Two separate" takes" of the features:

1) Reflexive: “all events reflexively become evidence for that belief” (380) - for autistic people, the opposite: any given event may be an exception or disproof.
2) Coherent body of knowledge: For autistic folks, no coherence - all separate “rules”.
3) Interactional activity: no, there is “the way others do it”, their way, which is relentlessly presented as the “right” way.
4) Fragility: for autistic folks, the fragility of one’s own understanding of it, which could be shattered at any moment.
5) Permeability: autistic folks experience this as social incoherence.

1) there is a provisional, tentative understanding to be consciously constructed and maintained
2) This is how it appears to us, absent a structured explanation which most nonautistic people don’t seem to need. So how do they know what they’re doing without having it explained? Instinct?
3) And if one doesn’t go along, the result is expressions of displeasure, shunning, and/or fear.
4) Resulting in anxiety and unsureness
5) ...and there are boundary issues all over the place. A physical analog would be a semipermeable membrane: how does one know what to let in, and when?

Permeability, in particular, seems to manifest as a sense of others being able to reach right inside one and modify what they don’t like. Where can one be safe from this? Where can one not be touched and pulled and manipulated? Could the extreme walling-off of oneself from others be a deliberate, defensive posture? The above interpretations of the five features combine to create a fearsome environment; if it is intolerable, what else can one do but detach from it?

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