek figure, Vedek Pagh, and developed a rabbinical Society for Creative Anachronism persona, Moyshe Arn der Faygnboym ben Hesh Leyb der Leyvy. These chimerical self-portraits, one set in the past and another in the future, have functioned as expositors for my shifting stances. Telling their stories, largely to conduct reified thought experiments, has taken precedence over meeting with other enthusiasts.
Additionally, an animated banner, one I designed nearly a decade before my Aa diagnosis, headlines the portal to The MarkFoster.NETwork, the title I have given to my ensemble of domains and websites, and greets visitors with the salutation, Welcome to my universe! This Internet network, as the electronic avatar of the multiple facets of my inward and outward being, remained incomplete without the accession of The League to Fight Neurelitism. More than a modest intellectual attainment, joining the league to the network has, in symbolizing and manifesting the integration of my personality, suffused me with a spirit which might be most excellently described as rapturous.
The approaches I applied for studying my own religion have attested to the continuity of modifications to my worldview. Utilizing a didactic, formulaic, and arcane metaphysics, I had become poignantly fixated on classifying what were, I then believed, the Neoplatonic conditions of existence into an extensive compilation of quotations. Earlier in my life, I referred to this ritual as inspired categorization. Classification has always been comforting. With my subsequent reformation into a social constructionist and a poststructuralist, I have, while retaining an ostensibly similar model, refashioned the conditions into relative names, categories, and conveniences of language. In other words, I no longer take my framework so seriously.
Although I was born into a minimally practicing Jewish home, attended Hebrew school, and became a bar mitzvah at 13, I undertook investigations for a new faith about one year earlier. Considering I chose to briefly continue going to Hebrew school following my bar mitzvah, if the Jewish renewal movement were around, I might have stayed in Judaism. However, after briefly practicing Sikhism, Eckankar, and, when had few heard of it, Wicca, I became active in yet another religion in 1970. As a member, the confidence and support I obtained for my special interests may account for my scholastic attainments and career.

Throughout the course of my life, I have, so far, undergone three momentous and transformative awakenings, attaining the first, at 14, by embracing my current religion and immediately embarking upon an exploration of the conditions of existence, or worlds of God, and my spiritual faculties, such as inner vision and faith. The second, at around 40, was in the abandonment of my ontological realism, or essentialism, for nominalism, or anti-essentialism. The third, at 51, was in the decoding of my neurological riddle through the dual diagnoses of Aa and OCD. Presently, I strive for a consummate awakening through faná, the mystic annihilation of the prison of self.

Given my nominalism, my view that categories of particulars are only relative names and willful social constructions, I am not an existentialist, nor do I believe I could ever be one. The universalization of the search for meaning, as in Viktor Frankl's logotherapy, is far too idealist and essentialist for my tastes. Yet, if I were an existentialist, I would then, without much difficulty, portray my insomnia as an existential crisis, a personal realization of the pinnacle of angst, succeeded by its syntheses in the diagnoses of Aa and OCD. As things stand, however, I can only see, in my newfound awareness, the opportunities for new language games.

Even if the etiologies, the origins or causes, of the autism spectrum are not yet fully mapped, I am thankful that my own route has been charted. My earliest memory is that of lying in a stroller as a baby. I can curiously recollect my late mother wheeling me around the park area which, at the intersection of Wallace Avenue, divided the two sides of the Bronx's Pelham Parkway. At one point, a woman, who had been conversing with my mother, dared to look into the carriage and smile at me. My immediate reaction to this invasion of my personal space was, I plainly recall, a pronounced sense of irritation. 

In addition, I have lived alone, and never married, since leaving my parents' home in 1976. Even though I have taught the class, Marriage and Family, about two dozen times and possess good technical understandings of romantic and other relationships, my predicament lies in applying them to myself. Time and again, I miss social cues, become anxious, play dumb, or lack the competencies to respond. I think back upon my fret and bewilderment at not knowing if I loved anyone or if, discernably, anyone loved me. In my late twenties, around 1983, my first date was arranged by a therapist. My last was in 1993.
As one chiropractor called to my attention, my back is the most rigid he ever adjusted. Beyond my choices in words, in my teens, I became acutely aware, through observation and from what others had told me, that an unwelcomed and unintentional formality, with an absence of spontaneity in body language and inflection, resulted in comportments both dispassionate and austere. The more I craved to be emotionally intimate, particularly with women, the more woodenly I acted. My loves have all been unrequited. For a time, my best efforts to present myself as less affected in my pragmatics came to no avail, even while I wrestled with the glaring contradiction between genuinely being natural and my exertions to be so.
Indeed, my seeming incompetence at cultivating successful romantic relationships was often front stage and center throughout adolescence and into adulthood. Periodically, and leading right up until my Aa diagnosis, I occasionally, and always unsuccessfully, pursued a resolution to this dilemma, and, in exasperation, I consulted, intermittently, with several clinical psychologists and counselors. I had once presumed that my difficulties in this area stemmed from poor peer relations as a child, and I still believe that may have been a contributing factor. I now recognize, however, that my willpower was, in essence, playing war games with my neurology, as I was, inadvertently, attempting to become a non-autistic man. The battle is over, and I can be at peace with myself.
Birds of a feather do flock together, studies show, and I have pondered over individuals, past and present, whom I have counted among my friends. A few have, I suspect, been Asperger's autistics or were at other points along the autism spectrum. From Ronnie, who asked the same questions again and again, mostly concerning his preoccupation with biblical translations, and twirled his pencils to calm himself, and his nephew, Tommy, who did not speak until he was 7, to Pat, an abrasive fellow with no social sense, to Richard, a brilliant, donnish, and chronically unemployed eccentric who once bit me on the ear and loves Woody Allen and Gilbert and Sullivan.
Furthermore, human relationships, their absence or presence, have had only isolated depressive repercussions, and being companionless has rarely been bothersome. While residing with my parents, I lived, more or less, in a realm of my own making. Typically, I remained in my room or, whenever possible, trolled through my favorite bookstores in Manhattan. If I were to be home for my one meal per day, a minimalist diet which remains my custom, I oftentimes requested my mother to leave dinner for me in the refrigerator. As much as she disliked doing so, it could be wontedly intolerable to eat with my family.
During my childhood and teens, an unflagging difficulty with small talk accentuated my artlessness at social interaction. Nearly whatever my interlocutors would impart to me, I wound up comprehending literally. The very fact that I regularly missed the subtlety and nuance of everyday conversation made me a convenient target for many practical jokes. I recall one particularly humorous incident, in my middle to late teens, when someone persuaded me concerning the existence of a small Latin American tribe whose members were endowed, through natural selection, with a third eye on the backs of their heads.
Decades before learning I was on the autism spectrum, I branded myself a solipsist. Lecturing to students has moderately reprogrammed me. My infelicitous smiles, which sometimes caused offense, resulted from "living in my head," as I have often remarked, to daydreaming, or to simple social perplexity. Over time, and through experience, I have ascertained that, to most people, my passions are plainly boring. Not having much to say, I tend to be laconic, more or less, in social situations. Fortunately, weaving one's interests into lectures is normative for an academic, and it makes that process enjoyable for me.
I will admit to being self-centered, fastened on my thoughts, but not to being very selfish. Like many Asperger's autistics, my staple, and hardly egotistical, pursuit has been for social justice. In 1968, while in the seventh grade, I joined the Students Democratic Coalition. Through it, I attended a Humphrey-Muskie presidential campaign rally featuring Sen. Edmund Muskie, opposed anti-ballistic missiles, and picketed a supermarket and distributed petitions in support of a boycott on California grapes. As a professor, a leftist standpoint informs my lectures. I consistently respond to racial and other bigotries with righteous indignations.
In terms of sensory and movement difficulties, I have, since I was just a boy, rarely felt at home in my clothing and, when younger, pulled at my garments around my neck and, to this day, near my middle. I often ritualistically wear clothes again and again. While alone, I have preferred to be undressed and have cut my own hair to avoid my outer ears. In my physical education classes, I had ungainly coordination and literally no concept of sports. I was ordinarily the last one picked for teams. When little, I was terrified of eye drops. To administer them, the opthamologist and both my parents were required to hold me down. Year round, the room temperature, even now, needs to be just right, namely, about 83°F. My parents constantly harassed me about turning the heat or air conditioner up too high.
Then, as a child, or a bit now when highly fatigued, I have had panic attacks from hearing, even thinking of, noises, like echos, barking dogs, bouncing balls, laughter, applause, and bursting balloons. While noises remain a distraction, gymnasiums were a nightmare. Due to my mental associations with ball and bomb, I was paralyzed by any b words, like boom and boy. Seeing bits of food on or about the mouths of people would make me nauseous. I was frightened by heights, wind, insects, and precipitively passing objects in my peripheral vision. My sinus fixations, which ended in three surgeries, may have been partially an Aa sensory problem, OCD, or both.
Further, I was, as a young boy, regrettably petrified of anyone atypical to my experience, such as little people, Blacks, and the disabled. I feared that my ears would permanently protrude when manipulated by barbers and froze in discomfort. I detested being hugged, kissed, or touched, including on the head. Overall, animals were less stressful, and better companions, than humans. My penmanship, shy of a draftsman-like lettering, has always been cacographic. I tirelessly protected the objects in my world from contact with others. Second-hand items all felt wrong to the touch. I raged until my parents made exchanges. 
Perceptually, my prosopagnosia or face blindness, coupled with my poor personal name recognition, is, while somewhat remediated from my youth, an ongoing challenge. When people greet me, I am, more commonly than not, placed into the embarrassing position of being unable to identify them at all, not recalling where we met, or not remembering their names. As a student, I rarely knew, or recognized, my peers, and, as a professor, I am similarly absent-minded with my students. In frustration, I have tried some mnemonic techniques through the years. Unfortunately, I did not find any of them all too profitable. 
To make an incontrovertible understatement, I was a fish out of water. Rather than ask for a bathroom pass, I urinated in my pants, hoping against hope that neither the teacher nor the other children would notice the puddle I left in my seat or on the floor. In the seventh grade, on a bus trip to perform at Montreal's Man and His World with my band, the teacher saw the urine but protected me. I displayed an equable look of mystification as I sat at my desk or wandered down the corridors. In fact, I all too commonly got lost and was unable, without assist, to find my classroom or, for that matter, to track down my home while walking home from school. My surroundings appeared uniformly surreal to me.
Gastrointestinal (GI) tract issues are also classic Aa comorbidities. In the 1980s, I became terribly constipated and lost around 30 lbs. over three months. After extensive tests, all negative, a gastroenterologist intimated that I take a bulk-forming laxative, which resolved the problems. In addition, I continue to have periodic troubles with acid reflux as well as irritable, loose, and irregular bowels. Anecdotally, I often notice an association between an absence of GI symptoms and more generalized sensations of mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being. How pedestrian is my testimony, in this regard, I am unable to postulate.
Likewise, I have retained a not-so-negligible cavillous, stilted, and convoluted vernacular speaking and writing style. To illustrate, I maintained, for a time, that my coming-of-age suburban Long Island home was the Township of Hempstead. As was pointed out to me, the proper name is Town of Hempstead. On the other hand, while I was being technically exact in casting my local community as a village, when most used town, I chided people. Verbal imprecision greatly troubled me. I still often specify, and recognize, medications predominantly by their generics, as in oxymetazoline hydrochloride nasal spray for Afrin. I similarly preferred terms such as, defecate and flatulate, over the more common colloquialisms.
Furthermore, as a child, I appear to have exhibited, like many autistics, a touch of hyperlexia. That is to say, I acquired, largely through imitation, an extensive vocabulary, but frequently without sufficiently understanding a number of the multisyllabic words I had mastered, and I could read audibly with a competence well beyond my junior years. Fortunately, in time, any traces of hyperlexia from my youth had been substantially overcome, and my mental lexicon became associated with normative definitions. Although I retain a preference for sesquipedalian discourse, I have, though not to an ample extent, trained myself to moderate my enthusiasm by forcing my mind to consider the requirements of my listeners or readers.
In closing this first section of these memoirs, I am reminded of the cockroaches, among this planet's most durable residents. They have, according to estimates, been citizens of our biosphere for some 300 million years. By contrast, we hominids are, based on current data, shy of that figure by approximately a third. Those irksome and intractable creatures hid everywhere in my apartment, including my bed, my clothing, and an overflow drain, torturing my life and making it a living hell. Unbeknownst to me at the time, my uninvited guests bestowed a cornucopia of glad tidings. Once, I hated them. Now, I am indebted.





The Original Diagnosis

While bigotry rallies in the "regular" guy,
Unable to cherish the mind walks of many,
The power of diversity releases the dreamer
From the prison of mediocrity.


- Mark A. Foster, Ph.D., from a 1990s poem




Having been to hell and back, I would not recommend it. As a child, I was the passive recipient of multiple drug and other therapies. In sum, they were founded on the supposition that I suffered from a psychosis, childhood schizophrenia. As best I can tell, none of the treatments actually helped me. However, I am, by and large, a strong-willed individual. Some, including members of my family of orientation, had even accused me of pertinaciousness. Still, given that many in similar straits did not fair nearly as well, my obstinance may have been a paramountly advantageous quality. One clinical psychologist actually irritated me in his repeated stupefactions at my accomplishments.
Preceding my nascent diagnoses in April, 2007, I did not know that the first edition (1952) of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (the DSM-I) of the American Psychiatric Association only specified autism as a manifestation of schizophrenic reaction, childhood type, my child psychiatrist's evaluation. I came upon this knowledge through my web surfing over the summer of 2007. Autism was also placed under schizophrenic reaction, paranoid type and schizoid personality disorder. The DSM-II (1968), making few pertinent revisions, assigned autism to schizophrenia, childhood type and schizoid personality disorder.
An initial exhilaration at my incipient finding, which I discussed with my current psychiatrist, turned swiftly to feelings of sorrow and anger that I did not have this information earlier, and, above all, that I had not been born two or three decades later into a somewhat more enlightened era. Indeed, had my Aa not been so undisguised as a boy, and if I had no OCD, I might never have been diagnosed in the first place. Moreover, considering both the striking incongruity in the quality of psychiatric care between the 1960s and the present-day and the nomenclature in the first two editions of the DSM, my situation was not at all peculiar.
As a side note, marking a massive paradigm shift, the DSM-III at once signalized a critical reappraisal of the biological and genetic nosology by the founder of modern scientific psychiatry, Emil Kraepelin (1856-1926). First published in 1980, it distinguished infantile autism from schizophrenia, childhood type, but I definitely did not meet the established criteria for Kanner's autism. It was not until the DSM-IV (1994) and the DSM-IV-TR (2000) that Asperger's disorder had supplanted schizoid disorder of childhood or adolescence, an archaicism in the DSM-III, and childhood-onset schizophrenia was assessed as very rare.

Taking into account these nosological modifications, I had, in effect, been diagnosed with autism, using the DSM-I, by my principal child psychiatrist. Since there was no separate DSM autism entity until 1980, my earlier remembrance, from my mother, that he changed the diagnosis from autism to childhood schizophrenia was likely either inaccurate or she misunderstood the situation. However, perhaps my mother meant that, contrary to the ideas and expectations of the clinicians we consulted earlier, the autistic symptoms of childhood schizophrenia, as the category was then constructed, were not so prominent.
Now, in all fairness, I was generally excluded from the conversations between my child psychiatrist and my mother. (My father, as per my demands, was rarely present and kept largely uninformed.) That being the case, I am unaware of which details in my diagnosis had been meted out to her. Yet, I can still visualize, when I was about 13, standing inside the hallway of the main floor within our house while repetitively screaming to my mother, "Am I a schizophrenic?" Finally, and vociferously, she then acknowledged it. "Yes! Is that what you wanted to hear?" "Yes," I sighed, utterly exhausted, and I repaired to my room.
To provide some context, my maternal grandmother, Nanny, had died of cancer, a year earlier, when I was 12. After accidentally overhearing talk of her disease, I was resolutely instructed by my parents never to mention it, and its probable course, around her, and I complied. When I asked whether Nanny knew she had cancer, my mother said that she suspected so but was not entirely sure. How horrible, I thought, to be aware you have cancer but to be deprived, by your daughter, of the opportunity for communication. This approach was, palpably, quotidian in the 1960s. Yet, I was determined not to let my mother use it on me.
At my insistence, the clinical apartheid of my mother and myself was abrogated, albeit unenthusiastically. I vividly recall that I was, in one of our sessions, disturbed at some comment made by my psychiatrist to my mother regarding an element of my behavior. When I attempted to interrupt, he snapped back, "See, that's the schizophrenia." I was, after all, just a boy, welcomed only in silence and subjugation, and could have no say in statements made about me. Indeed, if my routinized impuissance in our triad was in any doubt before this disparagement, it was now crystal clear. While yet callow, I was not dense.
In fact, virtually all of my social actions, and whatsoever I ostensibly failed to accomplish in my life, were attributed, ecumenically, by my psychiatrist to an apparently omnipotent childhood schizophrenia. As, to Herbert Marcuse, an entrenched class of capitalist elites engendered a one-dimensional man, so I became, as a constructed objectification of this psychoanalyst, a transpicuously depersonalized one-dimensional boy. Yet, antithetical to his fatalism, getting better, he puzzlingly insisted, was my own responsibility. Thoroughly marginalized, my redemption was found only in a temporary extrication from the system.
Maybe it was for peace of mind. Perhaps it was simply to resolve a prolonged dilemma. I am not certain. However, within a week of the Aa diagnosis in 2007, I phoned my old child psychiatrist for the first time in 18 years. I was polite, while the encounter itself was, from my standpoint, exceptionally fruitful. At first, he counseled me to focus on my future, not on my past, which struck me as more cliché than practicality. I am unable to so rigorously insulate my life's past from its future tense. He then assented, in the royal we, "Yes, if you were walking into our office today, we would probably diagnose you with Asperger's and OCD."
Years earlier, in a 1989 telephone conversation, my child psychiatrist had affirmed that I "obviously" did not have schizophrenia but, alternatively, some type of "developmental delay." Prospectively, the DSM-IV, the first version of that manual to subsume Aa, would not be published for another five years. In any event, although I was, in a way, grateful for his candid admission, I was also now unable to make sense out of my assorted odysseys and, for years to come, felt as if stranded in a neurological limbo. Whether in television shows and the cinema, or in my own life stories, I have never cared for open endings.
After reflecting on my child psychiatrist's words, the only conclusion I could reach was that I had been dreadfully neurotic or, in current parlance, that I had an anxiety disorder. Indeed, in light of the subsequent diagnosis of comorbid OCD, this assessment was both impressively accurate and radically incomplete. My 2007 discussion with that psychiatrist resulted, for all intents and purposes, in a second medical opinion, and, since his views were consonant with the perceptions of my present psychiatrist, they became eminently adaptive for me. Indeed, from that moment on, I have felt genuinely at peace with myself.
Well, then there were the seizures. I had one tonic clonic, or grand mal, seizure in 1982 and a second in 1985. As a child, however, I would frequently lay down on the floor and exclaim, "It's happening," with concurrent feelings of disgust, a bad taste in my mouth, and a mental image of crumpled and burning paper. Although these symptoms were, if I recall correctly, imputed to my "schizophenia," a neurologist I consulted in 2007 advised me that they were, in actuality, simple partial seizures. Either way, I am uncertain which was the more deleterious, the seizures or my mother's shaming trepidations over them. 
The left frontal lobes, the area of atypical electrical activity spotted on my often-repeated electroencephalograms (EEGs), are connected with empathy and with rapid and efficient mentalizing. While notations on my neurological reports do indicate a seizure disorder, a currently influential viewpoint, in citing correlations of anomalous frontal lobes with the autism spectrum, posits that variations in frontal lobe development can be associated with some emotional control difficulties, a propensity to become upset at small changes, compulsivity, intransigent approaches to problem-solving, and black-and-white thinking.
Breaking my silence and, to borrow an expression from the gay community, coming out as an autistic have provided considerable solace. However, as I was growing up, my now antiquated diagnosis of childhood schizophrenia, as well as my psychiatric control in general, were, by my steady and stern directives, maintained as the closest of family secrets. If I merely suspected, justifiably or not, that outsiders may have been apprised of my condition, I would become absolutely livid and often throw one of my customary and ritualized temper tantrums. Properly staging my self-presentation had evolved into a full-time, and largely ineffectual, occupation, even as my oft-repeated attempts to dissimulate the diagnosis were hindered by an unyielding social inaptitude.
For me, life has been a succession of culture shocks. What should be prosaic and native is, instead, occasionally exotic. In many ways, blending into my diverse social settings has often been accompanied by the uneasy feel of an acculturation through ethnography, as I will strain to comprehend the peculiar values and norms of my seemingly antipodal surroundings, while attempting a bit of mindful fluency in its foreign tongue. The pages of the phrase books are ever-present in my thoughts. No matter how well I can now function in most situations, some still, customarily, bring with them the noir ambience of the alien. 





Family and Kinship Relations


As far back as I can trace my autism is to my father's maternal uncle. He died when I was only a little boy, and I scarcely remember him. He was, I have been told, regarded as an unusual individual. A bachelor, he worked as a mail sorter and spent his entire adult life with his sister and brother-in-law, my paternal grandparents. Whenever I would visit, I sat on his lap, while he seemed lost in a world to his own. He was always in the same chair, next to the living room window, and he was constantly fiddling with one thing or another. The Asperger's diagnosis did not exist in those days, and my knowledge of him is scant.
My mother, a teacher aid and the oldest child of a struggling grocery store owner turned food salesman, pressured me into permitting her to toss my beloved G.I. Joe down the incinerator. Given my attachment to it, I suspect she meant well, but such fervent bonds to objects, as to my ventriloquial knee figures and to a polished agate stone I owned, are commonplace among autistics. Consequently, whenever my family went on vacation, I wished for my most treasured possessions to come, too. If refused, seeing them again, upon returning home, was like a family reunion. I still mourn for a Tommy 7 (TV show) clown nose, stolen by a neighboring fellow preschooler. 
The aggregation of moments through my lifespan, primarily over the course of my junior years, has been vexed with manifold contradictions. Relentlessly, in my boyhood and, at times, into adulthood, I was badgered by my mother concerning my egocentricity, which is an Aa trait, and told, time after time, that I cared for no one but myself. If, she insisted now and then, my coreligionists became wise to my conceit, they would shun me. Yet, in attempting to be empathetic, my stiffness and plasticity left me exceedingly frustrated; and despite being verbose in deportment, I hardly ever seemed to utter the right words.
Frankly, as I have systematically mulled over my relations with my mother, my infuriation and befuddlement concerning her frequent denigrations, her impatience with my stuttering and my pacing, her demands that I leave her alone, her accusations of deafness when I tuned her out, her outrage at my paucity of benevolence, and even her well-intentioned proddings to make me smile have, in weaker moments, turned to resentment. "How could I have given birth to such a selfish person like you?" They are words etched, even embedded, into my consciousness and betray a distinct nescience to the autistic implications of my early diagnosis. Except for when she entertained company, she seemed to be continually exasperated with me. 
I loved my mother irrespectively, and I craved her reciprocation. Nevertheless, I believe I did, over the years, internalize her emotionally abusive accusations and tirades. As my all but constant state of deliberation trained, from time to time, on my mother's outbursts, on whether I truly was an abhorrent person, I could not figure out what had gone wrong. Why, considering my general spiritual orientation, my devotions, my meditations, and my studies of religious texts, was I still so self-centered? I wondered whether I had failed to live up to my Lord's expectations, or if, perhaps, I had embraced a false belief system.


Kinship Diagram




In hindsight, I have attempted to be understanding. Setting my own issues off to the side, my family maneuvered through multiple obstacle courses. To cite one of them, our lives were left unsettled by my mother's insomnia. It was, I began to surmise within months of my own diagnoses, a disturbance secondary to OCD, which also exhibited in her phobias of heights and escalators, and hyperacusis. Obsessions on noises - whether anticipated, real, or imagined - permitted her a modicum of sleep. A near total silence was demanded after her bedtime, but even with the quiet came complaints and a perennial crankiness. 
I willingly concede that living with certain individuals on the autism spectrum can be arduous. In addition to myself, and the stresses and strains which my Aa imposed upon my family, my mother contended with my father, an eye care professional and the oldest child of a semiprofessional boxer and, subsequently, a successful grocery store owner. For his poor grasp of social nuance, dazed countenance, blindness to subtext, clumsy speech, inelegant and unremitting naiveté, and ignorance of current fads and fashions, I coarsely described him, typically in frustration or anger, as having "something missing." Graceful speech was generally possible for him only in highly structured situations, as with his optical patients.
My father's brother, alleged by his wife to be very weird, told me in a March, 2008, phone call that their maternal uncle, markedly after retiring, and my father were both decidedly odd. My mother was a talented woman who, if not obligated to help support her family during the Great Depression, might have become a physician. When she expressed an interest in marrying my father, her entire family, her cousin informed me, thought she had gone stark raving mad. To be fair, he was a handsome young fellow, and, admitting his habitually idiosyncratic and often bizarre mannerisms, he could even be slightly charming at times.
My father thrived on his routines and rituals, threw fits when our family disrupted them, despised certain clothing fabrics, and was captivated by counting, waiting by the window, and being on time. Indeed, the latter was so much so that, whenever he got his way, we invariably arrived at events well ahead of schedule. Privately, he preoccupied himself with science fiction novels, "the garbage," the science and technology magazine, Popular Mechanics, and his huge and omnipresent collection of American flags. Then, truth be told, even while the hospital staff was busily caring for my debilitated mother, my father droned the hackneyed tales of a medic in World War II. 
After first hearing about Aa in 2004, I immediately thought of my father and hypothesized that he, but not myself, was an Asperger's autistic. That same year, while my mother laid dying in her hospital bed, I broached the possibility of my father's Aa with my parents' physician, but he was, at the time, principally unfamiliar with it. Ensuingly, owing to my father's various problems with decorum in his new assisted living community, I phoned the physician, in late 2007, and asked him to arrange for a psychiatric assessment. While the process dragged on more than I would have preferred, eventually, my father was assigned a psychiatrist.
In February, 2008, my father's psychiatrist told me he has Aa symptions and (with mixed results) is treating him, pharmacologically, as an Asperger's autistic. Although a formal diagnosis of Aa, the psychiatrist continued, is, due to the aggravating effects of geriatric dementia, no longer possible, he provided, in our two conversations, enough of a diagnosis to suit me. Suddenly, in a flash, years of indefatigable turmoil with my father were elucidated. Still, notwithstanding our common autism, an undeniable asymmetry, whether in avocation, capability, or personality, has outdistanced, in considerable measure, any proportionality. 
Neither my parents nor I had adequate emotional control. A continual fracas revolved around my father's virtually incessant emotional, and occasionally even physical, abuse of me. Now and again, my mother would alternately threaten to put me up for adoption or to leave my father. As she acknowledged to me over the years, she remained with him for financial reasons, for which I never entirely forgave her, but never wholly forgave him. Looking back, I attribute these hapless plights to a mutual frustration of two social misfits. We had precious little insight into the norms of propriety, but we each knew how to go for the jugular and make it really sting.
For as long as I can remember, my father, like myself, has had gastrointestinal problems, and its foremost symptom was a loathsome flatulence. Whenever he neglected to spray the bathroom disinfectant, the entire area came under a tacit quarantine. Since, to boot, he generally used the upstairs facilities in the house, which were directly adjacent to my bedroom, this lone issue, even though superficially minor, only served to exacerbate any coexistent tension or enmity between us. Subsequently, with his advancing age, he has, regrettably, developed both irritable bowel syndrome and an incontinence of the bowels. 
I am doleful that my mother died prior to the revelations of my father's and my autism. A mere knowledge of it would, quite possibly, have ameliorated her relationships with both of us. The tremendous stress that my father's Aa had produced in my mother, which she generally believed to be intentionally bad behavior, may, I have sometimes speculated, have contributed to the stroke which began the long, downward spiral in her health. Over the two years after the stroke, she also wondered, as did I, why I did not spend more time at her side, but the sensations, and cessations in routine, would have been unbearable.
Nonetheless, I probably do not languish over death, in the conventional sense, as much as most persons, if there is such standardization. Perhaps I thwart intense empathy to avoid being overwhelmed, but I am only guessing. In late 2004, when my mother died, following two lengthy years of suffering, I was grateful her pains had ended, and have occasionally missed her, but I did not mourn hardly at all. At that time, about two years prior to my new diagnoses, my mothers accusations about my selfishness, so long ago, came back to haunt me briefly. 
As to my father's death, I was informed of it, over the phone, on the afternoon of December 15, 2008. He died that morning of, as they say, an apparent heart attack. Given that his quality of life was minimal, and he was barely conscious while he was awake, his passing was, in many respects, a blessing. Had he lived much longer, he would, according to his physicians, begin to experience tremendous pain. Still, knowing what I came to know about my father's autism and my own, I had accurately predicted that I would grieve more at his, than my mother's, passing. Yet, by the same token, perhaps my sadness reflected the realization that both my parents, those who raised me, had left this world. It is a strange sensation.
At my father's funeral, only two of us addressed the congregation. Given the rabbi's preference, fearing an extreme emotion from family members which would prevent others from making their tributes, a friend spoke first. In amazement, I listened as this friend described a very kind man who was, by all measurements, a complete stranger to me. Subsequently, in my short, rather matter-of-fact speech, I referred to my father's physical and emotional abuse during my childhood, having once hated him, becoming closer in recent years, and, finally, feeling a connection from our shared autistic diagnosis.
Nothing in life is ever perfect. If we imagine otherwise, we will, sooner or later, be jarred out of the delusion. I reject the trendy psychobabble about people doing their best. Since I have frequently failed to perform as well as I might, it would, I long ago concluded, be absurd for me, out of mere expediency or a desire for closure, to expect a pristine moral infallibility from others. Although I cannot say my parents have always done their best, neither can I claim it for myself. What binds us together is that, in my genetic and social inheritance, I own both my father's Aa and my mother's OCD. I am their looking glass.





Other Social Contexts


The unceasing intimidations of my formative years are far too abundant to enumerate here, but I will provide some background. Outside of my family, I preferred the company and conversation of adults to playing with other children. Among my peers, I routinely confounded kindness with bullying and bullying with kindness, even as, in defiance of all my mother's urgings, I grew increasingly more solitary. On account of putting on my mother's makeup, contrary to her wishes, to cover my facial scabs, my top-buttoned shirts, my butterfly collars, my briefcase, and my unfashionable accoutrements galore, not to mention my stuttering, my rapid speech, and my generalized penchants for peculiarity, an anxiously anticipated bullying or teasing was repeated well nigh diurnally and almost like clockwork.
I had little comprehension of the prevailing tastes of my cohorts and, as a consequence, donned whatever attire seemed, to me, most rational. Since I despised the press of a wallet against my skin, I attached one of those green bicyclists' pouches to my belt. Although it was visibly soiled, I saw no point in having it washed. How would cleaning the pouch, I reasoned, improve its overall function? Although the teasing I endured could have, in this one respect, been easily nullified by no longer wearing it, I, for whatever reason, never connected the dots. Similarly, in the early years of high school, I frequently clipped a few religious buttons to my shirt and trousers. With barely a shred of social discrimination, pragmatism overshadowed common sense.
I was, discounting my usual oddity, well behaved, but my fourth-grade teacher, who must have been familiar with my psychiatric record, was evidently provoked by certain of my eccentricities. Along these lines, I once, perhaps wrapt in some improvised abstraction, politely asked her to repeat a question. She pulled back on my left earlobe and shouted it into my ear. Being an inordinately sensitive child, I felt totally humiliated. When I arrived home, I cried to my mother who, I am grateful, complained to one of the school's officials. Still and all, the next year, my former teacher would be promoted to assistant principal. 
In the fifth grade, walking to and from school, I began focusing on a voice, slow in meter but mellow and deep in tone, inside my head. I recall asking myself whether I was losing my mind. Although I was aware that the voice was fanciful, and I controlled it voluntarily, it did, in fact, do little more than to recite my name over and again. In review, the unwise divulgement of these inner imaginings to my inimical psychiatrist may have reaffirmed his earlier diagnosis of schizophrenia which, in turn, culiminated in my being committed. Sorrowfully, I only read belatedly, in 2007, that obsessions on thoughts can be indicants of OCD.
I was only 11, and my first time away from home was as a state hospital inpatient for two grim months. The place had an awful turpentine smell and, as I imagined it, the aura of a prison. I was, in retrospect, unsuitably delivered a series of electroconvulsive therapies (ECTs). While painless, I recall being strapped down, drugged, and, in my peregrinations back to the ward with Mr. Watson, for me a grounding ritual, becoming lucid. On the one day he was busy, being escorted by another man was severely discomposing. I had bonded to Mr. Watson, and I would inquire about him, on his days off, from the other attendants. 
One of the more burdensome side effects of receiving ECTs is, quite frequently, varying lapses in long-term memory. In the face of months of nearly total amnesia, I would arrive home, whether for a weekend stay, only after the treatments were completed, or at the conclusion of my hospitalization period, and fail to recognize practically anything in my surroundings. The overriding exclusion was, through it all, that I never forgot my parents; and they were forewarned I might not recognize them immediately. However, when each weekend home had terminated, I became, in anticipation of resumed lonliness, inconsolable.
To reiterate, the major problem was in psychiatric construction. Given an insufficiency of research into autism, the boundaries of the schizophrenias had been demarcated far too broadly. Consequently, ECTs were futilely administered to individuals with Aa and, perhaps, a secondary or aggravating condition, such as my OCD. Barring blatant misdiagnosis, such a tragic state of affairs is, in the twenty-first century, unimaginable and could only be attributed to the most horrendous malpractice. Yet, lamentably, I am not alone and have interacted, online, with others, including the son of an Asperger's autistic man, about my age, who suffers a continued memory loss from that interval of his childhood.
Sadly, I witnessed injudicious beltings by all the attendants in my ward. Even Mr. Watson, who treated me kindly and was tipped by my father, flagellated others. Mercifully, I was beaten only once. After I told my parents, my father threatened the woman. Consequent to the reprimand, I received only the occasional dirty look. If the criminal battery by those monsters occurred today, and not in the psychiatric dark ages (1967 to be precise), I am fairly confident that the majority of them would be serving time. I later protested when events prior to the ECTs were discussed and became agitated while driving past the hospital.
Ensuant to a castigation by my dreaded and arrogant child psychiatrist that, absent some rectification of my illness, he might once again have me committed, as if I were to blame, I methodically and assiduously hid my thoughts and feelings from him. I also persistently pleaded with my mother, who sadly liked and trusted him, not to report certain episodes. Even as a preteen, I recognized his threat to be counterproductive and diligently worked to defeat it. What is more, these difficulties had worsened, in my mind, after his brusque repudiation of my accounts of the abuse. Much as my mother interceded to support me, I remain doubtful whether, in his hubris, he gave them any credence.
By the summer following my hospitalization, I had turned 12. I spent one homesick month at Ramapo Anchorage Camp, now Camp Ramapo, in a luxuriant facility for special needs children in rural Rhinebeck, New York. (Supposedly, I had consented, but I did not recall.) Besides learning how to swim, I devoted as much time as possible to ritually wandering from end to end of the camp, by myself, and rowing around the lake. The multitudinous hours I lingered alone aboard those boats were immensely pleasurable. As usual, some of the boys bullied me, but I was clueless about how to associate with other kids anyway.
The camp counselors, disgruntled that I kept mainly to myself, insisted that I participate in some group activities, including softball. One of them, apparently acquainted with my psychiatric profile, expressed surprise, though pointedly no less than my own, that I had played reasonably well. Not to let him get the better of me, I incisively retorted, "Well, I may not like it, but I can do it." "You are smarter than me," he replied. When my parents arrived, I was astonished, given my well-rehearsed litany of complaints, that they inquired if I wished to stay for another month. Without hesitation, I inexorably declined, and we headed home.
More precisely, we were driving to our new home on suburban Long Island. I had visited the ranch house before, but only as we rode from place to place with various realtors. As I subsequently discovered, my endless victimization was the major reason for the move, and it was accomplished while I was at camp. Since I was completing the fifth grade, had we remained in New York City, I would have been bussed to my new middle school, and my parents were understandably concerned over how I might be treated. Although I was hopeful that, beginning afresh, I might at last be accepted, my optimism, I soon learned, would be unjustified.
I only attended my new suburban elementary school during the sixth grade, since, the following year, I would be transferring to one of the district's junior high schools. As my homework for Mr. Galluzzo's sixth-grade class, I penned a poem, morbid and melancholy, and I read it out loud. Even while other students giggled, Galluzzo appeared to genuinely like it. "Being able to write like that takes real talent," he asseverated. After some serious consideration, I rejected the notion that the poem was self-referent. However, more than I would care to admit way back then, its trenchant verses had encapsulated my abject estrangement.
A boy of youth was white with fear.
His death he thought was growing near.
In tears he sat right by the clock.
Awaiting till it came to stop.
His mouth was dry.
His feet lie still.
He listened, numb and clawed with chill.
He slowly rose, all crushed and sad.
That all the earth stood up and stared.
The angels sobbed, the devils gay.
A big dark cloud then cov'd the day.
But then more fright came to the lad.
The clock of death was going mad.
It turned at thrice the speed of time.
Then four, then five, then eight, then nine.
It then, yes, then, came to a stop.
But then the boy just smashed the clock.
And there it ended.
With a tock.
A year later, in the seventh grade, as I waited in the cafeteria line, I stood up to a boy my age, among my inveterate tormenters, and refused his demand to cut in front of me. After slamming me into a wall and breaking my sternum, he was suspended for no more than a week. I endlessly worried he would take revenge, but, for the most part, he avoided me. Some ten years afterwards, he saw me on a bus. As it turned out, we were both students at the same graduate school. He did not apologize, not that I had been counting on a mea culpa, but he was cordial and, in an indirect manner, may have sought to make amends.
In that same grade, a boy who, using the seating chart, sat right beside me in one class seemed to derive a sadistic gratification from repeatedly kicking me in the leg. Fearing retaliation, however, I complained to no one. This student was among the school's few evangelicals in a disproportionately Roman Catholic suburb with smaller Protestant and Jewish populations. Before class started one day, I asked him whether he thought Jesus approved of his behavior. He glanced down, appearing momentarily disheartened, but he responded with, "That's not what Christianity is about," and the persecutions resumed.
As a ninth grader, I began to stay home due to nervous stomach aches. (I was tested.) The perpetual bullying had exacted its toll. I was worn out, consumed by anticipatory anxiety, and quite possibly experiencing the symptoms of a chronic post-traumatic stress disorder. My mother brought me to an orthomolecular psychiatric clinic which dispensed megavitamins. One time, a psychiatrist, whom I vehemently refused to ever see again, described me, while in his office with my mother, as "obviously very sick." Owing to my displeasure, even more centrally with the represcribing of a neuroleptic drug, my mother phoned my former child psychiatrist who, based on the literature, evinced skepticism. Since he saw no present need for any therapy, we discontinued with the treatments.
My enthusiasm for attending the clinic was nonexistent. On the surface, it impressed me as medical quackery, and I am now somewhat astounded that my mother was adequately persuaded of its merits. Sadly, as a junior high school student, I had none of the requisite learning and background to formalize a reasoned objection. However, in negotiating with my mother, she yielded to my precondition that my father be assessed there, too. Once more, I fully expected him to receive a diagnosis and was shocked and incensed he did not. In those days, Asperger's autistics without overt comorbidities, like my OCD, were simply quirky.
Simultaneously, I was sent to a school for problem children. As the well-behaved victim, the change in venue made no sense to me, and, inevitably, the bullies multiplied. Once, while being bussed, a boy rubbed nasal mucus on my pants. Later, after a month or so, on learning that I could now only test for a high school equivalency diploma, I vigorously protested and was, reluctantly, returned to my former school. The very first day, a former drama teacher dismissively inquired, "Why did you come back?" However, for reasons unknown, though perhaps age, the frequency of the bullyings precipitously diminished.
Auspiciously, any ill-treatment and duplicity has, during my succeeding years as a university student, and even well beyond, become even more sporadic though no less grievous. As a case in point, I altogether missed the cues when, in roughly 2004, one of my erstwhile best friends unexpectedly engaged in conduct, spinning a yarn about losing five friends due to my behavior and no longer desiring my attendance at his parties, which appeared premeditated to drive me away. Considering we had only recently initiated a project of recording podcasts together, his chastisements took me completely by surprise, and I initially found myself being apologetic. My ex-fiance, for her part, referred to me as "a poster child for nerds."
In September, 2008, I decided to phone a friend of mine of around 28 years. Although we presently live in different parts of the U.S., we continued to keep in touch. On this one occasion, however, after telling him about my autism diagnosis from the previous year, he began to procedurally criticize me for a number of situations which occurred many years earlier. For instance, referring to a poor woman I dated in the early 1990s, he reprimanded me for not informing my psychiatrist about my attraction to "trash."  When I expressed sympathy for his poor communication with his sister, he accused me of attempting to impose my value system upon him. 
Predictably, I picked up on his modus operandi only while reflecting on his comments after the conversation. During out dialogue, I inappropriately responded logically to everything he said and, consequently, became frustrated with the irrationality of his comments. Given my failure to recognize that, ostensibly, his sole motive was to simply brush me off, it would appear as though my ability to read people, at least in this one respect, did not significantly improve from previous encounters of this type, and, moreover, that I seem to have considerable difficulty learning from past social experiences. Still, I wish that these individuals, instead of displaying such brazen cowardice, would have the moral backbone to express themselves more straightforwardly. 
During the final phases of my Ph.D. work, in 1983, I audited a graduate practicum, in the Counselor Education Department, on group psychotherapies. When the professor, and my pro bono Gestalt and Rogerian therapist for a while, conducted an encounter group in his home, people attended from across the U.S. Given my sense of justice and fair play, I objected after, under the guise of "being real," one fellow excoriated a woman for being late, and I adamantly refused to participate in an exercise of designating the person we each most disliked. Foreseeably, virtually everyone, including the professor, chose me.
I feel fortunate. Some autistics, in addition to having difficulties with social relations and with such executive functions as planning, response inhibition (including temper), and decision-making, are confronted with considerable intellectual challenges. For them, an escape into the depths of reason and imagination may not come as effortlessly. While I struggled, in my youth, with exorbitant executive problems, I turned many of  them, as an adult, to my benefit and advantage. Currently, I would contend that I make decisions, plan, and inhibit my affect with a commensurate ease, or hardship, to most folks I know. 
Many Asperger's autistics remain unemployed, underemployed, or poor throughout their lives, but I have been greatly privileged to work in a profession which affords me considerable seclusion, flexibility, and tolerance of my eccentricities. Yet, I remain cognizant that functioning in most fields extrinsic to academia might be quite onerous. For all my problems in developing rapport with my students, issues with which I still struggle occasionally, I am deeply aware that, given my social challenges, I would, in the majority of other careers, have faired far worse. As a teen, most summer jobs were, to me, next to impossible. I either quit, performed poorly, or was, in one instance, terminated by a taxicab servicing company.
On November 21, 2008, I was, following a two-hour laboratory test conducted the previous day, diagnosed with diabetes. Since my father is also a diabetic, albeit one who was able to control it entirely through diet for most of his life, this condition would appear to be the second one I have inherited from him. I suppose that, technically speaking, the diabetes now places me into the category of the multiply disabled, defined as persons with two or more disabilities. Nonetheless, at least for me, the diabetes, when compared with the autism, is a relatively light burden. Unlike my father, who frequently attempted to hide his candy from my mother, I have never been one to crave sweets.
As I survey the unfolding panorama of my lifetime, in protocols defined substantively through stagecraft, I call to mind the exigencies I have consistently faced, some of them profoundly agonizing, which, in their instantiations, have often appeared tragic, possibly irremediable, and, especially concerning my own rehabilitation, I had grown progressively despondent and hopeless. However, with the passage of time, I accrued colossal dividends from my trying circumstances, or, if not, I realized some other, perchance fortuitous, profit. Even setting aside all determinative speculations, I can hope, needless to say, that such a well-pleasing serendipity will be an abiding characteristic of my future.





Empathy and Compensations


In my youth, I had genuine antipathy toward the strong and heart-felt sentiments which exuded from anyone nearby me. Unable to respond adequately, even less to identify with the other person's feelings, I characteristically froze to within a few degrees kelvin and, locating my point of least resistance, became instantaneously distant and illogically rational. Whether my interlocutor's passion could be categorized as positive or negative was beside the point. I had no baseline to react in a way which most might regard as equal to the occasion and became overpowered. Yet, even as my own anger and happiness came quite facilely, I stringently restrained myself from crying, in public, at the emotions of others, even in the cinema.
These days, having participated with, and observed, the virtual autistic community, I find that there is frequently a sense of understandable frustration over claims that autistics lack empathy. Significant confusions have often arisen due to differences between how medical and social scientists delimit empathy in their researches and professional publications, on the one hand, and colloquial usages, on the other. To humbly set the record straight, as the term is ordinarily employed, using informal conversation, to denote the human virtue of caring for others, anyone, whether she is autistic or otherwise, can be empathetic. 
More technically, empathy is a myth or a cultural story. As folklore, empathy presents us with narratives through which social actors may, under specified conditions, engage with others. As a multidimensional construct, empathy, like any empirical variable, must be clearly circumscribed. Research metrics demand a consistency which is unfamiliar to the average person. In an attempt to shed some light this issue, I will, through my personal biography, present two distinct academic definitions of empathy. To begin, I will discuss cognitive empathy and take up the relevancies of methodological empathy afterwards.
Should I assert that a meager one percent of my book stacks consists of novels, I would be exaggerating. The majority of volumes, as artifacts of my rapturous preoccupations, examine religions, social sciences, languages, and, mountingly, the autism spectrum. In the cognitive rendering of empathy, some persons might say that my nearly fictionless shelves signify a poor theory of mind, or capacity for intersubjective conceptualization, by autistics. While my problems in this area had been sizeable throughout my childhood and teens, I am much improved now. I have, from my teaching, become a keen observer.
In applying theory of mind to my attitudes and feelings with respect to others, I tend to be concerned for anyone who has endured suffering, irrespective of my conversance with them, but seldomly have I worried about specific individuals. Therefore, as I am refining these terms in the present context, to care for people is sympathy. To care about them is cognitive empathy. I have cared for my parents as they became dependent, distressed, elderly, and ailing. In like manner, I care for, and only sometimes to a lesser degree, victims of natural and manufactured disasters. Yet, I am hardly ever, if at all, distraught about them.
Some contend that Asperger's autistics can rarely lie convincingly. This proposition relates to theory of mind in that, deficient in empathy, autistics may be brutally honest. Indeed, as a youth, I was consumed by ideals of transparency and equity in others and myself, was forthright and tenacious in my intolerance for whatever I regarded as mendacious, nonsensical, or nebulous, and was hypersensitive to authority and correction but judgmental and critical myself. Among my patented slogans were, "It's not fair!," "Is that true?," and "But why?" In my teens, I often unknowingly offended, as a house guest, with my comparative evaluations on the quality of food. 
While these days, as a ripened college professor, much of my black-and-white thinking has pleasantly hued gray, my bluntness, especially as a backlash to antecedent evaluations of injustice or impropriety, may manifest in a righteous, perhaps occasionally self-righteous, indignation. Consequently, if I feel slighted, particularly by someone of higher social status, if I believe that performance expectations attendant to a circumstance are unsuitable, or if I witness race baiting, I may, in my response, be quite outspoken. Yet, my sense of fairness and impartiality has resulted in elections to chair of numerous groups. Moreover, I regularly wear far leftist t-shirts here in Republican Kansas, and when I openly objected, at a college retreat, to finding an object and listening to it, I was, unrepentant, effectively barred from future events in the series.
On the other hand, I would, as a teenager, oftimes exaggerate my parents' success, not to be deceitful for its own sake, but, rather, in order to make my distraught life appear more stable and, hopefully, to elevate the minimal level of esteem in which I was held by my peers. While plagued with guilt at first by my subterfuge, I slowly became accustomed to fibbing and was fairly good at it. The stories were believable, not fantastic, and, so far as I know, most people did believe me. Although such contrivances by Asperger's autistics are apparently not all that uncommon, with my higher education, the motivation for prevaricating was eliminated.
An alleged deficit in cognitive empathy, in theory of mind, may be the overarching factor which predisposes many autistics to logic and to a detached problem-solving. It is not by accident that Aa has many times been compared with the mentalities of various Star Trek series characters, such as Mr. Spock, the original Vulcan, or Data, the android, prior to his emotion chip, or Seven of Nine, the Borg, before surgery made possible a romantic affair with Chakotay. These days, when an identification with feelings is warranted, I will, rather than succumbing to my desire to analyze, practice my well-honed expertise at listening.
By the same token, in teaching my Social Problems classes, the only handout I distribute is one I wrote in the early 1990s, The Sociological Thinking Map, which is substantially a road map on logic and critical thinking. The first section navigates students through issues of evidence. It also includes a paragraph on the sociological imagination, a concept developed by the late Columbia University sociologist, C. Wright Mills (1916-1962), advocating a recontextualization of private problems into larger social issues. The final section is a guide to some of the more common logical fallacies, or errors, in evaluating evidence. I have sometimes prided myself in having the ability to refute someone's argument, concerning a relatively unfamiliar topic, simply by pointing out her logical fallacies.
Expressively, I have had a proclivity for neologism, and my theorizings have afforded me reliable media to communicate this predilection including, frequently, during the long-winded verbal expositions of my youth. Besides neurelitism, I have coined, alethionomy (science of reality), pneumaticonomy (spiritual science), physiconomy (material science), and, though I subsequently discovered that others (including an old, now departed, friend) have employed it, soulology (soul talk or study of the soul), as well. Some researchers have claimed that neologistic usages by autistics are symptomatic of owning a poor theory of mind. To me, however, they have been a means of drawing attention to the ingenuity of my ideas.
Furthermore, I have discovered, in the wake of my education and in my decades spent as a professional sociologist, that, though my empathy is not of the superbly high calibre of many individuals off the autism spectrum I have known, it has appreciably improved over the years. As I have pondered over this situation, I began to broadly distinguish between empathy, as a psychological and psychiatric construct, and empathy, as it has been developed and understood, over the last century, within my own field of sociology. These constructions of empathy, while not exactly antonymous, could not be regarded as synonymous either.
In the sociological glossary, the German verb Verstehen (to understand) has, substantially due to the influence of the German sociologists Max Weber and Georg Simmel, acquired a connotation of methodological empathy. Verstehen does not depend, for its successful implementation, on a purportedly neuronal operation or on the emotional discernment of theory of mind. Verstehen is, rather, the bracketing of one's own values and beliefs and the subsequent examination of another culture, or of persons and artifacts of that culture, in the particular contexts of the culture. Verstehen is, approximately, cultural relativism.
As a cultivated methodological praxis, not a hard-wired neurological trait, Verstehen can, much like numerous other dimensions of social scientific research strategy and design, be taught, learned, and eventually implemented. Whereas cognitive empathy requires a susceptibility to tone of voice, posture, kinesics (body language), and proxemics (spatial distance), Verstehen principally demands a willingness to abandon ethnocentrism and to deferentially approach another culture through its own social constructions and histories. Practically anybody can practice Verstehen. Theory of mind presents no critical impasse.
Previously, my worldviews, such as Neoplatonism, were my windows to the universe. Perspectives other than my own were to be deprecated and dismissed, assuredly not to be examined and penetrated. Even in journalism school, while I was an undergraduate, a sequence of think pieces I wrote prompted one of my professors to insist that I produce a standard news article. My boredom with regular reporting, and my unrealistic intention to become a columnist, is what at first induced me to pursue graduate studies in sociology. My minor for the Bachelor of Arts in Journalism had been sociology and English anyway.
It was, as a graduate student, that I encountered Verstehen. Sociology taught me about Verstehen, and it was through Verstehen that I have approached cognitive empathy. As strongly as I resisted, I could no longer be engrossed only in my own ideations. Although I wished to write my Ph.D. dissertation on my own religion, as I did for my M.A. thesis, I was talked out of it, as potential employers might question my objectivity. So, in place of my religion, I chose pentecostalism. By immersing myself in the lives of pentecostals, in my methodological empathy, I had begun to compensate for a lack of cognitive empathy.
Besides Verstehen, my intellectual conversion, to borrow Bernard Lonergan's term, from essentialism to social constructionism has been instrumental in my compensations. As, initially, a Neoplatonist and, subsequently, a critical realist, I espoused the existence of universal essences, or ideal forms, and, therefore, doubted the cogency of independent human will and agency. Presently, however, as a social constructionist, I consider transpersonal essences and absolute, axiomatic truth claims to be no more than nominal categories, susceptible to deconstruction, even while I scrutinize these relative thought or social systems with my intentionally acquired empathy.
Analyzing the diverse morphologies of empathy vis-a-vis the autism spectrum might be a salutary enterprise. From my online observations, sociology is not one of the more widespread occupational or avocational choices by Asperger's autistics. Instead, interests in the hard sciences, computers, mathematics, and psychology surface with greater regularity. Yet, if Verstehen, which was rooted in the epistemology of a rationalist liberalism, and social constructionism were invaluable for my own affective development, then perhaps other autistics, especially those at ease with logic, would find them to be similarly serviceable.





The Ideology of Neurelitism


Behavioral intolerance, like those based on race and other differences, should be openly and unambiguously censured. All quiescence is acquiescence. So, in my own story, the ignorance of the numerous, often nameless, individuals concerning both my autism and my OCD is not only a feeble excuse for my years of mistreatment. It is irrelevant. Indeed, I myself had a clouded and distorted view of the plethora of issues I faced. An ubiquitous haze enveloped me until I was 51 years old. Clarity was then introduced only through the diagnosis. It was as if a fog light had been switched on. The brume abruptly dissipated.
Through my musings on the nearly ceaseless terrorism of my childhood, I had gradually constructed a conceptual model of institutionalized and internalized oppression, but I was powerless to entitle, much less to explain or even describe, it. Given the dismissal of my original diagnosis, neither my afflictions, nor the ordeals they so consistently produced, could be usefully contextualized. In short, without a label, I was impeded from achieving either personal insight or the shared wisdom of a community of peers. Toward these twin objectives, the diagnosis and fellowship with other Asperger's autistics have been a noetic revelation.
Defined globally, ableism (British, disablism) might be summarized as a social structure, a system or set of conventional rules, which justifies or enables actions detrimental to the differently abled. Notwithstanding that oppression has been an academic interest of mine for many years, notably within my Social Problems classes, I have only recently initiated a reflexive sociology of my own life history as a text for ableism. While typifications, such as Kanner's autism and Aa, are merely linguistic conveniences, and devoid of essence, they can often function as helpful tools for private cogitation and personal development.
I considered several possible designations for neurological ableism. Among them, neuronism, neurologism, neurism, neuroism, and neuralism have, heretofore, each been employed to delineate particular subject matter. Of two other candidates, neurologicism impressed me forthrightly as entirely too cumbersome, whereas neuronormativity squarely embodied the phonetics of a tongue-twister. Another contender, neuricism, read more like a neurological disease or malformation. Since neuroelitism, with neuro- preceding a vowel, is bad English form, I ultimately, in October of 2007, settled on the appellation, neurelitism.
Recalling the writings of C. Wright Mills (1916-1962), a sociologist, on the U.S. power elite, incorporating the presidency, the Defense Department, and the corporatocracy, we may likewise observe a neurological power elitism, or neurelitism, in which a discourse of normality is constructed through the knowledge and power of the neurological majority. An illustrative comparison might well be situated in the ableist species of audism with the sanctioning of the disentitlement of the deaf and hearing impaired. While oppressions will remain uniquely indexical, they can be associated in a grand web of joint resistance.
The autistic self-advocacy movement has, in its promotion of neurodiversity, many correlative concerns with the identity political wings of certain other movements. As autistic self-advocates reject the pro-cure agenda of numerous, largely parent-run, organizations, so the intersex rights movement resists attempts to force a dualistic prototype of sex on their bodies, the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered) rights movement has, consonant with mainstream psychiatry, dismissed the view that homosexuality is a disorder to be cured, and the deaf rights movement has rejected the proposition that cochlear implants and lip reading are superior to medical nonintervention and signing. Thus, each opposes, not only the territoriality of exclusion, but the narrative of being cured.
As with other oppressive constructs, neurelitism is chiefly a collective, not an individual, phenomenon. In truth, neurelitism cannot only be objectified in the institutions of society, such as family and government. It can also be subjectified, internalized, or reverberated, in the consciousnesses of the oppressed, whether as self-hatred, a lashing out at others, shame, disaffection, and underachievement, or, in the affirmative sense evinced in my own odysseys, by an awareness of neurelitist tactics in struggles for liberation and, with an often coerced turning inward, an ardent soul-searching and appreciable accomplishment.
An everyday modus operandi by which neurelitism, and similarly oppressive ideologies, function is by means of marginalizing, or othering, specific demographic categories as outgroups. If persons occupying the higher statuses within particular social structures - such as NTs in neurodiversity, males in gender, and European Americans in race - turn a blind eye to those perceived, for whatever reason, as different from the norm, then, in the contexts of power, privilege, and prestige, the different become the other, their voices collectively silenced, and their very presence among us finally dismissed or ignored. 
Fortunately, receiving a Ph.D. in sociology has afforded me the opportunity to be both a scholar-practitioner, a person who not only examines oppression academically but is actively engaged in combatting it, and a public intellectual and public sociologist, one who endeavors to communicate academic constructions of knowledge to certain publics. My higher education has provided me with a voice, and an idiom, through which to express my own experiences with oppression. Thus, in teaching my Social Problems classes each semester, I periodically, when relevant to course material, raise issues from my own life and personal experiences. From the first day of classes, all of my on-campus students know that I am an autistic.
The fact is that I and myriads of other Asperger's autistics, whether diagnosed or self-defined, have, as a consequence of our neurodiversities, been subjected to traumatic and sustained abuse. Healing the scars is heavy labor. This oppression of a neurological minority, as revealed in the stories we tell each other, conveys an ideology of neurelitism. Like homophobia and psychiatric normalism, two additional performance-focused social constructions, neurelitism cannot be explained away as mere individual harassment. Moreover, in identifying that which is good with the neurologically normative, neurelitism may be especially troubling to those Asperger's autistics, like myself, with strong senses of social justice.
Deplorably, in the frame of popular psychological reductionism, fashionably promoted on daytime television talk shows, no one can be truly victimized. Being a victim is purely a mindset, and apparitions in air castles do not bite. This subjective idealist epistemology comes perilously close to blaming the victim for her own victimization. It also conflates two independent issues. Victimizations should be conceived as objectively measurable phenomena. However, while clinging to anger might hurt no one but the victim, whether to forgive can only be an individual decision. Speaking personally, I have tried to forgive.
During my years of maturation, neurelitism was, for me, the hidden curriculum. I was bereft of any data on the sociological construction of ableism, a neologism coined subsequently in the 1980s, but I learned it nonetheless. Neurelitism, and its impact upon my autism, has been my experience. It was, is, a part of me. When I am asked concerning what has been, or so I am told, the unusual extent of my personal adaptations into a mainstream society, and my compensations, my response is inescapably generational. I adapted without knowing I adapted. I compensated out of necessity. The subject was, back then, never deliberated.
Initially, observers often notice the first-personhood of the autism community. Many of us will say, "I am an autistic," and not, "I have autism." Any descriptor is limited, but why object when the topic is autism and not one's job, religion, or gender? I recall, as a child, proudly identifying myself as a numismatist and explaining it to anyone who inquired. In adopting the first person, I am eschewing the marginalization or compartmentalization of my autism and attesting to its integral character. Yet, calling myself an autistic does not prevent me, in other contexts, from referring to myself as a sociologist or a ventriloquist.
So, to the query, "Am I defined by my Asperger's autism?," I might coyly respond, "Am I defined by my Ph.D., by my I.Q., or by my Jewish ancestry?" Each of us is a mosaic. Aa is a guidepost to where certain of its tiles may, in some of us, be pinpointed. Considering that, due to my profession, I have been compelled to minimize my Asperger's autistic traits, much of what is recorded in this chronicle, I had long forgotten. By a, veraciously, self-centered reminiscence on this one back corner of my mosaic, memories, some painful, recurred to me in the composition. Writing has, for me, always been a meditation and self-disclosure.



Deconstructing Neurelitism


"When I use a word," Humpty 
Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just 
what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less."

"The question is," said 
Alice, "whether you can make 
words mean so many different things."

"The question is," said 
Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be 
master -- that's all."


- Lewis Carroll (1832-1892), Through the 
Looking Glass

Our neurodiversities, as a category of biodiversity, present us with predispositions, but the representation of typicality and disorder is human categorizing. Take the medical model of disability which labels, even tacitly promotes, disempowerment, aiming at defining who is normal and repairing all the rest. The social model of disability, however, values collective empowerment and enfranchisement over compulsory cures. An autistic may seek out palliatives, medically or otherwise, without necessarily wishing for her neurology, which contributes cardinally to her personalty and individuality, to be deformed to the psychiatric touchstone of normalcy.
Consider that all of us, autistic or not, are in need of continuous assistance. We depend on the electric company to power our appliances or on the bank not to foreclose on our mortgages. Complete self-reliance, in health care included, is a veritable pipe dream. On the scale of dependence to independence, each of our lives is a matter of degree. Hence, the problem is not medicine, per se, but medicine as social engineering and eugenics. Rather than building more inclusive human communities, the ideal of the medical model, with its neurelitist emphasis on fixing the autistic, is fitting her into a respectable society.
From the social model, I deduce a semantics of disability and typicality. Challenged, as a construction of disability, is acceptable but insufficient in scope. My Aa challenged me as a poorly adapted youngster to become, through my plentiful compensations, a generally well-adapted adult. I now rarely feel so challenged. However, I frequently observe a dialectic juxtaposing persons who are, given their tropes or empirical attributes, differently abled and typically abled and a power dialectic, framed around interactive syntaxes, between the differently enabled and typically enabled. The second dialectic becomes a substructure to the first.
Additionally, by opposing the ideal types of neurodiversity and disability, a third dialectic can be delineated. In this light, the portmanteau neurodiversity, as a largely descriptive construct, may be empirically formalized, neuroscientifically and sociologically, into useful categories and dimensions; while disability, as a relational construct, would be observed in conjunction with human agents of neurelitism and disenablement. Comparatively, an individual might, from an intrinsically descriptive standpoint, be depicted as an Asperger's autistic but, from a relational and an instrumental perspective, not be substantially disenabled by it.
In a neurelitist structure, the differently abled and enabled would denote those on the autism spectrum and with other developmental differences, like dyscalculia, whereas the typically abled and enabled would consist of everyday persons who are largely accommodated by present rules. Thus, in my own case, I am differently abled in that my strengths, such as my sociability, diverge from many typically abled persons. I had, more crucially, differentlial enablement, since, relative to the typically enabled, I once required distinct, and distinctly lacking, support systems. What I did get was generally oppressive.
Outside of disenablement as an externalization of disablement, articulations of disability can be hypostatization. That is to say, in the uncomplicated act of materially personifying and implanting disability inside a statistical category, its propagators might duly become, even without precalculation, the creators of a disabled other. The category, once spoken into existence, and outlined, by experts, can be transformed into a marginalized group of disabled persons. Yet, in coding for Aa, the authors of the DSM-4 and ICD-10 could never have predicted that they would be the progenitors of an emergent Internet phenomenon.
Moreover, the autism spectrum may itself be differentially constructed under these models of disability. Within the medical model, a diagnosis is one's passport to variegated treatments and, sometimes, an eligibility for government benefits. Self-diagnosis, while incompatible with the medical model, can, from a social perspective, provide one with a previously unattainable sense of identity and belonging, such that an official diagnosis may even be irrelevant. Viably, however, strict distinctions may be impossible. Some Asperger's autistics, like myself, not only subscribe to the social model but are formally diagnosed.
Subjectively, while my countless perpetrators outwardly buttressed my seclusion, they unwittingly, though propitiously in the long run, granted me time to explore comparative religions and theories concerning abnormal psychology, hypnosis, and Wilhelm Stekel's Interpretation of Dreams. These preoccupations, wedded to my punctilious and scholastic manner, opened a wide avenue to compliments and attention. Once in my new religion, negative, disabling social reinforcements gradually gave way to positive, enabling ones, which may partially explicate my grownup successes. Perhaps comparable enablements reveal why many Asperger's autistics pursue pivotally cerebral occupations.
Some Asperger's autistics object to the term, disorder, and its often euphemistic, but virtual medical synonym, syndrome, in the descriptors, Asperger's disorder, Asperger's syndrome, and autism spectrum disorders. Given my personal narrative, my sociobiography, and the incalculable miseries I underwent, I share their concerns, feel a sense of commonality and camaraderie emerging out of certain discussions, and often identify with, sometimes even mirror, their experiences. Considering that victimization is all-around unremarkable to a legion of us, these labels pile innumerable insults upon untold preexisting injuries.
To be honest, as someone once diagnosed with childhood schizophrenia, in a generation when that characterization may have rivaled the current ADHD pandemic, I would have been highly relieved by essentially any other unmalicious label. Although I favor as much self-determination as possible on issues of psychiatric, occupational therapeutic, and other treatments, I am also, as an academic, interested in hearing the perspectives which contrasting voices, including from social constructions as seemingly incommensurable as the "pro-cure" and "anti-cure" movements, may contribute to a practicable dialogue.
Patently, labels can and do oftentimes matter, expressly to the child or young teen first being diagnosed. They can also be important for influencing, through a public sociology, how average citizens and social policy makers will relate to individuals on the spectrum. Since preparatory work for the DSM-V is now underway, it is imperative that Asperger's autistics claim primary ownership of the Asperger's label over psychiatrists. If Asperger's autistics are to have a voice in how Aa will be designated and described in that guide, an examination, even a cursory one, of issues pertinent to psychiatric semantics and codification might be beneficial. 
Some have suggested substituting Asperger's syndrome with high-functioning autism (HFA). One problem is that HFA implies a pejorative antithesis, low-functioning autism. A related issue is that categories of this sort threaten to institutionalize, even if unintentionally, a social class hierarchy among autistics. An additional concern is that researchers and clinicians disagree over whether Aa and HFA point to the same diagnostic entity. There is, for example, evidence that the former may present with a significantly more favorable prognosis. It should also be noted that levels of functioning are culturally relative. A person who may function well, due to adequate accommodations and enablement, in one social context may function rather poorly in another. 
Since Hans Asperger (1906-1980) referred to his observations as autistic psychopathy, my intermediate suggestion is to bypass the disorder-syndrome question altogether through redacting Asperger's disorder and Asperger's syndrome into Asperger's autism, thereby clarifying its position alongside other autisms and refraining from marginalizing, while expressing solidarity with, autistics in general. Although I am personally partial to the spectrum of autisms over both the autism spectrum and autism spectrum disorders, in that the pluralization neatly forgos the controversy over whether autism consists of multiple categories or degrees of only one, I recognize that my preference is unlikely to enjoy wide acceptance. 
I have also, in my review of the recent literature, found that Asperger's was more frequency mentioned than high-functioning autism. Admittedly, formal academic terminologies are established through custom and by peer expectations. Still, should the writers of those articles hold any sway over the production of the DSM-V, it is doubtful that the word, Asperger's, will be abandoned anytime soon. If true, this news will, I fear, be greeted with a distinct absence of exuberance by many youthful Asperger's autistics. For many of their generation, Asperger's has, through a semi-homonymic misfortune, morphed into ass-burgers and become an all-too-common bullying tactic.
Furthermore, several writers have proposed a more wide-ranging autism spectrum. By augmenting the metacategory, symptom complexes displaying similar problematics in executive functioning and other areas can be consolidated. In addition to Aa, Kanner's autism, and pervasive developmental disorder - not otherwise specified (PDD-NOS), an expanded rubric might incorporate ADHD and some type A personality disorders, such as schizoid and schizotypal, while adjoining such non-DSM entities as semantic pragmatic disorder, sensory processing disorder, and, unless judged to be isomorphic with Aa, nonverbal learning disorder (NLD).
The question of distinguishing between NLD, originated by neuropsychologists without reference to the autism spectrum, and the more universally utilized Aa diagnosis remains controversial, and it may also be a case of splitting hairs. Given that even NLD experts disagree on the utility of distinguishing it from Aa, the chances of its inclusion in the DSM-V, other than as an autistic dimension, would seem remote. Personally, if I were to quibble, I am more generally more proximate to Aa than to NLD. Although special interests, which have animated my life, are not in most NLD formulations, nonverbal challenges are assocated with both.
I read occasionally that Asperger's autistics are brain damaged. Aside from being value-laden, highly offensive to some, and presumptive of injury, "brain damage" sets up an unnecessary dualism. Damaged brains imply undamaged ones. Dualisms are frequently employed to institute political dominance and self-serving standards of evaluation. Predicated on whose criteria are Asperger's autistics, and not those with other neurologies, brain damaged? Neurodiversity, on the other hand, does not presuppose a foreordained set of neurological categories. Both terms are social constructions, but neurodiversity is value-neutral and socially inclusive.
With regard to the autism spectrum, which can be extended to other neurological or psychological conditions, all views of normalcy are interpretations of observations. The appellative, norm, can itself designate: a statistical norm (a mean, median, or mode), a social norm (a rule of conduct), and, of concern here, a textbook norm. Persons who satisfy this norm for a DSM construct are labelled abnormal. Subsequently, the selfsame specialists who vetted the norm are privileged to treat those who match its criteria. This circularism demonstrates the salience of language games in the social institutionalization of power.
Within the autistic community, ostensibly in an effort to devise a genteelism for normal, the term neurotypical, often abbreviated as NT, has been widely employed. To a much more restricted extent, neurotypicalism has been utilized by others and, though fleetingly, by myself for what I am presently calling neurelitism. Neurotypical and its derivatives, even if improvements over normal, are not without their drawbacks. Principally, I find neurotypical, when used to exclusively identify persons not on the autism spectrum, to be both erroneous, defaulting to all exceptional neurologies but autism, and marginalizing, while neurotypicalism is, accordingly, not only unseemly but stereotypic.
On the other hand, perhaps most readers would concur that neurotypical is preferable to normal, a word which evokes its unsavory antonym, abnormal. Moreover, considering that we know so little about the possible neurological etiologies of conditions mentioned in the DSM-IV-TR, both neurotypical and normal inevitably become substantially informal, nontechnical designations. Although, for a brief period, I elected not use the word, neurotypical, after giving the matter more thought, I have once again adopted it, but only as the opposite of neurodivergent, referring to all classes of unusual neurologies itemized by qualified psychiatrists and psychologists, including autism. (I actually prefer neuratypical to neurodivergent, but the latter is already established.)
Through my vision for a liberation narrative theology, promoting equitable redistributions of power has been a core religious praxis. In so doing, I dismiss those decontextualized hermeneutic methods which disfigure certain scriptures into a contrived conformity with Enlightenment constructions of science and history. Instead, the questions I have often raised concentrate on religious narratives as mythopoeia and, when appropriate, as tales and prophecies of social justice and emancipation. For autistics, as for other oppressed peoples, ruminating on stories of struggle in our own faith traditions may be inspirational.
The liberty of self-definition must be accorded to each individual. As a boy, I would gladly have kissed the person's hand who offered to provide me with some hypothetical cure. Now, I would, politely, send her on her way. The issues, however, become substantially more complex when discussing the treatment of children or, from a futurist standpoint, prenatal genetic engineering. Here, I believe that medical ethics should, with due regard to situational variance, be both flexibly and inclusively formulated in close consultation between all interested parties, whether autistics, parents, health professionals, or others.
Launching attacks on the pro-cure movement and its proponents is as counterproductive as it is unjust. I, for one, do not wish to see anyone deprived of medical options. Among the few parents of autistic children I have come across, most impressed me, like my own parents who wanted me cured, as altruistic in their dispositions. A far more positive, and perhaps singularly efficacious, method for minimizing an interest in cures is to actively promote inclusiveness and neurodiversity. All autistics must, without regard to levels of functioning, be appreciated and encouraged within the full range of societal institutions.
Whether the autisms present some people with perspicuous advantages is substantially contingent on social indexicality. As an analogy, placed into American special education, some dyslexics might discover that, due to personalized tutoring, they eventually wind up as better-than-average readers, even if, in a signally divergent context, their dyslexia amasses no discernible benefits. Everyone has their strengths and weaknesses, but, for autistics, these can, relative to the general population, become exaggerated. The autistic savant may excell in particular areas but be incapable of discharging certain daily tasks.
Differences are not inherently disorders, and whether to embrace or to discard the social constructions of reality by the mental health establishment, including its scholars and practitioners, is a fundamentally personal decision. While the multiple relations between neurology and environment, or nature and nurture, may ultimately take time to map, the basic proposition of our neurodiversity is not in dispute. If a medical category contributes to a framework of personal discovery, all well and good. However, labels should emerge out of dialogue, not neurelitist imposition, and, even then, they can be deconstructed.
In this connection, is a sociology of the autism spectrum plausible? At first blush, it might appear to be an oxymoron, analogous to proposing a botany of antelopes or a mineralogy of squid. Yet, two autistics, Temple Grandin and Sean Barron, have already tackled similar subject matter in their book, Unwritten Rules of Social Relationships. Such a sociology, besides examining issues of neurelitism and the social model of disability, would present social constructions of reality from the standpoints of those, like myself, for whom any successes follow considerable perseverence and, often, outright imitation.
Many Asperger's autistics refer to themselves either as aspies or, less commonly, as Aspergians. Although, in principle, I have no strong objections to either of these terms, neither have I been enthusiastically taken with them. Aspie, while generally used in a friendly and conversational manner, is, like autie (for autistic), a bit too cutesy to suit my tastes. Nonetheless, with a bit of reservation, I eventually fell into the pattern of employing the expression myself on message boards, chat rooms, and email lists.
Subsequently, however, I abruptly stopped utilizing it, partially as protest but also because I genuinely like thinking of myself as an autistic, after witnessing a number of posters on web message boards insist they were aspies, not autistics. I recognize not everyone uses the word hierarchically, or perhaps to escape some stigma, but I wanted to be unambiguous in my rejection of vocabularies and syntaxes of exclusion. As to Aspergian, I am admittedly not drawn to the mythos, or thought experiment, of a forgotten civilization of Aspergia, which is, at least to me, implied by that word. 
Moreover, if there is to be a reconstruction of our knowledge, absent the omnipresent specter of oppression, it will surely not entail, as some youthful Asperger's autistics have conjectured, a separatist, escapist, and, indeed, neofascist social polity with Aa dominance; a Social Darwinist, internalized neurelitist dogma of evolutionary supremacy; or a cartoonish existence with mental superpowers over bullies. However, even in my unreserved forsaking of these triumphalist notions, and their reifying and demonizing of the neurotypical construct, I am not unsympathetic. Many teens have identity and self-esteem issues which, as autistics, may be compounded by rejection. In my own teens, I, too, would likely have acceded to them.
Oppression, and its internalization, can, and often does, induce an understandable anger or even wrath. Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam and Dwight York's Nuwaubian movement, with their denials of caucasian souls, mirror some White racist teachings which dismissed Black Africans as the cursed and soulless progeny of Ham. Similarly, the male-bashing of the 1970s and 1980s, driven by the women's liberation movement and its consciousness raising, frequently attributed to men the same undesirable characteristics, such as helplessness, which men had for generations ascribed to women. 
With this understanding, I have, for much of my life, attempted to contextualize, not to criticize. Indeed, in my recognition of stuggles against the oppressions which so many have faced, I honor the indignation which they experience and regard it as an early stage of consciousness formation. I see, in their dissent and in their resistance, the beginnings of a liberation even while hoping, simultaneously for dialectical resolution of the resentment and umbrage within a more encompassing inclusiveness. Conduct has its reasons, even if they are emotional ones. Moreover, I have come to recognize that the supremacists are not the other. They could have been me.
Despite the events which have thus far transpired, or perhaps more as their denouement, I endeavor to be sanguine. By enriching our shared frames of reference, as together we uncover the commonsense lifeworlds of autistics from across the spectrum, I remain hopeful that the normative ethic of tolerance will be eclipsed by a transcendent ethic of active engagement and learning in all communities and societies. Among the more outstanding features of this civil rights movement, as I presently envisage them, would be the inauguration of a universal human right to neurological autonomy coupled with an inclusive consciousness of neurodiversity and, vitally, an unmitigated renunciation of a false consciousness of neurelitism. Let it be.







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Mark A. Foster, Ph.D.
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