Autism and Representation

Mark Osteen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781135911485
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Autism, a neuro-developmental disability, has received wide but often sensationalistic treatment in the popular media. A great deal of clinical and medical research has been devoted to autism, but the traditional humanities disciplines and the new field of Disability Studies have yet to explore it. This volume, the first scholarly book on autism in the humanities, brings scholars from several disciplines together with adults on the autism spectrum to investigate the diverse ways that autism has been represented in novels, poems, autobiographies, films, and clinical discourses, and to explore the connections and demarcations between autistic and "neurotypical" creativity. Using an empathetic scholarship that unites professional rigor with experiential knowledge derived from the contributors' lives with or as autistic people, the essays address such questions as: In what novel forms does autistic creativity appear, and what unusual strengths does it possess? How do autistic representations--whether by or about autistic people--revise conventional ideas of cognition, creativity, language, (dis)ability and sociability? This timely and important collection breaks new ground in literary and film criticism, aesthetics, psychology, and Disability Studies.

Part I
Clinical Constructions

1
No Search, No Subject?

Autism and the American Conversion Narrative

James T.Fisher

Autism is widely understood as a disorder of selfhood in which persons fail by virtue of their condition to fulfill the birthright of developing, disclosing, and searching for an individual identity. The presence of autistic persons thus constitutes a kind of scandal in a culture where the subject in search of self is virtually equated with what makes us human. The best-known literary works treating autism in America are conversion narratives: these texts resuscitate the imperiled humanity of their subjects while confirming the efficacy of therapeutic interventions, which, in the twentieth century, rivaled traditional religious practices as chosen vehicles for personal transformation. As heirs to a tradition—with deep roots in the Augustinian sensibility of Puritanism—packing as much normative power as American culture permits, these narratives tend to immunize themselves from interrogation.

The conversion narrative—a record of the quest for a transformed or redeemed self—is such a pervasive motif in the American idiom that contemporary versions are rarely identified as such or contextualized against the genre’s evolving history, from colonial-era Protestant narratives of spiritual conversion to its many subsequent permutations in classic and vernacular American literature. In seventeenth-century New England, “potential church members had to deliver conversion narratives—oral testimonies—to prove themselves worthy to the minister and church elders before they were allowed to become full members and participate in the Lord’s Supper and vote in church meetings” (Reis 22). This ritual was designed to ensure “that all members were among the saved” (22). In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries African-American slaves and free persons of color, westwardexpanding White Protestants, and many others adapted the conversion narrative to their own forms of evangelical piety, the public expression of which often conferred cultural and spiritual authority on the bearer. Even immigrant Catholics developed a communal variant of the conversion narrative through the intercession of the parish mission, which exposed urban congregations to the heart-rending sermons of itinerant revival preachers (Dolan). In the twentieth century, the conversion narrative served widely diverse purposes, from the southern “racial conversion narratives” charted by literature scholar Fred Hobson (in which white authors “confess racial wrongdoings and are ‘converted,’ in varying degrees, from racism to something approaching racial enlightenment”: 2) to ubiquitous popular chronicles of recovery from addiction.

Though the contemporary literature of self-help/recovery has been lampooned by scolding critics as symptomatic of a post-Christian “triumph of the therapeutic” (Rieff) or a “culture of narcissism” (Lasch), the distinction between religion and psychology was often creatively blurred in twentieth-century conversion narratives. The broader tradition was grounded, as histo-rian John O.King explained in The Iron of Melancholy, in “a certain literary genre and style of self-examination—the idea that to be of the saints is to be mentally beset” (331). King argues that the conversion narrative evolved across a trajectory marked by the shift from “Puritan conscience to Victorian neurosis” (his subtitle) where it stalled out amid the struggles of secularizing late-nineteenth-century Protestant intellectuals to work through obsessive ideations that rendered them “mentally beset” but spiritually stranded without access to the consolations of saintliness. William James’s monumental Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) was conceived in large part as a response to this dilemma; a series of lectures informed by classic conversion narratives, Varieties also charted the stages of James’s own personal “transformation, refashioning the landscape of the pilgrim’s journey in the terms of the new psychology” (King 192), a modern psychology of unfolding selfhood that James himself helped construct. James and the cohort of psychologists, psychoanalysts and social critics who came after him grafted new layers of meaning onto the traditional conversion narrative, yet the practice of psychotherapy in the twentieth century found its cash nexus primarily in the treatment of “neuroses” that rarely yielded dramatic cures to rival the transformative personal narratives animating the older tradition that James found so compelling.

By the time “infantile autism” was isolated as a distinct disorder by Johns Hopkins psychiatrist Leo Kanner in 1943, the psychoanalytic interpretive categories that enjoyed hegemony among American cultural elites tended to highlight the grinding labor of adjusting instinct to the civilizing process. Autism was dramatically different: a condition whose alternative label—childhood schizophrenia—evoked a terrifying blend of innocence and madness. The temptation for some psychoanalytic theorists and psychotherapists to manipulate this new disorder so as to showcase their prowess at treating the most challenging mental pathologies (in this case by transforming mute subjects into authentic selves) proved irresistible. The threat of competing counternarratives authored by parents or other nonprofessionals (or autistic persons themselves) was quickly subdued by Kanner in his published accounts of “refrigerator mothers,” a motif ritually invoked in virtually all authoritative autism narratives published over the next two decades and beyond.

Kanner was a gifted clinician who came to understand the damage wrought by that one most infelicitous turn of phrase. He deigned finally to “acquit you people as parents” (Park, Exiting 11) at a meeting of the fledgling National Society for Autistic Children in 1968, but not before a small but profoundly influential subgenre of autism conversion narratives had emerged, exalting visionary therapists who rescued children from toxic parents and the hostile culture threatening sensitive young people in postwar America. Although the psychoanalyst-manqué Bruno Bettelheim would achieve great celebrity for his 1967 work, The Empty Fortress: Infantile Autism and the Birth of the Self, with its claims of “cure” for numerous autistic children, the most enduring work in the genre is surely Virginia Mae Axline’s 1964 best-seller, Dibs: In Search of Self. This remarkably durable, perpetually reprinted work—originally subtitled Personality Development in Play Therapy—is structured after the classic American conversion narrative: a youthful (extraordinarily youthful, in this case) subject, an estranged or “divided self” (the category first devised by William James in 1902), achieves wholeness and authentic selfhood following an arduous journey of self-discovery:

This is the story of a child in search of self through the process of psychotherapy. It was created out of the experience of a living person—a little boy named Dibs. As this child came forth to meet the abrupt forces of life, there grew within him a new awareness of selfhood, and a breathless discovery that he had within himself a stature and a wisdom that expanded and contracted even as do the shadows that are influence by the sun and the clouds. (Axline xi)

“Dibs” was a semi-mute, withdrawn and tormented child attending a fancy Manhattan private school when his desperate parents reached out to Axline, who worked in a Child Guidance Center at an undisclosed nearby location. Over the course of a handful of weekly play therapy sessions Dibs undergoes a miraculous transformation from an echolalic (echolalia is the repetition of words or phrases one has heard), obsessively pronoun-reversing, miserable young soul to perhaps the most adult-sounding, self-aware six-year-old in the annals of American literature. Axline used dollhouse figures to “unlock” Dibs from the source of his antisocial rage, his cold and unfeeling parents, especially Dibs’s mother, a former surgeon who reportedly confessed to Axline: “It was bad enough to have a child, but to have a mentally retarded child was really more than we could bear” (65). At a crucial stage of his recovery, Axline encourages Dibs to fantasize about his parents trapped in their burning home. “They scream and cry and beat on the door,” intones Dibs. “They want to get out. But the house is burning and they are locked in and they can’t get out. They scream and cry for help.” Axline writes: “Dibs clasped his hands together and tears streamed down his face. ‘I weep! I weep!’ he cried to me. ‘Because of this I weep.’ Do you weep because the mother and father are locked in the house and can’t get out and the house is burning?” Axline asks.” “Oh no!’ Dibs replied. A sob caught his voice and broke it. He stumbled across the room to me and flung his arms around my neck while he wept bitter tears. ‘I weep because I feel again the hurt of doors closed and locked against me,’ he sobbed. I put my arm around him” (125–126). His parents could put out their own damn fire.

Although it is sorely tempting to dismiss this work as a hoax, or one very bad novel, Dibs is in fact a landmark autism conversion narrative, in which “autism” as such is revealingly invoked but twice in the book and never by Axline (Dibs’s nameless mother and teachers separately confess their fear of the diagnosis before Axline saves him), though “there can be no doubt,” as Catherine Maurice writes in Let Me Hear Your Voice, “that Dibs is indeed autistic” (279). Axline eschewed applying a formal diagnosis to Dibs, a strategically potent move at a time when autism was still viewed as extremely rare. She linked Dibs’s condition to an emotional injury susceptible to cure by a gifted, empathetic healer such as herself. Because autism itself continued to be viewed as an emotional disorder caused by bad parenting, Axline could draw on the Kanner/Bettelheim mother-bashing tradition (though The Empty Fortress would not appear until 1967, Bettelheim’s theories were familiar via his earlier writings) while reaching out to a much wider general audience than those writers had found. Her relative humility was a key to the book’s everlasting popularity: while Dibs’s symptoms clearly indicate autism, the treatment is grounded in a simple approach accessible to readers and practitioners alike. Inadvertently, perhaps, Axline shifted the public perception of autism from its location in a bizarre precinct of abnormal psychology into a metaphor for the human condition itself, a literary coup that was astonishingly successful.

Dibs, as best-seller and conversation piece, surely exposed millions of Americans to autism for the first time, albeit to an egregiously inaccurate if clinically validated version of emotional malaise rather than to a neurological condition. Though not widely reviewed or aggressively marketed at the time of its initial publication (and Axline totally evaded the glare of celebrity in the decades prior to her death in 1988), the New York Times reported in 1969 that Dibs (“the most unlikely-sounding best-seller ever”) was still “selling madly”; by 1979 more than one and one-half million copies were in print. Dozens of printings later, Dibs soldiers on in a life wholly independent of the autism wars: school children honor its compassionate spirit in book reports; online customer reviews tout it as a miracle text holding the key to recovery from autism and less daunting ailments alike.

The popular reception of Dibs is testament to the enduring centrality of conversion narratives in American culture, especially those blending an inclusive postdenominational spirituality with a highly accessible therapeutic ethos. Axline’s skill in this genre was first evidenced in Play Therapy: The Inner Dynamics of Childhood (1947), a casebook grounded in the application of “Eight Basic Principles” she devised to guide therapists in this relatively new psychotherapeutic technique (75–76). These principles—designed for therapists but structured in a spiritually progressive manner akin to the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous—urge a radical acceptance of each child’s unique selfhood and a “non-intrusive” technique adapted from the work of Axline’s mentor Carl Rogers (1902–1987), an erstwhile Protestant seminarian turned therapist/guru of untapped human potential. Axline studied under Rogers at...

Table of contents

• Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Part I Clinical Constructions
• Part II Autistry
• Part III Autist Biography
• Part IV Popular Representations
• Contributors
• Index