The co-authors of Autism and the Myth of the
Person Alone are not academics nor clinicians, but seven people labeled as
autistic who provide the core of this book.  Together with Douglas Biklen, they
have produced an immensely readable, well-written, enlightening and humane
text.

Biklen gives an overview of how autism has
traditionally been defined as a ‘triad of deficits’ affecting social interaction,
communication and imagination. He notes the two ways of viewing autism, as a
static condition (‘autism-in-the-person’) or as a ‘set of qualities among many
where the experience of the person can be understood only as being located and
negotiated in complex social-cultural contexts’. This book and its contributors
take the latter viewpoint.

The contributors to this book provide the reader
with ideas about what it is like to live with autism. They show that there is a
disjunct between how they might appear to others, and what is going on inside
their heads, between action and intent. Such a disjunct, as Biklen discusses,
has lead to people with autism being assumed to be mentally retarded, even
though no physical evidence for this has been found.

Many of the contributors provide startling
examples of this disconnect, including Lucy Blackman. She is a young woman who
‘barely speaks’, but types fluently as her major means of communication. She
describes herself as having come late to language, ‘about twelve years too
late’, but who completed high school and went on to study literature at
university, and has written a memoir. An incident is described where she was
standing at a pedestrian crossing with an older woman next to her:

"I assume she was concerned at my odd
movements. She asked me if I were all right. Confused by the fact that she
expected me to respond, I started running in a little circle"… A half
hour later, Blackman was still making her circles and the "would-be
benefactor was standing aghast"…Her movements were social overtures,
attempts to engage, but they were so outside the normate notion of how to
connect socially that it would have been hard for any passerby to realize her
intentions. (56)

Blackman goes on to make the comment that
"[t]he strange thing was that I could see the ridiculous and comic
scenario in my mind’s eye, but I could not alter the behavior", which
makes it perfectly clear how aware she is of her behavior, and how different it
is from her thinking and what she actually wants to do.

Sue Rubin writes of her literal-mindedness,
fascination with certain objects, and the echolalia that really annoys her. She
needs others to break the circuit of it by telling her to stop. She also makes
a point about being aloof: ‘Some perceive autistic people to be rude and
antisocial, I view it as being true to one’s self….When I don’t want to be
around others I won’t place myself in their existence, I will stay away.’ (104)
She believes ‘not all communication is best served through speech’, and that we
should all ‘look beyond the obvious’. Although she may not look at others when
they are talking, ‘I am always listening and I always understand’.

It is finding a means to communicate that has
changed the lives of people with autism. Richard Attfield describes how being
able to finally communicate by typing was exhilarating. Tito Rajarshi
Mukhopadhyay, aged thirteen at the time of the interview in this book, speaks
softly and slowly, with his mother by his side; when he writes, he needs her by
him to ‘provide an environment’ that enables him to concentrate. He wrote a
book about autism when he was eleven. 

What comes through in the stories of each of the
contributors is their persistence, imagination, struggle with ignorance and
misunderstanding, their humor and intelligence. They are not necessarily
antisocial: Richard Attfield gains great pleasure in the social interaction
gleaned from his public presentations, for example. The important role of
carers, and of assistants in everyday living, become clear. Lucy Blackman
writes that her mother ‘socializes for two’, acts as her personal facilitator
in interactions with others, as Blackman provides the words on the screen.

What Biklen starts with in his book is the
premise that autistic people are ‘thinking people with ideas about their lives
and their relationship to the world’, which he calls a ‘presumption of
competence’. This valuable book shows the importance of this presumption, and
its application.

© 2007 Sue Bond

Sue Bond has degrees in medicine and
literature and a Master of Arts in Creative Writing. Reviews for online and
print publications. She lives in Queensland, Australia.

Categories: Psychology