Autistic autobiography

Autism narratives are not just stories or histories, describing a given reality. They are creating the language in which to describe the experience of autism, and hence helping to forge the concepts in which to think autism. This paper focuses on a series of autobiographies that began with Grandin's Emergence. These are often said to show us autism from the 'inside'. The paper proposes that instead they are developing ways to describe experience for which there is little preexisting language. Wittgenstein has many well-known aphorisms about how we understand other people directly, without inference. They condense what he had found in Wolfgang Kohler's Gestalt Psychology. These phenomena of direct understanding what other people are doing are, Kohler wrote, 'the common property and practice of mankind'. They are not the common property and practice of people with autism. Ordinary language is rich in age-old ways to describe what others are thinking, feeling and so forth. Kohler's phenomena are the bedrock on which such language rests. There is no such discourse for autism, because Kohler's phenomena are absent. But a new discourse is being made up right now, i.e. ways of talking for which the autobiographies serve as working prototypes.