A Feeling-Based Theory of Autism

On this page, the one word "autism" takes the place of the more complex "autism spectrum disorder" and its short form "ASD."

Without theory there are no questions;
without questions, no learning;
hence, without theory there is no learning.
--W. Edwards Deming

Please take note that these four special words and one special group of words

• communicator
• noncommunicator
• communicative
• noncommunicative
• deep-feeling communication channel

are representatives of ideas which have a connection to deep feeling and deep feeling only. Clearly, noncommunicators are frequently experts with communication channels other than the deep-feeling communication channel. For a simple overview of these five ideas, make use of this connection.

Ongoing observation gives support to four facts about the experience of deep feelings. The four facts give us a way of working with a person's old tendencies in acting, thought and feeling which are part of his or her disease process and which put up a fight against cognitive and behavioral attempts at changing those tendencies.

• 1. An important and far-ranging division puts every feeling into one of two separate groups: surface or deep. The experience of surface feelings, like anger and guilt, keeps a person's old tendencies fixed. On the other hand, the experience of deep feelings, like grief and loneliness, makes old tendencies become feeble and lets a person become healthy. So it makes sense that a helper with deep feelings has to keep persons' attention away from their surface feelings and on their deep feelings.
• 2. There are great numbers of persons (that is, noncommunicators) who have never made use of deep feeling to get in touch with an adult human being. And this noncommunicative condition itself almost always goes unchanged from the time a person is six weeks old until the person is dead. Please take note that the condition of being a noncommunicator, by itself, is never a cause of a disease of the mind. Most noncommunicators have completely normal minds.

• 3. Never having made deep-feeling contact with an adult human being puts an early end to the development of a person's deep feelings. That is, deep-feeling development comes to a stop at some time between one's birth and one's second birthday. So, with respect to deep feelings, all noncommunicative persons are between zero and two years old, however much older than two they may be physically.

  Most persons who get less serious diseases of the mind--like hypomanic and "borderline" states--had their deep-feeling development stopped when they were between thirteen and twenty-four months old. But almost all persons who get more serious diseases of the mind--like Asperger's disorder, autism or schizophrenia--had their deep-feeling development stopped when they were between birth and thirteen months old.

  Let me make two important points once again:

  • Simply being a noncommunicator, by itself, never gives a person a disease of the mind.
  • But having a disease of the mind almost always says that the ill person is a noncommunicator

  
  

• 4. A helper with deep feelings makes noncommunicators' diseases of the mind better by changing the noncommunicators into communicators with respect to deep feelings. The helper makes this change by contacting the deep feelings of the noncommunicators with his or her own deep feelings. This deep-feeling contact never makes use of body-to-body touching between persons. After deep-feeling contact, the noncommunicator becomes a communicator forever. In other words, with any given noncommunicator, deep-feeling contact has to be done only once.

  Making noncommunicators into communicators gets them free from the baby-like structure of their deep feelings whose growth was stopped when the noncommunicators were between birth and two years old. There was never anything wrong with the noncommunicators' deep feelings; the growth of those feelings simply came to a stop when the noncommunicators were very young, namely, at some point in time between their birth and and their second birthday.

  After deep-feeling contact, the structure of the contacted person's deep feelings undergoes quick development. Cognitive and behavioral attempts at change get good outcomes. Lastly, health takes the place of old, diseased tendencies in thought, acting and feeling.

THE PUBLIC HEALTH SIDE OF DISEASES OF THE MIND

Almost all persons with a disease of the mind are noncommunicators. And almost all noncommunicators have no disease of the mind. These two statements are very important so let me go over them again.

When I was working in places that took care of persons with diseased minds, almost every ill person I saw was a noncommunicator. Outside of places that took care of persons with diseased minds, almost every noncommunicator I saw had no disease of the mind.

So the connection between the noncommunicative condition and a diseased mind is like the connection between poliomyelitis infection and paralysis. While a polio epidemic is going on, most persons get infected with the virus. Nearly all of these infected persons never get ill or simply get something like a short cold. Of all the infected persons, only a small number gets a paralysis that quickly goes away. And only a very small group of infected persons gets a serious and ongoing paralysis.

Let us go on with the parallels between poliomyelitis and the noncommunicative condition. More than 90 of every 100 persons in our society are noncommunicators. (By the way, this last statement says that the noncommunicative condition is normal for mankind.) Of these noncommunicators, most have no disease of the mind.

Only a small number of noncommunicators gets less serious diseases of the mind like alcoholism or character disorders. And only a very small group of noncommunicators gets a serious and ongoing disease of the mind like Asperger's disorder, autism or schizophrenia.

A DEEP-FEELING THEORY OF AUTISM

The facts about deep feelings, communicators, noncommunicators and deep-feeling contact let me put together a theory of autism. Be conscious that the theory comes from my own experiences, feelings and rough thoughts. It has four good points and one bad one. The theory's four good points are:

• 1. It is simple (parsimonious).
• 2. It makes connections between the different sorts of autism and between autism and other diseases of the mind.
• 3. It gives us signs of autism that may be used starting at birth.
• 4. It gives us a way to make autism better that may be used starting at birth.

Of course, the theory's one bad point is an important one:

• It has not been tested and judged as true.

THE TWO AXIOMS OF AUTISM

In this theory, all the signs and acts of autism come from two axioms:

• being unable to make a complete unit from its parts
• trance--its upkeep and its outcome

Parts Do Not Become Complete Units

Autistics who are talking are persons who are unable to see the forest for the trees. Take note that these autistics are able to see the trees. The hard part for these autistics is getting at

• the sense that is joining together, or
• the act of grouping, or
• the connection uniting, or
• the making of one thing out of

all those trees.

In other words, autistic persons:

• 1. Get the parts but have trouble with the whole.
• 2. Get the content but have trouble with the context.
• 3. Get the figure but have trouble with the ground.
• 4. Get the observation but have trouble with the META-observation, that is, the observation of observations.

In all these examples, autistics do not have some of "the thousands of associative threads which guide our thinking." I have given you the words of Bleuler ([1911] 1951, p 14) who was talking about how those threads get broken in schizophrenia. Autism is different from schizophrenia because, in autism, most associative threads were never formed from birth on.

I put forward that the deep feelings ARE the threads which are guides for and connections between observations, purposes and behaviors. Deep feelings
differentiate,
modulate,
articulate and
integrate
here-and-now experience and make it one with past experiences. In other words, deep feelings make content and context into a complete unit. And the level of deep-feeling development gives persons their level of perceptual-conative-behavioral comprehension, that is, wholeness or health. Because deep-feeling development was stopped so early in autism, persons with autism have little order in their observations, purposes and behaviors (that is, they have perceptual, conative and behavioral disorders).

Regular Medical Thought about Development

Normal medical thought makes use of straight-line reasoning: The body is the starting point for development. Then the body is the base for the development of feelings. And feelings are the base for the development of thought. Lastly, thought is the base for the development of relations in society.

Here is what Greenspan (1997) says about persons' feelings as the starting point for their higher-level observations, purposes and behaviors:

In recent years, through our research and that of others, we have found unexpected common origins for the mind's highest capacities: intelligence, morality, and sense of self. We have charted critical stages in the mind's early growth, most of which occur even before our first thoughts are registered. At each stage certain critical experiences are necessary. Contrary to traditional notions, however, these experiences are not cognitive but are types of subtle emotional exchanges. In fact, emotions, not cognitive stimulation, serve as the mind's primary architect.[p 1]

. . .

The perennial dichotomy between emotions and intelligence persists because, until recently, there has been little inquiry into the way emotions and intelligence actually interact during early development. For example, rather than simply guiding our social skills and relationships and serving as the basis for empathy and self-esteem, do emotions play a specific, critical role in how intelligence develops? Is emotional experience necessary for acquiring traditional cognitive skills?

Historically, emotions have been viewed in a number of ways: as outlets for extreme passion, as physiologic reactions, as subjective states of feeling, as interpersonal social cues.⁸ Our developmental observations suggest, however, that perhaps the most critical role for emotions is to create, organize, and orchestrate many of the mind's most important functions.⁹ In fact, intellect, academic abilities, sense of self, consciousness, and morality have common origins in our earliest and ongoing emotional experiences. Unlikely as the scenario may seem, the emotions are in fact the architects of a vast array of cognitive operations throughout the life span. Indeed, they make possible all creative thought.[p 7]

Regular medical thought's straight-line (that is, epigenetic) reasoning is all right for most purposes. But straight-line reasoning does not take into account the idea that the development of a person is a system. In the view of development as a system, having growth (or not having growth) in one part of a person has an effect on every other part of the person. This is especially important when we go in the opposite direction on the straight line of development. For example, trouble with relations in society makes changes in the growth of thought, feelings and the body. The two chief ideas here are these:

1. The underdevelopment of feelings may be a cause
of underdevelopment in the body.
2. Causing the growth of the feelings may be a help
for further development of the body.

In ALL autism spectrum disorders, there is a failure of comprehension. "Comprehension" is defined as the "act of grasping clearly and fully." (Webster's 1968, p 842) For our purposes, this "act" may be mental or physical.

Failure of Mental Comprehension

Mental comprehension typically fails in three major areas, listed here from the least likely to fail down to the most likely to fail:

• language
• social interaction
• deep feeling

Please take note that cognition is missing from the list above. With autistics, cognition may be extraordinarily comprehensive (that is, a savant phenomenon) in some narrow area of living such as calculation, drawing or music. This uncanny comprehension comes from pre-social rather than social cognition. Pre-social and social cognition are distinguished below.

In addition to having their pre-social cognition, autistics may be schooled in regular social cognition and, by putting in a great amount of attention, time and work, they do get some comprehension into their minds. But the nature of their comprehension is is more thought-out than automatic, more cognitive than emotional, more calculated than spontaneous and more contrived than intuitive. So their comprehension is much like speech by the deaf--an astounding achievement but still not beautiful.

Failure of Physical Comprehension

The failure of physical comprehension may explain a number of qualities of autism spectrum disorders:

• clumsiness
• extreme sensitivity to toxins (like mercury and food dyes)
• multiple food intolerances (like milk- and wheat-products)

Neurophysiology

Neurophysiologically I am saying that autistics can and do substitute cortical function for arrested limbic-cerebellar function. Further, I say that deep-feeling contact and subsequent deep-feeling acknowledgment develop limbic-cerebellar function which then supplants its cognitive counterfeits.

The Upkeep of Trance and The Outcome of Trance

Outside of failed comprehension,
the rest of autism is an unbroken trance.

. . . I am still unable to abandon my illusion that Jordan's [his son's] autism is merely a trance, from which he will emerge if I and the others in our program only work hard enough. [Schulze is half right.]

Schulze pp 120-121

Trance is the same as hypnosis and an altered state of consciousness. In his first paper on autism, Kanner (1943 p 235 and p 242) twice said something about trance:

As a baby, the boy [Charles N.] was inactive, "slow and phlegmatic." He would lie in the crib, just staring. He would act almost as if hypnotized. He seemed to concentrate on doing one thing at a time. . . .

The outstanding, "pathognomonic," fundamental disorder is the children's inability to relate themselves in the ordinary way to people and situations from the beginning of life. Their parents referred to them as having always been "self-sufficient"; "like in a shell"; "happiest when left alone"; "acting as if people weren't there"; "perfectly oblivious to everything about him"; "giving the impression of silent wisdom"; "failing to develop the usual amount of social awareness"; "acting almost as if hypnotized." This is not, as in schizophrenic children or adults, a departure from an initially present relationship; it is not a "withdrawal" from formerly existing participation. There is from the start an extreme autistic aloneness that, whenever possible, disregards, ignores, shuts out anything that comes to the child from the outside. Direct physical contact or such motion or noise as threatens to disrupt the aloneness is either treated "as if it weren't there" or, if this is no longer sufficient, resented painfully as distressing interference.

Now take a look at White's 1941 accounts of trance. See how White's observations have a relation to autistic trances.

. . . hypnotic actions are carried out with a curious lack of humor and self-consciousness, often with an air of abstraction and drowsiness, and they do not seem to have the claim over subsequent memory to which their recency and importance entitle them. [p 479]

. . .

. . . For one thing, the subject's manner differs from the ordinary: he seems literal and humorless, he shows no surprise and makes no apology for bizarre behavior, he appears entirely un-self-conscious, and very often he acts abstracted, inattentive, almost as if he were insulated against his surroundings. Braid's notion of monoideism serves very well to describe the impression a hypnotized person makes on an outside observer. . . . [p 481]

[Definition]

monoideism "The theory according to which an idea detached from other ideas will exercise an unusually powerful force in the mind. This notion was formulated long ago both by Descartes and by Condillac. The magnetisers were well aware that suggestion was more powerful when the subjects were 'isolated,' that is to say when they were apparently unable to perceive any phenomena except the personality of the magnetiser and his utterances." (Janet P 1952. Psychological Healing.) The term is also used to refer to the symptom of harping on one idea, seen frequently in the senile group and in the schizophrenias, (and in social bores--"he can't change his mind and he won't change the subject"). Source: Campbell RJ 1996. Psychiatric dictionary seventh edition, p 448. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

. . .

. . . Even more important than these findings is the demonstration, through a convincing series of experiments, that hypnosis is not a form of sleep. . . . In a very neat experiment Bass (1) has shown that the knee jerk and the voluntary pressing of a key in response to a bell, actions which disappear quite early in true sleep, remain unchanged throughout a deep hypnotic trance. Other investigators have measured pulse and respiration rates, brain potentials, and electrical resistance of the skin in hypnotized persons, finding that none of these measurements shows the changes characteristic of sleep ([Davis & Kantor] 3; [Jenness & Wible] 13; [Loomis et al] 14). Physiologically the hypnotized subject is awake, not asleep, a fact which appears less remarkable when one recalls the feats of problem-solving and calculation which have been known to take place in hypnosis. [p 494]

. . .

Little has been said about the limitations of hypnotic behavior, the things which are done less well in hypnosis than in the normal state. The hypnotized person lacks alertness and humor; he is literal and serious in his execution of the operator's wishes, seems to have lost all sense of the ludicrous, pursues one goal with disproportionate intensity, and pays little attention to matters and impressions which lie outside this purpose. He seems to have a contracted frame of reference, and above all he lacks initiative, lying perfectly quiet and even dropping off to sleep if the operator stops proposing lines of action. It may well be that suitable tests of performance demanding alertness, decisions, and quick complex judgments would outline a sphere of achievement in which hypnotized persons made reliably poorer scores. The hypnotic state is not a super-state; it is simply an altered state. [pp 495-496]

. . .

It is significant that one of the commonest complaints of unsusceptible [-to-hypnosis] subjects is that they could not forget the situation as a whole, could not stop thinking how absurd it was to be lying there on the couch, what their friends would say afterwards, how unreasonable the suggestions sounded, how humiliated they would be to have their wills overcome. Such comments, in so far as they are not simply signs of unfavorable motivation, imply that the frame of reference has refused to contract, that in spite of external circumstances there remains an internal alertness to "other considerations" which is the opposite of drowsiness and the enemy of successful hypnosis. [pp 501-502]

[RW White sent this personal communication to TR Sarbin for Sarbin's 1950 paper on role-taking in hypnosis.]

2In a personal communication, R. W. White has extended his theory as follows: "It would have been better, I think, to develop at more length the idea of a contracted frame of reference, or, as I would now prefer to put it, a contracted frame of activation. What has to be explained is how the hypnotic suggestions achieve their peculiar success, and I think the explanation should include two things: first, the presence of a single ruling motivation, and second, the exclusion (by quieting) of all promptings and even of the sensory avenues to such promptings that might set up competing processes. In this contracted field of activation there may be conceived to take place a deep vertical activation, reaching to the affective and autonomic levels, of those processes which are suggested. In contrast to this would be the relatively horizontal activation of everyday life where different processes tend to act together or check each other. "This (monoideism) appears to me to be the pre-dynamic form of what now looks like the best hypothesis for the nature of the hypnotic state. For present purposes some such term as monomotivation would be more suitable. This view of the matter makes possible a fruitful comparison between hypnosis and other states, such as great fear or excitement, in which volition is transcended. All such states are monomotivational but in the sense that one extremely powerful motive or one strong preoccupation momentarily towers over all other processes. Hypnosis achieves the same relative effect at low dynamic intensities, quieting the competitors rather than heightening the chief process."

Here is a key question: Is the autistic's trance, in fact, forever unbroken? No. The trance may be broken under conditions which are very serious from the autistic person's point of view. Then he or she may come out of the trance for a short time. In a later paper, Kanner (1949 p 418) gives us these accounts of autistics "coming out" of their trances:

One five-year-old boy, who had never been heard to pronounce one articulate word in his life, became distressed when the skin of a prune stuck to his palate. He exclaimed distinctly, "Take it out of there!" and then resumed his muteness. Another mute boy, four years old, was examined in a pediatrician's office and was annoyed by the physical contact. He cried out, "Want to go home!" About a year later, when left in a hospital because of bronchitis, he was heard saying, "Want to go back!" These--and other--examples are convincing proof that even the mute autistic children do not suffer from either sensory or motor aphasia. Those who eventually begin to talk give evidence that during the silent period they have accumulated a considerable store of readily available linguistic material.

Here is another key question: Why do autistics make so much use of trance? First, autism is an anxiety disorder. (The opposite of an anxiety disorder is a depressive disorder.) Anxiety is a very unpleasant experience. So, the profit from trance is getting away from anxiety. But the price of trance is two-fold:

• getting deeply into one's private point of view and
• not joining other persons in a common point of view.

The physical acts that get and keep a trance going are named stereotypies or stimming. To see my copy of a good page on stimming put out by the Center for the Study of Autism, make use of this connection.

Here is what Lovaas (Lovaas, pp 31-32) has to say about stimming. The italics are Lovaas's. The yellow highlighting of his words is mine.

SELF-STIMULATION

Many developmentally disabled children have a variety of repetitive, stereotyped mannerisms such as rocking, spinning, twirling, arm flapping, gazing, tapping, eye rolling, and squinting. We call this kind of behavior self-stimulation (short for self-stimulatory behavior) because the children seem to use it to "stimulate" themselves. The stimulation can be visual, auditory, or tactile. Usually the behavior is repetitive and monotonous and it may occur daily for years. The following is a summary of what is presently known about self-stimulation:

• 1. Self-stimulatory behavior is inversely related to the number and frequency of other, more socially acceptable behaviors. When other behaviors are high, self-stimulatory behavior is low. Apparently the child "needs" stimulation, and if he can't get this through behaving appropriately, he will engage in self-stimulation. It appears that there is a need for stimulation, perhaps to keep the nervous system alive. The rocking, gazing, and twirling may be like food to the nervous system; without it, the child's nervous system might deteriorate and atrophy. In this sense, then, self-stimulatory behaviors are necessary for the child. If you do not have a more appropriate behavior to offer him, consider letting him continue to self-stimulate.
• 2. Self-stimulatory behavior can be used as a reward. We have used self-stimulation as a reward for the child, much like food and water. That is, we may let the child self-stimulate for 3 to 5 seconds as part of his reward for having done something correctly.
• 3. Self-stimulation decreases or blocks responsiveness to outside stimulation. That is, if the child is self-stimulating during his lesson, it is unlikely that he will pay any attention to his teacher. The rewards derived from self-stimulation are often stronger than the rewards the teacher can offer. Self-stimulation is like drugs: both are difficult to compete with. What we have had to do, then, and what we recommend, is that the teacher actively suppress the child's self-stimulating behavior when she tries to teach. This means that if the child self-stimulates when the teacher is talking to him (when she wants him to pay attention to her), she may physically restrain him, or she may give him a loud "No" and perhaps some other aversive to stop the self-stimulation. (There is a problem in physically restraining the child during self-stimulation, such as holding his hands still, because the contact provided by the teacher may be a reward for the self-stimulation. That is, the child may learn to self-stimulate to get his teacher to touch him.) As soon as he stops the self-stimulation, the teacher rewards him for it ("Good looking" or "Good listening") and gives him his instruction. The teacher may let the child self-stimulate after he has behaved correctly, as a reward for being correct.
• 4. The suppression of one form of self-stimulatory behavior may lead to the increase in another, less dominant form of self-stimulation. For example, if the child rocks a great deal, and such rocking is suppressed, visual gazing may replace rocking. If gazing is suppressed, vocalizing and humming may replace gazing. The task in this case is to help the child develop a form of self-stimulation that interferes minimally with learning and that appears socially more acceptable than some other form of self-stimulation. For example, humming and vocalizing, like gazing, are socially less stigmatizing than jumping up and down while flapping arms and hands. The need for self-stimulatory behaviors may also provide an ideal basis for building play and athletics. This possibility is discussed later in this book.

The chief process for making autism better is to keep everyone's attention on deep feelings. Joined attention to deep feelings makes trance impossible.

If, by joined attention to deep feelings, you make war on autism before the autistic person becomes a communicator, then you are putting him or her through cruel and unnecessary PUNISHMENT. The war on autism has to come after deep-feeling contact with the autistic person.

PUTTING FAILED COMPREHENSION AND TRANCE TOGETHER

Here is a table listing some of the signs and acts of autism with respect to the two axioms of autism: trance and failed comprehension. Keep in mind that failed comprehension may be a mental or a physical process.

Eisenberg & Kanner's 1956 List of AUTISM'S QUALITIES
extreme self-isolation or aloneness (pathognomonic, 1 of 2) See Note 1
obsessive insistence on the preservation of sameness (pathognomonic, 2 of 2) See Note 1
1. inability to relate in the ordinary way to people and situations
2. failure to use language for the purpose of communication
3. an anxiously obsessive desire for the maintenance of sameness
4. a fascination for objects
5. good cognitive potentialities See Note 2
Gillberg & Gillberg's 1989 DIAGNOSTIC CRITERIA FOR ASPERGER'S SYNDROME
1. Social impairment, extreme egocentricity
2. Narrow interest
3. Repetitive routines
4. Speech and language peculiarities
5. Non-verbal communication problems
6. Motor clumsiness
Autism Research Institute AUTISM TREATMENT EVALUATION CHECKLIST (ATEC) II. Sociability
1. Seems to be in a shell-- you cannot reach him/her
2. Ignores other people
3. Pays little or no attention when addressed
4. Uncooperative and resistant
5. No eye contact
6. Prefers to be left alone
7. Shows no affection
8. Fails to greet parents
9. Avoids contact with others
10. Does not imitate
11. Dislikes being held/cuddled
12. Does not share or show
13. Does not wave "bye bye"
14. Disagreeable/not compliant
15. Temper tantrums
16. Lacks friends/companions
17. Rarely smiles
18. Insensitive to other's feelings
19. Indifferent to being liked
20. Indifferent if parent(s) leave
Autism Research Institute AUTISM TREATMENT EVALUATION CHECKLIST (ATEC) IV. Health/Physical/Behavior
1. Bed-wetting
2. Wets pants/diapers
3. Soils pants/diapers
4. Diarrhea
5. Constipation
6. Sleep problems
7. Eats too much/too little
8. Extremely limited diet
9. Hyperactive
10. Lethargic
11. Hits or injures self
12. Hits or injures others
13. Destructive
14. Sound-sensitive
15. Anxious/fearful
16. Unhappy/crying
17. Seizures
18. Obsessive speech
19. Rigid routines
20. Shouts or screams
21. Demands sameness
22. Often agitated
23. Not sensitive to pain See Note 3
24. "Hooked" or fixated on certain objects/topics
25. Repetitive movements
Rami Grossmann, MD PDD Assessment Scale/ Screening Questionnaire (This is an experimental screening tool that requires a traditionally established PDD diagnosis.) [used with permission]
SOCIAL INTERACTION DIFFICULTIES
1. Poor eye contact, or staring from unusual angle
2. Ignores when called, pervasive ignoring, not turning head to voice
3. Excessive fear of noises (vacuum cleaner); covers ears frequently
4. In his/her own world (aloof)
5. Lack of curiosity about the environment
6. Facial expressions don't fit situations
7. Inappropriate crying or laughing
8. Temper tantrums, overreacting when not getting his/her way
9. Ignores pain (bumps head accidentally without reacting)
10. Doesn't like to be touched or held (body, head)
11. Hates crowds, difficulties in restaurants and supermarkets
12. Inappropriately anxious, scared
13. Inappropriate emotional response (not reaching to be picked up)
14. Abnormal joy expression when seeing parents
15. Lack of ability to imitate
SPEECH AND LANGUAGE DELAY
1. Loss of acquired speech
2. Produces unusual noises or infantile squeals
3. Voice louder than required
4. Frequent gibberish or jargon
5. Difficulty understanding basic things ("just can't get it")
6. Pulls parents around when wants something
7. Difficulty expressing needs or desires, using gestures
8. No spontaneous initiation of speech and communication
9. Repeats heard words, parts of words or TV commercials
10. Repetitive language (same word or phrase over and over)
11. Can't sustain conversation
12. Monotonous speech, wrong pausing
13. Speaks same to kids, adults, objects (can't differentiate)
14. Uses language inappropriately (wrong words or phrases)
ABNORMAL SYMBOLIC OR IMAGINARY PLAY
1. Hand or finer flapping; self stimulation
2. Head banging
3. Self mutilation, inflicting pain or injury
4. Toe walking, clumsy body posture
5. Arranging toys in rows
6. Smelling, banging, licking or other inappropriate use of toys
7. Interest in toy parts, such as car wheels
8. Obsessed with objects or topics (trains, weather, numbers, dates)
9. Spinning objects, self, or fascination with spinning objects
10. Restricted interest, (watching the same video over and over)
11. Difficulty stopping repetitive "boring" activity or conversation
12. Attachment to unusual objects, (sticks, stones, strings, or hair)
13. Stubborn about rituals and routines; resists to change
14. Restricted taste by consistency of shape or form (refuses solids)
15. Savant ability, restricted skill superior to age group (reads early, memorizes books) See Note 2
American Psychiatric Association DSM-IV-TR 299.00 Autistic Disorder
impaired nonverbal behaviors that regulate social relationships
poor peer relationships See Note 4
lack of spontaneous sharing with others
lack of social or emotional reciprocity
delay or absence of spoken language
inability to initiate or sustain a conversation with others
stereotyped, repetitive or idiosyncratic language
lack of make-believe or social-imitative play
stereotyped and restricted patterns of interest
specific, nonfunctional routines or rituals See Note 5
stereotyped and repetitive motor mannerisms
persistent preoccupation with parts of objects
NOTES
Note 1 These two pathognomonic signs have to be present together. Note 2 This is more a sign of high intelligence than a sign of disease. Note 3 Keep in mind that trance sometimes takes the place of an anesthetic for normal persons. Note 4 Most children are natural "trance-busters" because they are almost always forcing everyone's attention onto themselves. So, to see what the children are up to, everyone's attention has to get wider and turned outside the self. Keep in mind that trance comes from narrowing attention and turning it mostly inside oneself. Note 5 These acts are nonfunctional to an outsider but are functional to the autistic person because they keep his or her trance going.

THE RANGE OF AUTISM AND BEYOND

Two events determine the range of autism, a deficit and an arrest. The deficit takes place when the newborn fails to become a communicator during the first six weeks of extrauterine life. No pathology exists as yet because most noncommunicators turn out to be perfectly normal people. But the noncommunicative newborn faces a serious problem: how does he or she get over an intense deep feeling (like terror or horror) when there is no deep-feeling communication channel between him or her and a parenting person? When no deep-feeling communication channel is open between the newborn and a parenting person, an intense deep feeling makes the arrest of deep-feeling development take place when the newborn deals with the intense deep feeling all by himself or herself. Here are some details of what goes on:

Let's define soothing as the reduction of deep-feeling intensity. For the noncommunicative newborn, soothing comes about in two ways:

• 1. Social soothing by means of ordinary parenting activities like bathing, changing, conveying feelings, cuddling, dressing, eye-contact, feeding, holding, kissing, playing, rocking, singing, stroking, swinging, talking, washing and so on.
• 2. Self-soothing in which the newborn soothes deep emotion in ways that he or she discovers by himself or herself.

For a newborn, virtually anything can evoke intense deep feeling. The source might be physical like an ear infection, psychological like moving to a new home, or social like the loss (or addition) of a family member. Adults may be unable to discern the source of the newborn's intense deep feeling because deep-feeling responses depend on the particular sensitivities and reactivities of each individual newborn. And we must consider that birth itself probably generates intense deep feelings.

From the standpoint of deep emotion, two sorts of newborns develop autism:

• the very bright
• the persistently distressed

Of course, a newborn could belong to both groups.

Rimland (1964 p 124) proposed that "autism is high intelligence gone awry at its outset. . . ." High intelligence requires an uncommonly adaptive nervous system. Faced with the problem of soothing their intense deep emotion all by themselves, what do highly intelligent newborns do with their uncommonly adaptive nervous systems? They use them to solve the problem to their own detriment by engaging pre-social cognition, which will be defined shortly. And pre-social cognition generates both the wonders and the horrors of autism.

Given time and persistent distress, less intelligent newborns will eventually discover self-soothing on their own. In addition, neurophysiology helps the distressed infant because some soothing mechanisms, like twirling oneself or objects, seem "hard-wired" into human brain structure. When, by chance, a distressed infant hits upon one of these "hard-wired" mechanisms, it gives him or her a great measure of respite from distress.

Let me make a critical distinction. Social cognition (that is, ordinary thinking) starts about age two and is linguistic, that is, strongly connected with human language. On the other hand, pre-social cognition (that is, pre-verbal thinking), if it appears, starts some time before age two and is infantile, that is, largely independent of human language. Whether pre-social or social, all cognition is a cortical function which, in noncommunicators, arrests the development of deep emotion, which is a limbic-cerebellar function. The limbic system mediates emotion and memory. The cerebellar system coordinates various brain functions so the cerebellum is neither an input nor an output organ (that is, neither afferent nor efferent) but an organ of integration or coherence.

The arrest of deep-feeling development has three aspects:

• 1. The complexity, depth and scope of the individual's deep feeling cease to mature.
• 2. The individual's inherent sensitivity to social context stops growing.
• 3. The individual's receptivity to social soothing no longer increases.

Back to the noncommunicative newborn who must soothe his or her intense deep emotion, which may have arisen from the birth experience. From the parents' viewpoint, social soothing is immensely preferable to self-soothing for several reasons.

First, self-soothing requires pre-social cognition which is likely to utilize mechanisms that lie far beyond the pale of anyone's understanding. Consequently, the newborn's self-soothing mechanism can never be shared. Second, cognition arrests deep-feeling development. What's wrong with arresting deep-feeling development? Deep-feeling development gives the individual increasing sensitivity to social context and increasing receptivity to social soothing.

As a starting point, let us examine a hypothetical newborn named Alfie who is dealing with his own birth trauma. Alfie is a noncommunicator. Before anyone can begin to soothe him socially, he "goes cortical," engages his pre-social cognition and soothes himself by powerful mechanisms which are so distant from our shared social knowledge that we will never understand them. Alfie is placid and easy to raise. His deep-feeling development is zero; he doesn't seem to have emotions. His pre-social cognition reigns supreme, virtually unchallenged by deep emotion. So Alfie's pre-social cognition readily makes room for social cognition at age two. Consequently, he develops adult language normally and, in later life, has no significant emotional experiences. But his sensitivity to social context is also zero and he becomes a peculiar and emotionally detached individual. Alfie represents Asperger's Disorder.

Next, let us examine two hypothetical babies, a girl and a boy named Brava and Chuck, born on the same date into two separate families. Both are noncommunicators. Both babies respond reasonably well to social soothing of their deep emotions until age four months when both suffer a crisis that evokes intense deep emotions. At this point, both "go cortical" and engage their pre-social cognition in order to soothe themselves. Consequently, their emotional development arrests at four months. But the mechanisms they choose for soothing themselves will be both less exotic and less effective than the mechanism chosen by our first hypothetical child, Alfie. Still, we will never share and probably never understand those mechanisms because they belong to a kind of cognition (pre-social) that is both far-removed from and more magically potent than our adult, social cognition.

All goes well until 18 months after Brava and Chuck were born. Both babies have been getting their deep feelings soothed by a combination of weak social soothing and strong self-soothing. Brava's and Chuck's emotional development remains arrested at four months. However, their sensitivity to social context, also fixed at four months but acting in concert with their pre-social cognition, is not too different from the social sensitivity of normal 18-month-olds.

Now the little girl suffers another severe emotional crisis. She abandons social soothing, engages her pre-social cognition full time and withdraws into an autistic shell, maybe forever. Any ordinary language she had disappears. She may never speak again. Brava represents early-onset Autistic Disorder.

Chuck never suffers another severe emotional crisis. But he has to use his pre-social cognition regularly in order to soothe himself. When he gets to age two, his pre-social cognition struggles daily with deep feelings and resists the development of social cognition. The failure of social cognition then gets noticed because the development of Chuck's ordinary language is delayed. Chuck represents late-onset Autistic Disorder.

Our fourth hypothetical child is a girl, Deltette. Deltette is also a noncommunicator. But Deltette responds well to social soothing until eight months of age when she suffers a severe emotional crisis. At that point, Deltette "goes cortical" in order to soothe herself. She activates pre-social cognition and arrests her deep-feeling development. But her pre-social cognition is less exotic and effective than Brava's and Chuck's and it is much less exotic and effective than Alfie's. On the other hand, Deltette's sensitivity to social context is much better than the other children's because her deep feelings had more time to develop. Pre-social cognition and eight-month-old social soothing combine and keep Deltette out of serious trouble. Her development of ordinary language may be delayed, but nowhere near as much as Chuck's. And she will probably attain adulthood without attracting clinical attention. If someone tries to diagnose her, she will probably be labeled as one of the many cognitive personality disorders: alexithymic, "as-if," attachment-deficient, schizoid, schizotypal, anorexic, avoidant, dissociative, Tourette's or paranoid. Deltette represents the borderland where Autistic Disorder and other psychiatric conditions overlap.

Pre-social cognition's power to soothe deep emotions declines steadily according to the time it is first established. At birth, pre-social cognition, if engaged, is overwhelmingly powerful. That power declines steadily. So first engaging it at 12 months of age yields a fairly weak soothing mechanism. On the other hand, social soothing really gains strength at about 13 or 14 months. So there exists a very vulnerable period, right around 12 months of age, when "going cortical" and the arrest of deep-feeling development produce a precarious alliance of weak self-soothing and weak social soothing which together act as a time bomb set to go off at pubescence or age 20. At these two times of emotional turmoil, an excess of deep emotion overwhelms the alliance and classical schizophrenia ensues.

From these hypothetical examples, it follows that Asperger's Disorder represents the worst form of autism from the perspective of deep emotion. Of course, Asperger's Disorder is nowhere near the worst form of autism from the perspective of social functioning.

Psychiatry relates the severity of psychopathology with social impairment in a linear fashion: the greater the pathology the greater the impairment and vice versa. But I arrange psychopathology differently, according to the client's incapacity to handle deep emotion in a free and fluid manner. My arrangement of psychopathology, from most severe to least severe, looks like this:

• Asperger's Disorder
• high-functioning autism
• ordinary autism
• cognitive personality disorders
• paranoid schizophrenia
• ordinary schizophrenia
• schizoaffective disorder
• bipolar disorder
• "borderline" personalities
• emotionally turbulent personality disorders
• "depressive" personalities
• neurosis
• normalcy

Across this spectrum, the curve of social functioning is V-shaped. It starts out high with Asperger's, drops to its lowest point with ordinary schizophrenia and then rises again to its highest point with normalcy.

PRE-SOCIAL COGNITION

Pre-social cognition (described above) is amazing stuff, especially when it gives rise to savant phenomena like extraordinary arithmetic, artistic, mnemonic (memory) and musical skills. (Interestingly, pre-social cognitive skills are usually seen as eerie and preternatural rather than attractive and creative.) And pre-social cognition is quite striking in the extreme ways that it organizes sensory input. It can see the tiniest detail and be blind to looming dangers. It can hear the faintest sound and be deaf to the loudest call. It can feel the least touch and ignore a deep wound. It can reject the slightest variation in taste and consume the most bitter poison. It can detect a wisp of odor and never notice the worst stench. It can balance like a tight-rope walker and stagger like a drunk. It can be upset by a minute rise in temperature and be oblivious to freezing conditions. It can be bothered by the vibration from a passing automobile and be indifferent to a medium-sized earthquake.

In terms of spoken words, pre-social cognition is likewise amazing. It can repeat whole sequences of words with exact accents and intonations (echolalia). It can sometimes read complex passages accurately (hyperlexia). It can use gestures and name things. Sometimes, these verbal features of pre-social cognition obscure the fact that ordinary language is failing to develop in the autistic child.

But pre-social cognition is woefully inept at other language acts. It cannot handle abstractions like pragmatics, pronouns and prosody. It cannot give meaning to stories. It cannot carry on a truly reciprocal conversation probably because it cannot grasp the subtleties of social interaction. And it cannot achieve emotional expression except for anger and maybe some of the other surface feelings like anxiety.

The delay, abnormality, regression or lack of language clearly indicates autism. But I, along with many parents, cannot wait two or three precious years before we attempt to detect autism in an infant. We need diagnostic criteria that we can apply immediately, even to a newborn. Too many children, often our brightest and best children, have been lost to autism while parents waited in the vain hope that, "He (or she) will grow out of it."

THE EARLY DIAGNOSIS OF TROUBLED NONCOMMUNICATORS

Parents can apply nine deep-feeling diagnostic criteria that suggest autism. They can apply these criteria to any child starting at birth.

• 1. Does the child have sleep disturbances?
• 2. Is the child's eye contact poor?
• 3. Is the child's body language unaccommodating like becoming stiff, going limp, failing to anticipate being picked up or failing to mold to the parent's body?
• 4. Does the child lack deep emotions?
• 5. Is the child's deep emotion static or monotonous, with only one or two emotions evident, for example, terror or horror?
• 6. Is the child either inconsolable or in need of constant consolation with respect to deep emotion?
• 7. How does the child handle naturally occurring episodes of deep emotion?
• 8. What happens when you induce deep emotion in the child with close physical contact?
• 9. What happens when you induce deep emotion in the child with the direct expression of your own deep emotion to the child?

In a moment, I will discuss these criteria in more detail. But first, I must discuss a special reason for early diagnosis besides the obvious one of saving the child from autism.

These deep-feeling criteria cast a large, fine-meshed net which will "catch" a great many disturbed and disturbing infants, some of whom are not truly autistic. I hope that the criteria will "catch" every potentially autistic child. I have no wish to widen the diagnosis of autism to include all these upset infants. But an infant's problems with deep emotion often rob him or her of vibrancy. And parents, who have taken on the responsibilities of bringing new life into the world, have some right to the enjoyment which a vibrant infant brings them.

BEYOND VIBRANCY

Deep-feeling communication with an infant exhilarates the parent beyond description. It is as if this small person understands every nuance of the parent's deep emotions. Compared to the exhilaration from such profound understanding, the euphoria of recreational drugs shrivels to almost nothing. I have no idea if this exhilaration can occur with every infant but I want the reader to know that it exists as a possibility. I do know that the exhilaration fades as the infant grows and becomes more autonomous. And the exhilaration of deep-feeling communication is gone by the time the child is two years old.

DEEP-FEELING CRITERIA THAT MAY DIAGNOSE AUTISM EARLY

The first criterion

• 1. sleep disturbance

is, in my experience, the earliest sign of any mental disturbance associated with deep emotion.

The next four criteria

• 2. poor eye contact
• 3. unaccommodating body language
• 4. absent or flat deep feeling
• 5. static or monotonous deep feeling

are largely self-explanatory.

The sixth criterion

• 6. inconsolable deep feeling or the need for constant consolation of deep feeling

may be a good sign. The newborn may have, as yet, failed to soothe his or her own deep feelings. More likely, he or she has made a parent an indispensable part of the pre-social cognitive scheme he or she is using to soothe himself or herself. It is highly unlikely that anyone will ever understand how this scheme utilizes the parent.

The seventh criterion

• 7. the infant's handling of deep feeling in day-to-day living

is perhaps the most important one. Here the parents' formulation carries great weight because they spend so much time with the infant in familiar settings. Does the child convey deep feelings when upset? Or does the child "disappear" emotionally into a trance or a rage until he or she has succeeded at self-soothing?

Be wary of smiling and crying. Smiling often accompanies surface emotion. Accept your child's smile but do nothing to augment or sustain it. Watch the smile to see if it fades and reveals some deep emotion underneath it. Crying may be tears of rage, which is a surface emotion that cloaks deep emotion. Meet crying with neutral attention and minimal soothing until you can see what it's about. Tears of rage tend to be steady and prolonged. Tears of pain (or other deep emotions) tend to be wave-like and short-lived. It may be hard to distinguish the tears of surface emotion from those of deep emotion.

The last two criteria address deep emotion which is deliberately evoked in the child

• 8. by close physical contact and
• 9. by the direct expression of your own deep emotion to the child.

Both of these criteria depend on the fact that deep emotion is contagious. That is, the deep emotion of one person automatically evokes the most available deep emotion of anyone else who is present. I say "the most available" deep emotion to emphasize that the deep emotion of the other person need neither match nor be compatible with the first person's deep emotion.

The direct expression of deep emotion is quite difficult for people who are unaccustomed to handling deep emotion. I mention the technique here in order to complete the diagnostic list and in order to alert parents to an action which a helper with deep feelings might perform with them and their child.

PICTURES REPRESENTATIVE OF AUTISTICS, NONCOMMUNICATORS AND COMMUNICATORS

The green design is representative of the general society which is outside of the family that is pictured.

Autistics

The brown color is representative of the living conditions that come about from and are kept up by the autistic person's private point of view. The autistic person gets comfort from these living conditions. Take note how the mother's or father's control goes all the way around the autistic person's comfort space. Keeping this comfort space as an island has a number of purposes: The autistic person is at peace there and in almost no other place. The autistic person will get troubled or angry if others make changes in his or her comfort space. The autistic person is kept safe from general society where he or she may be open to danger, damage or death. Helping to keep up and putting up with an autistic person's island of comfort is painstaking work which becomes long, slow, unbroken, tiring and hard for the autistic person's family.

Noncommunicators

The key quality of the noncommunicative condition is the form of thought in that condition. That form of thought is named all-none thought. The noncommunicator automatically and unconsciously sees all relations between himself or herself and other persons, animals, places and things as having two--and only two--units: the all position and the none position. Whoever or whatever is in the all position gives out the directions for all the details of the relation. Whoever or whatever is in the none position takes in the directions for all the details of the relation and puts his or her thoughts, feelings and behaviors into agreement with those directions. Any thoughts, feelings or behaviors not in agreement with those directions simply have no existence whatever. The noncommunicator may keep himself or herself in one of the two positions for long stretches of time. Or the noncommunicator may go quickly from one position to the other and back again. If changes between the all and none positions are made quickly enough, then the noncommunicator may seem to be two (but only two) different persons who are living in the same body. When in the none position, noncommunicators have a delicate sense of the directions that other persons, animals, places and things are putting out. When in the all position, noncommunicators are putting out directions and ordering others around. So noncommunicators in the all position seem to have no interest in the needs and desires of other persons, animals, places or things. Because noncommunicators give direction or do as they are ordered at all times, they never truly take part (that is, participate) in whatever is going on. Because noncommunicators never got a base in their feelings for having a separate existence, they are pictured as forever joined to the mother or father.

Communicators

The key quality of the communicative condition is the form of thought in that condition. That form of thought is named part-part thought. The communicator automatically and unconsciously sees himself or herself as having a part in relations with other persons, animals, places and things. His or her part may be small but it is always present. And the communicator automatically and unconsciously lets other persons, animals, places and things have some part in what is going on. Because communicators got a base in their feelings for having a separate existence before they were six weeks old, they are pictured a separate from their mother or father.

Putting the Pictures Together

GUIDE TO THE PICTURE: A (red) = Autistics N (gold) = Noncommunicators C (green) = Communicators * (light gray) = being a Noncommunicator and a Communicator at the same time # (dark gray) = not being a Noncommunicator and not being a Communicator at the same time MAKING SENSE OF THE PICTURE: Red inside of Gold: All autistics are noncommunicators. Gold outside of Red: Some, in fact a great number of, noncommunicators have no sign of autism. Gold and Green taken together: All persons are noncommunicators or communicators. Light Gray (*): No one is a noncommunicator and a communicator at the same time. Dark Gray (#): If all noncommunicators and all communicators are put into one group, then no one is outside of that group.

READING THE EYES OF AUTISTICS

By way of comparison, the eyes of a communicators always have a mammalian tie with other persons which goes on to wholehearted participation with them. If communicators are very angry, it may take some time for their anger to come down so that you then see the mammalian tie in their eyes. Keep in mind that anger is a surface feeling, not a deep one.

THE NATURAL HISTORY OF DEEP-FEELING DEVELOPMENT IN NONCOMMUNICATORS

So, what takes place if we do nothing about a person's noncommunicative condition? Mostly, things go on in the same old way.

The development of a noncommunicator's deep feelings is almost unchanging but their growth never comes to a complete stop. In a noncommunicator, the growth of deep feelings goes forward in very slow motion. It frequently takes years for the deep feelings to get a week older. In comparison to doing nothing, some talk-based ways of making noncommunicators better (that is, psychotherapy) let deep feelings get older more quickly. But, in my experience, these talk-based processes never let a person's deep feelings get older than twenty-four months, even when the talk goes on for tens of years.

In comparison, deep-feeling contact makes the complete growth of deep feelings take place in less than an hour. Here "complete growth" means that the deep feelings get as old as the biological age of the brain. All this has the sound of science fiction but it is nonetheless true.

"TRANCE BUSTING": TODAY'S WAY
TO MAKE AUTISM BETTER

At the present time, putting up a fight against trance is the chief way to make autism better. But fighting against trance quickly becomes

• long,
• slow,
• unbroken,
• tiring and
• hard

WORK whose output of changed behavior is small in comparison to the amount of force put into the work. So, by itself, fighting against trance is a meager way to make autism better.

A number of psychiatric conditions are trance-based and "trance busting" has little effect on them:

• 1. autism
• 2. dementia
• 3. deep depression, the sort for which electroconvulsive treatment (ECT) is used
• 4. great anger
• 5. dissociative identity disorder (multiple personality disorder)
• 6. psychosis
• 7. mania
• 8. posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
• 9. attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)

With dementia, mania and psychosis, "trance busting" in the form of one-on-one, person-to-person care makes so little change that medical chemicals (drugs) are almost always used as the only way to make these three conditions better.

THE THEORY OF AUTISM AND A NEW KIND OF SCIENCE

Keep in mind how changeable and complex autism becomes:

• when we go from one autistic person to another or
• in the same autistic person over time.

Sometimes no two persons with autism seem to have the same disease. Sometimes the same person with autism seems to have a different disease after a number of months have gone by. So, to keep my theory of autism simple and straight-forward, it is based on only two axioms. In support of my theory, let me give you a small number of statements from Stephen Wolfram's 2002 book. Axioms are named "rules" and theories are named "models" by him. The yellow highlighting of his words is mine.

In most cases the basic approach I take is to try to construct the very simplest possible model for each system. From the intuition of traditional science we might think that if the behavior of a system is complex, then any model for the system must also somehow be correspondingly complex.

But one of the central discoveries of this book is that this is not in fact the case, and that at least if one thinks in terms of programs rather than traditional mathematical equations, then even models that are based on extremely simple underlying rules can yield behavior of great complexity. And in fact in the course of this chapter, I will construct a whole sequence of remarkably simple models that do rather well at reproducing the main features of complex behavior in a wide range of everyday natural and other systems.

Any model is ultimately an idealization in which only certain aspects of a system are captured, and others are ignored. And certainly in each kind of system that I consider here there are many details that the models I discuss do not address. But in most cases there have in the past never really been models that can even reproduce the most obvious features of the behavior we see. So it is already major progress that the models I discuss yield pictures that look even roughly right.

. . .

Typically it is not a good sign if the model ends up being almost as complicated as the phenomenon it purports to describe. And it is an even worse sign if when new observations are made the model constantly needs to be patched in order to account for them.

It is usually a good sign on the other hand if a model is simple, yet still manages to reproduce, even quite roughly, a large number of features of a particular system. And it is an even better sign if a fair fraction of these features are ones that were not known, or at least not explicitly considered, when the model was first constructed.

. . .

One might have thought that in the literature of traditional science new models would be proposed all the time. But in fact the vast majority of what is done in practically every field of science involves not developing new models but rather accumulating experimental data or working out consequences of existing models.

And among the models that have been used, almost all those that have gone beyond the level of being purely descriptive have ended up being formulated in very much the same kind of way: typically as collections of mathematical equations. Yet as I emphasized at the very beginning of this book, this is, I believe, the main reason that in the past it has been so difficult to find workable models for systems whose behavior is complex. And indeed it is one of the central ideas of this book to go beyond mathematical equations, and to consider models that are based on programs which can effectively involve rules of any kind.

WHAT GIVES A THEORY
OF AUTISM ITS VALUE?

I put forward the argument that four qualities give a theory of autism its value:

• The theory makes autism clear and simple to understand, even for a newcomer to autism.
• The theory gives a person ways of working with autism so that there is a chance of making changes in autism.
• The theory lets autism be prevented or preserved. Both prevention and preservation are important.
• The theory gives a person the power to predict what will take place in the future of someone with autism.

List of Pages
	Contacting Jason			Medical Arguments Against My Theory of Autism
	A Feeling-Based Theory of Autism			Autism's Axioms: Less Is More
	Key Questions & Answers about Autism			Three Overviews of Learning Deep Feelings
	Sayings & Stories			Frequently Asked Questions
	Disclaimer & A Way to Make Autism Better			References & Citations
	The Genetics of Autism: Heredity or Heresy?			Curriculum Vitae