This would appear to be the goal of ABA training, wherein an autistic person is purportedly (in my opinion) “trained into neurotypicality”, and the collective meanings being “how the real world is”. It becomes a matter of persuasion amounting to indoctrination. This kind of “interaction” is aimed at the appropriateness of response, but at what level? It seems to make more sense at the atomic level, but not the higher-level-structure one.

Typical efforts at socializing an autistic person to the satisfaction of (whomever) could hardly be called a “partnership”, though. On one side is the autistic person, on the other is Everyone and Everything Else, with their/its bewildering array of encouragements, entreaties, pleas, wheedling, coaxing, doggedly-determined training regimens... and collective-as-jointly-held meanings may scarcely exist at all. Rather, there may be a sense of separateness from an entire system which is The Way Things Are, and the autistic person is expected to climb aboard and take a seat. This goes beyond the case of “feel(ing) unable to modify” the meanings; they were established without any consultation in the first place. Perhaps there was a wholesale substitution of expectations for “collective meanings”...

Last revised: June 20, 2007
(c)2007 Dave Spicer
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