Psycho-practice, Psycho-theory and the Contrastive Case of Autism

ing the content from these accounts, without considering style or possible limitations in the writer’s insight, not only discards valuable data, but must lead to questionable conclusions. What are we to make, for example, of an autistic person’s comment that his mental processes or sensations are radically different from other people’s when he is likely to have severely impaired insight into other minds? Is it not probable too, that an autistic child will have peculiarly unreliable memories from a childhood without self-awareness? While these remain open questions, we must be careful in how we use the contents of autistic autobiographies (Happe, 1991, pp. 222–3). Unfortunately, this observation cuts both ways. As theorists, we too must be careful about how we use the contents of autistic autobiographies. For it may be tempting simply to minimize or sideline possibly central features of reported autistic experience that do not fit easily into our preferred theories, especially as these theories reflect the preoccupations of our own slanted perspective. Our own theories are geared after all to the pivotal role others play in shaping the warp and weft of normal human subjectivity. This makes it more difficult for us to see how abnormalities apparently unrelated to us could play any role in autistic ‘mindblindness’. Some methodological humility is therefore in order. Perhaps the most neutral way to proceed is by what Dennett calls, in another context, the method of heterophenomenology (Dennett, 1991): we take subjects’ at their word, letting their descriptions of what it’s like to be them stand as an authoritative account of their ‘heterophenomenological’ world — the world of their own experiences, including, of course, the world as they experience it. Our task as theorists is then to develop a scientific explanation of this heterophenomenological world in all its details, reconciling it with what we observe to be true of their capacities from a third-person point of view. It may be that our best explanations of why their PSYCHO-PRACTICE, PSYCHO-THEORY AND AUTISM 127 [8] Another problem with using these autobiographical accounts as representative of autistic experience is that such high-functioning autistics only comprise about twenty-five per cent of the autistic population. Clearly, any suggestions for further research based on phenomena reported in these accounts must find third-person means of corroborating the existence of such phenomena more generally within the autistic population. [9] One minor way this bias may show up is in the simple reporting of these features, as when Happe asks what we are to make of ‘an autistic person’s comment that his mental states or processes are radically different from other people’s’. In fact, autistic observations seem to be focused on what it’s like to be them, without particular regard for how their experiences compare with others’. Indeed, their writing often evinces little sense of how odd their claims might seem to us, as Happe herself elsewhere notes. Of course, the implications are certainly everywhere that their experiences are different from ours, but the judgment that they are so comes mainly from us who are struck by the abnormality of their reports. experiences seem to them a certain way do not gibe with their own understanding of these experiences, but we shouldn’t prejudge this question by beginning — in this case unnecessarily — with theories developed purely on the basis of third-person observations of their abilities and disabilities. What kind of theory could reconcile the data provided by first-person autistic accounts of their unusual sensory experience with the non-autistic ‘interactional’ appearance of their suffering a specific impairment relating to the recognition of other people? A first step towards sketching such a theory is to focus on what normal infants get in the kinds of reciprocal, affectively patterned relations they normally have with others. On the view I’ve been developing in this paper, infants are not just learning about others and the world through these interactions; they are themselves becoming well-regulated by them. As I argued in Part II, this is not to deny the need for ‘innate machinery’ supporting the infant’s capacity to engage with others. But it does suggest that an infant’s innate proclivity for imitating others may be driven as much by machinery dedicated to serving a self-regulative goal as it is to machinery dedicated to the epistemic goal of understanding self and others. This fits with a theme emphasized by Hobson and other theorists that what matters to a child’s normal social cognitive development is the affective quality of her intersubjective experience (Hobson, 1991; 1993b; Stern, 1985; Trevarthen, 1979; Trevarthen and Hubley, 1978). That is to say, the initial innate bridge between self and other is not just sustained by the cognitive satisfaction of finding and imitating something ‘like me’; it is sustained by perceiving and reproducing the bodily expressed feelings of others: smile for smile, frown for frown, fearful look for fearful look (Hobson, 1991; 1993b; cf. Stern, 1985; Trevarthen, 1979; Trevarthen and Hubley, 1978). This makes others potentially significant for the infant in two respects at once: not only do they provide information about the world and human experience; they also serve as a critical source of sensory-affective regulation. Thus, for instance, a mother may comfort a distressed child by, first, adopting in face and voice expressions that are recognizable to the child as mirroring its own distress, then modulating these in a way that expresses the easing of distress. The child, carried along by its innate proclivities for imitation, will often follow the direction of the mother’s expressive modulation, experiencing the easing of its own distress in consequence (Gergely, 1995). Indeed, the regulative benefits of imitation may be so critical to an infant’s well-being that it is they, rather than any direct epistemic rewards, which drive the infant’s interactions with responsive others. For in learning how to be like others, the infant is learning how to be itself in tolerable contact with the world. Of course, these structured interactions, first with others then later with objects and situations via the mediation of others, become enormously rewarding on the epistemic front as well. For they allow the growing child to metabolize its experiences in ways that are conducive to developing a picture of the world as a stable, predictable place. The normal child who becomes well-regulated in the manner of other people thus derives a double epistemic benefit from this process: the world, including the progressively more complex and differentiated behaviour of other people, is made open to manageable exploration, while at the same time other people become known to the child inside and out in a way that precedes more elaborate theories about them. If this is a reasonable sketch of what happens in normal development, it suggests a clear connection between autistic sensory disturbances and their failure to engage 128 V. McGEER