Neurelitism and Emancipation - A Reflexive Sociological Narrative

The historical mission of a Reflexive Sociology is to transcend sociology as it now exists. In deepening our understanding of our own sociological selves and of our position in the world, we can, I believe, simultaneously help to produce a new breed of sociologists who can also better understand other men and their social worlds.

- Alvin Ward Gouldner (1920-1980), The Coming Crisis in Western Sociology

Introduction

I am, whether for good or for ill, a rather inconspicuous fellow. I would neither stand out in a crowd, nor would my actions locate me sufficiently at variance from most people I know to be noticeable. I am well practiced and can, though oftentimes only at face value, play the game just like a pro. Nonetheless, I eat alone, live alone, spend holidays alone, have talked to myself since I was a boy, and feel, on occasion, an invisible bulwark of disorientation from others. Still, notwithstanding, or perhaps due in part to, my reclusive habits, inflexible online routines, and a sliver of protracted social awkwardness, I am, as I navigate through my fifties, remarkably content. Indeed, I might even describe my predominant current mood as blissful.

Yet, I wear a mask. As a tenured full professor of sociology at a Kansas City area college, born and raised in the City of New York and its suburbs on Long Island, I have, in feigning the prescriptive deportment, enjoyed a string of academic accomplishments. Even so, many of my gains were realized despite an ample diligence to cure me. By the same token, one of the more salient motifs within my biography may be characterized as a recurrent failure at conforming to expectations. In my professional life, for instance, it took me roughly 25 years, in the end through an instructional consultant, to enhance my effectiveness at relating to students.

If I have learned anything, it is that an acquiescence to one's distinctiveness should not be mistaken for a preoccupation with one's limitations. At 14, an adult declared, I would likely identify with a human reared by Martians, Valentine Michael Smith, the lead character in Robert A. Heinlein's popular science fiction novel, Stranger in a Strange Land. From my early childhood years, my life experience has staunchly situated me as the self-conscious performer, the outsider, looking in while crafting a repertoire of multiple impersonations through the upstairs bathroom mirror.

In graduate school, I instantly identified with the depictions of University of Chicago sociologist Charles Horton Cooley (1864-1929) on the looking-glass self. In summary, I had observed the presentation of my own self in the deleterious image of how, at that time of my life, I believed others viewed me. Still, even while accounting for these literal and metaphorical reflections, my temperament, distressingly, rarely matched my intent. Once, I embarrassed myself when, in the presence of a role model, Tom, I accidentally called myself "Tom." Thenceforth, given my perpetual state of personal insecurity, I attempted, with mixed success, to avoid him entirely.

"All the world's a stage," I am, more so than the majority, well aware. Life's scripts, I have frequently observed, always seem more second nature to others than to me; but scripts, the prepared kind, furnished an escape to an otherwise unavailable world. My acting interests began after watching The Paul Winchell Show on ABC, not the later and syndicated Winchell – Mahoney Time. I actually disliked that second program and hardly ever watched it. Though not quite like Kukla, Fran and Ollie, which ended in its first and major run while I was still in diapers, the arrangement of the syndicated version impressed me as a series of intermittent puppet shows rather than ventriloquial routines. The great Winchell himself was rarely on set, and the time devoted to Jerry Mahoney and Mortimer Snerd was considerably surpassed by cartoons.

At 8 years old, after triumphanty persuading my mother to purchase a Jerry Mahoney look-alike figure for me, I became a ventriloquist myself and, over a period of several years, won numerous local talent contests. Subsequently, I performed, rather skillfully I would say, following a sequence of method and other acting classes, and I was a radio newscaster, writer, and producer in my teens and then again in my thirties. Being able to play to an audience has continuously served me well. While my social insight may still be somewhat astigmatic, my acting acumen has, over time, become a corrective lens.

Theory and Methodology

The framework for this project, emancipatory constructionism, is a new critical theory, a radical perspective which has alternately been termed postmodern critical theory. It resembles, to varying degrees, critical postmodernism, post-Marxism, and, perhaps most significantly, cultural sociology. Indeed, new critical theory and cultural sociology can each be situated within a broadly based cultural turn in the social sciences. Whereas cultures, and an array of culture traits, had often been regarded merely as the objects for treatment or influence by independent variables, they are now are examined as explanatory factors, or causal mechanisms, for various categories of social phenomena.

New critical theories have benefited from the emancipatory neo-Marxism of its engendering Frankfurt School with its stalwart concentration on liberation from oppression. Moreover, critical social theorists of each generation, including the present one, have paid particular attention to the dialectical process of domination and emancipation. With respect to the latter, one of the originating points of methodological inquiry, for some critical social theorists at least, concerns the possibility of a new civil order, an eutopia-cum-utopia (to wit, an as-yet unattained good place), one which, by dismantling the systemic hegemonies of power elites, approaches universal enfranchisement and human rights.

Since the beginnings of the Frankfurt School in 1930, when Max Horkheimer assumed the directorship of das Institut für Sozialforschung (the Institute for Social Research), critical social theories have been eclectically neo-Marxist. However, the Freudian interests of some first-generational critical theorists, and the second-generational Jürgen Habermas, with his attention to communicative interaction, have, with this recently minted new critical theory, been joined, by some younger intellectuals, with an assortment of theoretical and philosophical epistemologies. Significant avenues of engagement can, for instance, be observed with critical poststructuralism, social constructionism, ethnomethodology, critical pragmatism, and critical pedagogy.

Additionally, this developing radical theory, unlike some other branches of the critical social tradition, has been guided, to varying degrees, by the wise counsel of Jean-François Lyotard to be incredulous toward metanarratives. Furthermore, reminiscent of Antonio Gramsci's (1891-1937) historicism, such theories have also displayed a rejection, or at least a suspicion, regarding the possibility of producing truly objective or empirical accounts of social experiences. Rather, many postmodern critical social theorists have tended to prefer what I shall term mental and emotional ethnographies of personal reflection over strict quantitative analyses.

A conscious and intentional praxis can be understood as a relatively stable pattern of reflectively animated social action. To reflect is to theorize or philosophize, with particular reference to the relativity of a concrete situation, and, in order to transcend a spurious consciousness of culturally majoritarian worldviews and advantages, one reflects on the situated exigencies of an oppressed demographic. Consequently, a liberationist struggle for human rights and social justice must be embedded into the emancipatory consciousness of a truly reflective individual.

The objective of such a struggle should be the attainment of what educator, Paulo Freire (1921-1997), referred to, in Portugese, as conscientizacao (conscientization or critical consciousness), which is to say, an awareness of the social contradictions of domination and of the emancipatory strategies for subduing them. Indeed, from a Freirian standpoint, the collaborative character of the educational process is encompased by a model of critical pedagogy, namely, an educational praxis which encourages students to explore the agents of domination and, ultimately, the instrumentalities of emancipation.

Although Freire developed his critical pedagogy as a tool to enlighten students, its applications have extended well beyond. The Autistic community, too, is unjustly dominated. Unemployment and poverty rates are commonly well in excess of averages. This subject has been competently addressed by Autism researcher, Simon Baron-Cohen:

... the biggest risk is GPs [general practitioners] not realising how adults with Asperger syndrome may become suicidal from the secondary depression, which is common. This depression is associated with social isolation, the high levels of unemployment, the lack of close friends, the lack of a partner and the abuse that adults with Asperger’s may experience on the bus or in the supermarket or in other everyday situations. GPs need to give reassurance to adults with Asperger’s that just because their disability is invisible, they recognise the patient is suffering underneath and will help them find the right support.

In addition to poverty, Autists are routinely denied many supports which are simply taken for granted by most persons. For instance, it remains legal in most U.S. states to deny medical insurance to persons with an Autistic spectrum disorder (or to individuals with numerous other pre-existing medical conditions). Autistic children are also frequently subjected to a variety of physical abuses, including by school personnel. The abuses have, on occasion, resulted in death.

These social facts have galvanized me. Given the circumstances of my long-term self-identification with the status of nonviolent revolutionary, and my cartography of its jurisdiction, I emulate Freire who was, not unlike myself, a spiritually oriented, neo-Marxian educator. As an academic, I dare say that my cultivated posture toward all forms of Autistic praxis, including self-advocacy and activism for others, could indeed be summarized as fundamentally instructional and heuristic.

Correspondingly, I would rigorously resist the utilization of conventional constructions of apologetics, marketing, and propaganda in an educational setting, and I once attended a series of workshops, run by a salesman, which attempted it. Most intellectuals with whom I have broached this subject share my distaste for confounding the artistry of teaching with one or more modes of salesmanship. To me, an intentional exercise of the latter within an educational environment might even approach academic dishonesty while suggesting a want of integrity. Although the merchandising of products has in its proper place, and there are many ethical sales representatives, that place is not in the lecture hall.

Conscientization was clearly influenced by an analogous construct, Karl Marx's class consciousness. Just as Autistic activism may be reconstituted as an expression of conscientization and class consciousness, another version of conscientization was popularized by the 1970s American women's liberation movement as consciousness raising. Briefly, the territory of conscientization frames the perimeters of knowledge or consciousness concerning the forces of domination or oppression and the subsequent struggle, by conscious individuals, for emancipation or liberation. Here it is, in Freire's own words, taken from Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968):

One of the basic elements of the relationship between oppressor and oppressed is prescription. Every prescription represents the imposition of one individual’s choice upon another, transforming the consciousness of the person prescribed to into one that conforms with the prescriber’s consciousness. Thus, the behavior of the oppressed is a prescribed behavior, following as it does the guidelines of the oppressor....

Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift. It must be pursued constantly and responsibly. Freedom is not an ideal located outside of man; nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion.

To surmount the situation of oppression, people must first critically recognize its causes, so that through transforming action they can create a new situation, one which makes possible the pursuit of a fuller humanity....

However, the oppressed, who have adapted to the structure of domination in which they are immersed, and have become resigned to it, are inhibited from waging the struggle for freedom so long as they feel incapable of running the risks it requires....

The central problem is this: How can the oppressed, as divided, unauthentic beings, participate in developing the pedagogy of their liberation? Only as they discover themselves to be “hosts” of the oppressor can they contribute to the midwifery of their liberating pedagogy.

As in Mahayana Buddhism, the bodhisattva grounds her own quest for enlightenment as a preceptor to others, so the critical pedagogue, by deconstructing dominative narratives and constructing emancipatory ones, imparts her conscientization to a tyrannized population. Approached in a thoughtful manner, praxis can, I believe, become a normative framework for disability activism and self-advocacy. Thus, by way of emphasizing the strategic importance of critical reflection to praxis, Freire, in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (chapter 1), wrote:

Reality which becomes oppressive results in the contradistinction of men as oppressors and oppressed The latter, whose task it is to struggle for their liberation together with those who show true solidarity, must acquire a critical awareness of oppression through the praxis of this struggle. One of the gravest obstacles to the achievement of liberation is that oppressive reality absorbs those within it and thereby acts to submerge human beings’ consiousness. Functionally, oppression is domesticating. To no longer be prey to its force, one must emerge from it and turn upon it. This can be done only by means of the praxis: reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it.

Freire's article, Cultural Action for Freedom, echos this assertion:

Critical consciousness is brought about not through an intellectual effort alone, but through praxis – through the authentic union of action and reflection. Such reflective action cannot be denied to the people. If it were, the people would be no more than activist pawns in the hands of a leadership that reserved for itself the right of decisionmaking.

Freire believed that oppressed persons internalize their domination. Turning once again to Pedagogy of the Oppressed, he wrote, "The oppressed, having internalized the image of the oppressor and adopted his guidelines, are fearful of freedom." Thus, the oppressed person must not only fight the enemies external to her being, those who rob her of her freedom and autonomy. She must also fight the oppresser within. If a socially, politically, or economically dominated individual believes that she deserves her domination, or that she must in some fashion become resigned to it, then that inner phantasm must be defeated, as well.

In other words, the self-advocate must first, in her methodological praxis, attain a critical consciousness of her oppression and of the factors which serve to perpetuate it. She must also reject the internalized domination of defining herself according to the values and norms of power elites and even replicating that domination against others. The battle for human rights cannot be merely a series of mechanical, nonideological responses to events. Any nonviolent revolutionary struggle, such as this one, must, if it is to have a chance of success, be principally proactive, not reactive.

Not unlike Freire, the Martinican revolutionary and psychiatrist, Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), in the third chapter of his The Wretched of the Earth (1961), identified praxis with class consciousness:

The living expression of the nation is the collective consciousness in motion of the entire people. It is the enlightened and coherent praxis of the men and women. The collective forging of a destiny implies undertaking responsibility on a truly historical scale.

The differences, however, between praxis, as conceived by Freire, and praxis, as imagined by Saul Alinsky (1909-1972) in his Rules for Radicals (1971), are simple and straightforward. Superficially, Freire was an educator. Alinksy was a community organizer. Freire was a Roman Catholic who developed a system not terribly at variance from Latin American theologies of liberation. Alinsky was an atheist who demonstrated his willingness to work with various groups, including those in Roman Catholicism and Protestantism.

In reading Freire, I could not help but feel his compassion for the poor and his overriding desire for them to recognize their dominated statuses and, through conscientization, to ultimately become emancipated. Alinsky, on the other hand, was a political pragmatist – a proponent of realpolitik. To abuse an analogy, he turned Machiavelli upside down on his head. Even a superficial reading of of Alinsky makes his position evident that dominated groups, in the course of their organizing, must utilize similar tactics and expediencies to “the prince.” By such means will they accomplish their objectives over and against their oppressors.

As I have already stated, I find Freire’s approach to be much to my own liking (and much like my own). However, I substantially reject Alinsky’s rules as exemplary of the sort of consequentialism often characterized as “the end justifies the means.” In my view, the ultimate revolution in human rights and social justice, whether pertaining to Autists or to other socially dominated populations, will come through an education into conscientization, not through the ruthless exercise of disparagement and dissimulation.

Within this narrative, I shall make little distinction between my praxis, my activism, and my research methodology. Praxis, for me, is an intensely personal activist, self-advocative, and transformative process. Attendant to my professional capacity, as an academic, it is cemented to both my radical pedagogy as a sociology professor, in my Introduction to Sociology and Social Problems classes, and to my membership in the National Education Association (NEA). While, admittedly, I have not been particularly active in the college's chapter of the NEA, the mere fact that I belong to an association approximating a union reinforces a significant dimension of my self-identification.

By means of my emancipatory research methodology, I will recount, through self-advocacy, the taken-for-granted narrations of knowledge and power in my own social contexts. Consequently, as I progress through the passionately engaged and phenomenologically driven praxis, such as I have enacted in this reflexive historiography, I will explore the many stages of life through which I have till now journeyed. Thus, I shall describe, as graphically as possible, the fifty-one-year occultation of my voice, one chronically fearful of a universe of unknown consequences, and, in consideration of my ultimate activism, will present a culmination in that voice's special revelation and intimate unveiling.

Accordingly, information which may frequently be assumed to be simply commonsensical is often a residue of influence, suggestion, and oppressive power. Occupying elite statuses confers dominance in defining that which is real, while escaping the resulting mass hypnosis is a necessary, though rarely sufficient, cause of emancipation. In my own case, the process of emancipation has involved an acknowledgment of the trance of oppression into which I had fallen. It has also required a deep reflection on the biographical agents of my domination.

Inspirational dialectics of oppression and liberation have captured the imaginations of people in many societies and through numerous histories. They tell us the tales of the possible or, as sociologist Karl Mannheim (1893-1947) described, they map out the paths from ideologies of dominance to utopias of transformation. As European Americans and men have historically been positioned to redact the identities of, respectively, racial minorities and women, so the parameters of disabled individuals have been contoured by others. Herein, I contemplate my own experiences with this process.

The Third Awakening

When I was a child, my problems must have appeared insurmountable, and I was seen by several psychiatrists. Collectively, in the process of serving up, and then force-feeding me, their mind-numbing neuroleptics, antidepressants, and electric shocks, they circumscribed my societal context through disability and disempowerment. Consequently, I had, over the intervening years, sworn to myself, many times over, that I would never again darken the door to a psychiatrist's office. However, in March of 2007, following the recommendation of my family practitioner, whose prescriptions of a sleep medication and, subsequently, a mild tranquilizer were ineffective at resolving my symptoms, I visited a psychiatrist for the first time since I was 14 or 15.

The complaint was direct and specific: I trembled when attempting to lay down for the night, felt dazed and stoned for most of the following day, and compulsively scratched my scalp. The cause was self-evident and repulsive: My apartment was infested with cockroaches. They would crawl into my bed, onto my back, and into my hair and rectum when I was asleep and going to sleep. It was perhaps my most intensive experience with sleeplessness but by no means my first. I have often laid awake, or paced back and forth, panicked with sinus congestion or angered by background noises (possibly hyperacusis).

I was not seeking a diagnosis, but I received three of them. The verdict was Autism, as the primary condition, with comorbid obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and comorbid chronic insomnia. Statistically, OCD is dependent, more prevalently, on Autism than the reverse. As to the insomina, both Autism, perhaps due to its nearly universal association with anticipatory anxiety, and OCD, encompassing intrusive thoughts as well as undesired behaviors, can often be unequivocally implicated, but, regardless of the culprit, a seemingly interminable focus on those vile cockroaches kept me awake night after night.

While the insomnia has now passed and the OCD is barely negligable, the diagnosis of Autism has, for me, been the unraveling of a neural koan, where the one hand clapping, in a sequestered silence, has, at long last, encountered the other hand. It came a few weeks after the other diagnoses and was, my psychiatrist said, deduced from my self-reports, not from my demeanor in his office. That is to say, based solely on our dialogue, and on my appearance, he would never have suspected it, he said. Moreover, although not all clinicians differentiate between Autism and some other categories of Autism, among a portion of those who do, I would, owing to my normal verbal and cognitive development as a toddler, be considered Autism.

The Autism factor shed light on my eye contact practice sessions, at a time when gazing straightaway into the eyes of others, which I can best describe as emanating the incandescence of miniature suns, would commonly burn my eyes. Additionally, I am unaware as to whether there was any relationship, even though I do know that I would often make unintentionally unusual faces, but many years ago, on a commercial break during a taping of The Joan Rivers Show, Ms. Rivers, staring directly at me, comically parodied my facial expression by crossing her eyes. At the time, her behavior made no sense to me.

Autism also explained my rote memorizings of long lists of items, my off-beat jokes, my frequent catastrophizings, my insecurities regarding addressing certain people by their first names, my lengthy tangible and online catalogings of information, and my carefully cultivated prosodies. There were then my pedantic monologues with my never-ending analyses, prompting some adults to call me an encyclopedia or a computer, and my emotional meltdowns, which have sometimes resulted in suddenly discontinuing most email correspondences for long stretches, as many as three years, at a time, or not answering the telephone and ignoring messages.

My perseverations, defined as the reiterations of words or actions even after their initial stimuli may have vanished, and my routines or rituals have varied considerably throughout my life. If, in autoecholalia, turning a particular phrase delights me, for whatever reason, I may repeat it verbatim, aloud (when alone) or silently, over and over again. Moreover, I frequently recite, or mull over, a sentence or a paragraph until i subjectively get it right. The use of words, their proper use in my judgment, has been a perpetual source of personal fascination.

Ritualistically, since I was, ages ago, uncertain of how to handle a coin-operated washer and dryer, I had fallen into the revolting habit of never washing my clothes. Even though the catalyst has long since vanished, I have, for decades, been piling up dirty clothes while purchasing brand-new ones. As a child, I stridently whined if I could not sit in my favorite seats. Among my other routines have been stimming, such as pacing and chewing my tongue as a child, special interests, and OCD. Given the high comorbidity rate of OCD for Autistics, my psychiatrist considers the OCD to be a dimension of Autism.

For my entire childhood, my egodystonic, or self-repugnant, OCD manifested in such modes as a fear of heights and in compulsions to manually "make it even," belch, curse, chew on pencils, and step on sidewalk cracks. The OCD was both comorbid with my Autism and aggravated by it. What is more, given my introversion and limited social facility, I coped with the OCD largely on my own. Admittedly, I still, to this day, have small traces of OCD, including my obsession over not driving into parked vehicles and a lifelong picking at my scabs and nails, but I credit the rationality of the Autism with helping me intellectualize most of it away.

Fabricating voices either ventriloquially or otherwise, mimicking or echolalia, concocting puns, and then regurgitating all of them pacified me. I mastered a radio call-sign: 60,000 watts, clear channel. This is the flagship station of the National Broadcasting Company, WNBC, New York. I also reprised my own sign-off ad nauseam: WHPC now concludes its programming for the day. Up next, WBAU carries you over till 1 in the morning. Then WHPC returns tomorrow at 9. This is Mark A. Foster reporting for WHPC news. Have a pleasant evening and a better day tomorrow. The soothing predictability sterilized ambient babel.

JFK, UFOs, dictionaries, helicopters, the Trachtenberg Speed System of Basic Mathematics, constructed languages, news and weather, theme songs, and consecutive plays of a Triumph of Man record (a souvenir from the Travelers Insurance pavilion at the 1964-1965 New York World's Fair) are an autobiographical sample of my Autism interests. They are egosyntonic, or self-consistent, repetitive, more trancelike than hobbies or pastimes, and may confound some persons not on the Autism spectrum. Their determinateness is my custodian of untold joy and my architect of resolute percipience. Their want is my harbinger of inward privation. With television shows, such as Superman, What's My Line?, and Babylon 5, missing a single program was invariably disquieting.

Many of my interests and activities have been shaped by a convergence of my academic involvements and my Autism. Beneficially, my marginalization, and derivative alienation and introspection, have, while I earned a Ph.D. in sociology and history and pursued an academic career, provided relevant texts for personal reflection. Sociology may seem an odd field for an Autistic. However, I have, as a sociologist, examined subjects which, interpersonally, I could never satisfactorily apprehend, and, by specializing in social theory and religious studies, I tailored my youthful absorptions with conceptual systems construction and the study of religions into my full-time livelihood.

In a similar vein, my hoardings of books, domains, listservs, and other items, costing me several fortunes, have always coincided with my infatuations du jour. As a testament to my procession of fixations, I currently own 25 domains, run 23 websites, operate about a dozen listservs, and possess in the vacinity of 25 ventriloquial knee figures (dummies). Meanwhile, as the years have gone by, my library had grown so prodigious, incorporating well in excess of 30,000 books, that, in 2007, I was pressed by the apartment manager, under threat of my lease not being renewed, to move most of it into a storage facility.

I had previously ascribed my rituals and routines, such as the endless book acquisitions, to having an addictive personality, but I no longer utilize that narrative. While I have been a long-standing critic of the recovery movement's discourse on the loss of willpower and its essentialist reification of addiction, treating addiction as a real thing, I was, at the same time, unable to decipher my inclination to become thoroughly engrossed in behaviors, and, in all candor, I fell short when fighting to eliminate, or even moderate, them. Since cognitively restructuring them as Autism preoccupations, I find myself strangely in control.

My fascinations with a concatenation of elaborate, logically masterminded doctrines have forged a rational order out of my social chaos while simultaneously providing an ideational map to my inward search for meaning. With each and every one of them, I have become proficient and loquacious. Transmodern Critical Realism, Structural Dialectics, the Neoplatonic framework of Alethionomy, the popular neuroscience of Mental Energetics (at 15), and the bidimensional, occultic, idealist philosophy of Soulology (at 12) have been counted among my prior narratives.

The twin perspectives I use currently have each progressed through sequences of designations. These name changes have sometimes expressed slight modifications to emphasis, organization, or format. Alternately, they were simply dictated by tacit fluctuations in my personal preference. Emancipatory Constructionism (EC) is a term I selected in 2009 in order to make explicit the grounding of my present sociological perspective in critical social theory. Beginning in 2004, it was initially developed as Dialectical Constructionism and, later that year, as the Structurization Paradigm. The axiological subtext of EC, ASMÁ, was renamed in 2008 from Structurizing. It is an emerging, or postmodern, practice of spiritual transformation.

Once inwardly selected and then outwardedly rendered in text, each paradigm, comprising parts adopted and parts invented, has been transformed into a comprehensive taxonomy. I remain undecided as to whether it might be more fitting to describe these explanatory frameworks as individual or as the consecutive stages in the formalization of a single perspective. Either way, without the standardization, the routine, and the constancy of an integrative outlook on the many categories of our human experiences, as my unwavering ground and serene center, I have struggled against an unrelenting encumbrance and unease. In addition, I will, to this day, spend hour after hour, immersed in angst, laboring to logically relate some new idea to my framework.

In search of contextuality, I have designed many alternate universes. My aforementioned ventriloquism, in which I have played all the parts, has conspicuously been among them. It also provided a comedic escape from my life's tragedies. Futhermore, I created a Bajoran Star Trek figure, Vedek Pagh, and developed a rabbinical Society for Creative Anachronism persona, Moyshe Arn der Faygnboym ben Herschel der Leyvy. These chimerical self-portraits, one set in the past and another in the future, have functioned as expositors for my shifting stances. Telling their stories, largely to conduct reified thought experiments, has taken precedence over meeting with other enthusiasts.

Additionally, an animated banner, one I designed nearly a decade before my Autism diagnosis, vividly headlines the portal to The MarkFoster.NETwork, the title I have given to my ensemble of domains and websites, and greets visitors with the salutation, Welcome to my universe! This Internet network, as the electronic avatar of the multiple facets of my inward and outward being, remained incomplete without the subsequent accession of The Collective to Fight Neurelitism. More than a merely modest intellectual attainment, joining the Collective to the network has, in symbolizing and manifesting the integration of my personality, suffused me with a spirit which might be described as rapturous.

The approaches I applied for studying my own religion have attested to the continuity of modifications to my worldview. Utilizing a didactic, formulaic, and arcane metaphysics, I had become poignantly fixated on classifying what were, I then believed, the Neoplatonic conditions of existence into an extensive compilation of quotations. Earlier in my life, I referred to this ritual as inspired categorization. Classification has always been comforting. With my subsequent reformation into a critical theorist, social constructionist, and poststructuralist, I have, while retaining an ostensibly similar model, refashioned the conditions into relative names, categories, and conveniences of language. In other words, I no longer take my framework so seriously.

Although I was born into a minimally practicing Jewish home, attended Hebrew school, and became a bar mitzvah at 13, I undertook investigations for a new faith about one year earlier. Considering I chose to briefly continue going to Hebrew school following my bar mitzvah, if the Jewish renewal movement were around, I might well have stayed in Judaism. However, after briefly practicing Sikhism, Eckankar, and, when had few heard of it, Wicca, I became active in yet another religion in 1970. As a member, the confidence and support I obtained for my special interests may account for my scholastic attainments and academic career.

Throughout the course of my life, I have, thus far, undergone three momentous and transformative awakenings, attaining the first, when I was 14, by embracing my current religion and immediately embarking upon an exploration of the conditions of existence, or worlds of God, and my spiritual faculties, such as inner vision and faith. The second awakening, at around 40 years old, was in the abandonment of my ontological realism, or essentialism, for a nominalist, or an anti-essentialist, critical theory. The third awakening, which produced my long-sought class consciousness, was in the decoding of my neurological riddle, at the age of 51, through the dual diagnoses of Autism and OCD. Presently, I strive for a consummate awakening through faná, the mystic annihilation of the prison of self.

By the same token, I have had to resolve certain conflicts between my religion and other areas of my life. For instance, although I am a socialist, not a social liberal, I have been a cultural liberal on most issues for as long as I can remember. Since my diagnosis as an Autistic and after, subsequently, achieving a degree of conscientization concerning my autobiographical status in the matrix of social domination, my commitment to cultural liberalism has been even more pronounced than before. Thus, an awareness of my own contexts of oppression has increased my sensitivities to the human rights struggles of other oppressed populations, particularly women, racial and ethnic minorities, and, most relevant here, the LGBT community.

I had once encountered a personal dilemma regarding a reconciliation of the official positions of my religious community, which disallows Gay marriage, with my own personal beliefs in support of it. Indeed, I would like to see marriages, of any category, taken out of the hands of governments altogether. In place of marriage, I have proposed that adults, of whatever number or gender, could receive, unceremoniously, a civil union license. While, legally, it would be equivalent to a present-day marriage contract, the determinations would be left to those persons, or to their religious organizations, as to whether, ceremonially or otherwise, those unions should be designated as marriages. In this way, marriage leaves the public sphere and becomes a private matter.

I have digressed a bit. As I said before, my concern centered around being culturally liberal on sexual orientation when my religion was not. I resolved it, as a nominalist, by refusing to conflate my religion, as a voluntary association, with the secular arena to which sexual preference belongs. In other words, I am able to acknowledge the requirements of my religion as covenantal obligations, binding only on believers, while simultaneously affiming my personal views, in support of Gay rights, as a private individual. Similarly, although I would like to see the elimination of gender categories, I accept them within the framework of my voluntary religious association.

Given my nominalism, my view that categories of particulars are only relative names and willful social constructions, I am not an existentialist, nor do I believe I could ever be one. The universalization of the search for meaning, as in Viktor Frankl's logotherapy, is far too idealist and essentialist for my tastes. Yet, if I were an existentialist, I would then, without much difficulty, portray my insomnia as an existential crisis, a personal realization of the pinnacle of angst, succeeded by its resolutions in the diagnoses of Autism and OCD. As things stand, however, I can only see, in my newfound awareness, the opportunities for new language games.

Even if the etiologies, the origins or causes, of the Autism spectrum are not yet fully mapped, I am thankful that my own route has been charted. My earliest memory is that of lying in a stroller as a baby. I can curiously recollect my late mother wheeling me around the park area which, at the intersection of Wallace Avenue, divided the two sides of the Bronx's Pelham Parkway. At one point, a woman, who had been conversing with my mother, dared to look into the carriage and smile at me. My immediate reaction to this invasion of my personal space was, I plainly recall, a pronounced sense of irritation.

In addition, I have lived alone, and never married, since leaving my parents' home in 1976. Even though I have taught the class, Marriage and Family, about two dozen times and possess good technical understandings of romantic and other relationships, my predicament lies in applying them to myself. Time and again, I miss social cues, become anxious, play dumb, or lack the competencies to respond. I think back upon my fret and bewilderment at not knowing if I loved anyone or if, discernably, anyone loved me. In my late twenties, around 1983, my first date was arranged by a therapist. My last was in 1993.

As one chiropractor called to my attention, my back is the most rigid he ever adjusted. Beyond my choices in words, in my teens, I became acutely aware, through observation and from what others had told me, that an unwelcomed and unintentional formality, with an absence of spontaneity in body language and inflection, resulted in comportments both dispassionate and austere. The more I craved to be emotionally intimate, particularly with women, the more woodenly I acted. My loves have all been unrequited. For a time, my best efforts to present myself as less affected in my pragmatics came to no avail, even while I wrestled with the glaring contradiction between genuinely being natural and my exertions to be so.

Indeed, my seeming incompetence at cultivating successful romantic relationships was often front stage and center throughout adolescence and into adulthood. Periodically, and leading right up until my Autism diagnosis, I occasionally, and always unsuccessfully, pursued a resolution to this dilemma, and, in exasperation, I consulted, intermittently, with several clinical psychologists and counselors. I had once presumed that my difficulties in this area stemmed from poor peer relations as a child, and I still believe that may have been a contributing factor. I now recognize, however, that my willpower was, in essence, playing war games with my neurology, as I was, inadvertently, attempting to become a non-Autistic man. The battle is over, and I can be at peace with myself.

Birds of a feather do flock together, studies show, and I have pondered over individuals, past and present, whom I have counted among my friends. A few have, I suspect, been persons at various points along the Autism spectrum. From Ronnie, who asked the same questions again and again, mostly concerning his preoccupation with biblical translations, and twirled his pencils to calm himself, and his nephew, Tommy, who did not speak until he was 7, to Pat, an abrasive fellow with no social sense, to Richard, a brilliant, donnish, and chronically unemployed eccentric who once bit me on the ear and loves Woody Allen and Gilbert and Sullivan.

Furthermore, human relationships, their absence or presence, have had only isolated depressive repercussions, and being companionless has rarely been bothersome. Still, like many Autists, I have approached been suicidal a few times in my life (happily, none too recently). While residing with my parents, I lived, more or less, in a realm of my own making. Typically, I remained in my room or, whenever possible, trolled through my favorite bookstores in Manhattan. If I were to be home for my one meal per day, a minimalist diet which remains my custom, I oftentimes requested my mother to leave dinner for me in the refrigerator. As much as she disliked doing so, it could be wontedly intolerable to eat with my family.

During my childhood and teens, an unflagging difficulty with small talk accentuated my artlessness at social interaction. Nearly whatever my interlocutors would impart to me, I wound up comprehending literally. The very fact that I regularly missed the subtlety and nuance of everyday conversation made me a convenient target for many practical jokes. I recall one particularly humorous incident, in my middle to late teens, when someone persuaded me concerning the existence of a small Latin American tribe whose members were endowed, through natural selection, with a third eye on the backs of their heads.

Decades before learning I was on the Autism spectrum, I branded myself a solipsist. Lecturing to students has moderately reprogrammed me. My infelicitous smiles, which sometimes caused offense, resulted from "living in my head," as I have often remarked, to daydreaming, or to simple social perplexity. Over time, and through experience, I have ascertained that, to most people, my passions are plainly boring. Not having much to say, I tend to be laconic, more or less, in social situations. Fortunately, weaving one's interests into lectures is normative for an academic, and it makes that process enjoyable for me.

I will admit to being self-centered, fastened on my thoughts, but not to being very selfish. Like many Autistics, my staple, and hardly egotistical, pursuit has been for social justice. In 1968, while in the seventh grade, I embraced the New Left and joined the Students Democratic Coalition. Through it, I attended a Humphrey–Muskie presidential campaign rally featuring Sen. Edmund Muskie, opposed anti-ballistic missiles, and picketed a supermarket and distributed petitions in support of a boycott on California grapes. As a professor, a critical social theory informs my lectures. I consistently respond to racial and other bigotries with righteous indignations.

In terms of sensory and movement difficulties, I have, since I was just a boy, rarely felt at home in my clothing and, when younger, pulled at my garments around my neck and, to this day, near my middle. I often ritualistically wear clothes again and again. While alone, I have preferred to be undressed and have cut my own hair to avoid my outer ears. In my physical education classes, I had ungainly coordination and literally no concept of sports. I was ordinarily the last one picked for teams. When little, I was terrified of eye drops. To administer them, the opthamologist and both my parents were required to hold me down. Year round, the room temperature, even now, needs to be just right, namely, about 83°F. My parents constantly harassed me about turning the heat or air conditioner up too high.

Then, as a child, or a bit now when highly fatigued, I have had panic attacks from hearing, even thinking of, noises, like echos, barking dogs, bouncing balls, laughter, applause, and bursting balloons. While noises remain a distraction, gymnasiums were a nightmare. Due to my mental associations with ball and bomb, I was paralyzed by any b words, like boom and boy. Seeing bits of food on or about the mouths of people would make me nauseous. I was frightened by heights, wind, insects, and precipitively passing objects in my peripheral vision. My sinus fixations, which ended in three surgeries, may have been partially an Autism sensory problem, OCD, or both.

Further, I was, as a young boy, regrettably petrified of anyone atypical to my experience, such as little people, Blacks, and the disabled. I feared that my ears would permanently protrude when manipulated by barbers and froze in discomfort. I detested being hugged, kissed, or touched, including on the head. Overall, animals were less stressful, and better companions, than humans. My penmanship, shy of a draftsman-like lettering, has always been cacographic. I tirelessly protected the objects in my world from contact with others. Second-hand items all felt wrong to the touch. I raged until my parents made exchanges.

Perceptually, my prosopagnosia or face blindness, coupled with my poor personal name recognition, is, while somewhat remediated from my youth, an ongoing challenge. When people greet me, I am, more commonly than not, placed into the embarrassing position of being unable to identify them at all, not recalling where we met, or not remembering their names. As a student, I rarely knew, or recognized, my peers, and, as a professor, I am similarly absent-minded with my students. In frustration, I have tried some mnemonic techniques through the years. Unfortunately, I did not find any of them all too profitable.

The following statement from Syndrome Partner Information Australia Inc. (ASPIA) could have been written by me:

What many people will not be aware of is that there is a second wave of identification taking place within the adult population. For adults with Asperger's Syndrome, their behaviours since childhood have gone "underground" and layers of coping strategies and defence mechanisms greet the social world. These behaviours often give the impression of someone quite "together" - perhaps a little eccentric or odd - but passable because of their high intelligence, impressive knowledge, high integrity and particular flair or gift in an area or career, such as engineering, telecommunications, computers, art, religion and politics.

To make an incontrovertible understatement, I was a fish out of water. Rather than ask for a bathroom pass, I urinated in my pants, hoping against hope that neither the teacher nor the other children would notice the puddle I left in my seat or on the floor. In the seventh grade, on a bus trip to perform at Montreal's Man and His World with my band, the teacher saw the urine but protected me. I displayed an equable look of mystification as I sat at my desk or wandered down the corridors. In fact, I all too commonly got lost and was unable, without assist, to find my classroom or, for that matter, to track down my home while walking home from school. My surroundings appeared uniformly surreal to me.

Gastrointestinal (GI) tract issues are also classic Autism comorbidities. In the 1980s, I became terribly constipated and lost around 30 lbs. over three months. After extensive tests, all negative, a gastroenterologist intimated that I take a bulk-forming laxative, which resolved the problems. In addition, I continue to have periodic troubles with acid reflux as well as irritable, loose, and irregular bowels. Anecdotally, I often notice an association between an absence of GI symptoms and more generalized sensations of mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being. How pedestrian is my testimony, in this regard, I am unable to postulate.

Likewise, I have retained a not-so-negligible cavillous, stilted, and convoluted vernacular speaking and writing style. To illustrate, I maintained, for a time, that my coming-of-age suburban Long Island home was the Township of Hempstead. As was pointed out to me, the proper name is Town of Hempstead. On the other hand, while I was being technically exact in casting my local community as a village, when most used town, I chided people. Verbal imprecision greatly troubled me. I still often specify, and recognize, medications predominantly by their generics, as in oxymetazoline hydrochloride nasal spray for Afrin. I similarly preferred terms such as, defecate and flatulate, over the more common colloquialisms.

Furthermore, as a child, I appear to have exhibited, like many Autistics, a touch of hyperlexia. That is to say, I acquired, largely through imitation, an extensive vocabulary, but frequently without sufficiently understanding a number of the multisyllabic words I had mastered, and I could read audibly with a competence well beyond my junior years. Fortunately, in time, any traces of hyperlexia from my youth had been substantially overcome, and my mental lexicon became associated with normative definitions. Although I retain a preference for sesquipedalian discourse, I have, though not to an extent I would deem sufficient, trained myself to moderate my enthusiasm by forcing my mind to consider the requirements of my listeners or readers.

In closing this section of these personal memoirs, I am reminded of the cockroaches, among this planet's most durable residents. They have, according to estimates, been citizens of our biosphere for some 300 million years. We hominids, by contrast, are, based on current data, shy of that figure by approximately a third. Those irksome and intractable creatures hid everywhere in my apartment, including my bed frame, my clothing, and an overflow drain, torturing my life and making it, for a time, a living hell. Unbeknownst to me at the time, my uninvited guests bestowed a cornucopia of glad tidings. Once, I hated them. Now, I am indebted.

The Original Diagnosis

While bigotry rallies in the "regular" guy,
Unable to cherish the mind walks of many,
The power of diversity releases the dreamer
From the prison of mediocrity.

- Mark A. Foster, Ph.D., from a 1990s poem

Having been to hell and back, I would not recommend it. As a child, I was the passive recipient of multiple drug and other therapies. In sum, they were founded on the supposition that I suffered from a psychosis, childhood schizophrenia. As best I can tell, none of the treatments actually helped me. However, I am, by and large, a strong-willed individual. Some, including members of my family of orientation, had even accused me of pertinaciousness. Still, given that many in similar straits did not fair nearly as well, my obstinance may have been a paramountly advantageous quality. One clinical psychologist actually irritated me in his repeated stupefactions at my accomplishments.

Preceding my nascent diagnoses in April, 2007, I did not know that the first edition (1952) of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (the DSM-I) of the American Psychiatric Association only specified Autism as a manifestation of schizophrenic reaction, childhood type, my child psychiatrist's evaluation. I came upon this knowledge through my web surfing over the summer of 2007. Autism was also placed under schizophrenic reaction, paranoid type and schizoid personality disorder. The DSM-II (1968), making few pertinent revisions, assigned Autism to schizophrenia, childhood type and schizoid personality disorder.

An initial exhilaration at my incipient finding, which I discussed with my current psychiatrist, turned swiftly to feelings of sorrow and anger that I did not have this information earlier, and, above all, that I had not been born two or three decades later into a somewhat more enlightened era. Indeed, had my Autism not been so undisguised as a boy, and if I had no OCD, I might never have been diagnosed in the first place. Moreover, considering both the striking incongruity in the quality of psychiatric care between the 1960s and the present-day and the nomenclature in the first two editions of the DSM, my situation was not at all peculiar.

As a side note, marking a massive paradigm shift, the DSM-III at once signalized a critical reappraisal of the biological and genetic nosology by the founder of modern scientific psychiatry, Emil Kraepelin (1856-1926). First published in 1980, it distinguished infantile Autism from schizophrenia, childhood type, but I definitely did not meet the established criteria for Kanner's Autism. It was not until the DSM-IV (1994) and the DSM-IV-TR (2000) that disorder had supplanted schizoid disorder of childhood or adolescence, an archaicism in the DSM-III, and childhood-onset schizophrenia was assessed as very rare.

Taking into account these nosological modifications, I had, in effect, been diagnosed with Autism, using the DSM-I, by my principal child psychiatrist. Since there was no separate DSM Autism entity until 1980, my earlier remembrance, from my mother, that he changed the diagnosis from Autism to childhood schizophrenia was likely either inaccurate or she misunderstood the situation. However, perhaps my mother meant that, contrary to the ideas and expectations of the clinicians we consulted earlier, the Autistic symptoms of childhood schizophrenia, as the category was then constructed, were not so prominent.

Now, in all fairness, I was generally excluded from the conversations between my child psychiatrist and my mother. (My father, as per my demands, was rarely present and kept largely uninformed.) That being the case, I am unaware of which details in my diagnosis had been meted out to her. Yet, I can still visualize, when I was about 13, standing inside the hallway of the main floor within our house while repetitively screaming to my mother, "Am I a schizophrenic?" Finally, and vociferously, she then acknowledged it. "Yes! Is that what you wanted to hear?" "Yes," I sighed, utterly exhausted, and I repaired to my room.

To provide some context, my maternal grandmother, Nanny, had died of cancer, a year earlier, when I was 12. After accidentally overhearing talk of her disease, I was resolutely instructed by my parents never to mention it, and its probable course, around her, and I complied. When I asked whether Nanny knew she had cancer, my mother said that she suspected so but was not entirely sure. How horrible, I thought, to be aware you have cancer but to be deprived, by your daughter, of the opportunity for communication. This approach was, palpably, quotidian in the 1960s. Yet, I was determined not to let my mother use it on me.

At my insistence, the clinical apartheid of my mother and myself was abrogated, albeit unenthusiastically and capriciously. I vividly recall that I was, in one of our sessions, disturbed at some comment made by my psychiatrist to my mother regarding an element of my behavior. When I attempted to interrupt, he snapped back, "See, that's the schizophrenia." I was, after all, just a boy, welcomed only in silence and subjection, and could have no say in statements made about me. Indeed, if my routinized impuissance in our triad was in any doubt before this disparagement, it was now crystal clear. While yet callow, I was not dense.

In fact, virtually all of my social actions, and whatsoever I ostensibly failed to accomplish in my life, were attributed, ecumenically, by my psychiatrist to an apparently omnipotent childhood schizophrenia. As, to Herbert Marcuse, an entrenched class of capitalist elites engendered a one-dimensional man, so I became, as a constructed objectification of this psychoanalyst, a transpicuously depersonalized one-dimensional boy. Yet, antithetical to his fatalism, getting better, he puzzlingly insisted, was my own responsibility. Thoroughly marginalized, my redemption was found only in a temporary extrication from the system.

Maybe it was for peace of mind. Perhaps it was simply to resolve a prolonged dilemma. I am not certain. However, within a week of the Autism diagnosis in 2007, I phoned my old child psychiatrist for the first time in 18 years. I was polite, while the encounter itself was, from my standpoint, exceptionally fruitful. At first, he counseled me to focus on my future, not on my past, which struck me as more cliché than practicality. I am unable to so rigorously insulate my life's past from its future tense. He then assented, ever so appropriately in the royal we, "Yes, if you were walking into our office today, we would probably diagnose you with and OCD." Psychiatric diagnosis, I have reflected, is not only more art than science; it cannot be legitimately extracted from its sociohistorical purveyance.

Years earlier, in a 1989 telephone conversation, my child psychiatrist had affirmed that I "obviously" did not have schizophrenia but, alternatively and yet inexplicably, some type of "developmental delay." Prospectively, the DSM-IV, the first version of that manual to subsume Autism, would not be published for another five years. In any event, although I was, in a way, grateful for his candid admission, I was also now unable to make sense out of my assorted odysseys and, for years to come, felt as if stranded, enigmatically, in a neurological limbo. Whether in television shows and the cinema, or in my own life stories, I have never cared for open endings.

After reflecting on my child psychiatrist's words, the only conclusion I could reach was that I had been dreadfully neurotic or, in current parlance, that I had an anxiety disorder. Indeed, in light of the subsequent diagnosis of comorbid OCD, this assessment was both impressively accurate and radically incomplete. My 2007 discussion with that psychiatrist resulted, for all intents and purposes, in a second medical opinion, and, since his views were consonant with the perceptions of my present psychiatrist, they became eminently adaptive for me. Indeed, from that moment on, I have felt genuinely at peace with myself.

Well, then there were the seizures. I had one tonic clonic, or grand mal, seizure in 1982 and a second in 1985. As a child, however, I would frequently lay down on the floor and exclaim, "It's happening," with concurrent feelings of disgust, a bad taste in my mouth, and a mental image of crumpled and burning paper. Although these symptoms were, if I recall correctly, imputed to my "schizophenia," a neurologist I consulted in 2007 advised me that they were, in actuality, simple partial seizures. Either way, I am uncertain which was the more deleterious, the seizures or my mother's shaming trepidations over them.

The left frontal lobes, the area of atypical electrical activity spotted on my often-repeated electroencephalograms (EEGs), are connected with empathy and with rapid and efficient mentalizing. While notations on my neurological reports do indicate a seizure disorder, a currently influential viewpoint, in citing correlations of anomalous frontal lobes with the Autism spectrum, posits that variations in frontal lobe development can be associated with some emotional control difficulties, a propensity to become upset at small changes, compulsivity, intransigent approaches to problem-solving, and black-and-white thinking.

Breaking my silence and, to borrow an expression from the LGBT (Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgendered) community, coming out as an Autistic have provided considerable solace. However, as I was growing up, my now antiquated diagnosis of childhood schizophrenia, as well as my psychiatric control in general, were, by my steady and stern directives, maintained as the closest of family secrets. If I merely suspected, justifiably or not, that outsiders may have been apprised of my condition, I would become absolutely livid and often throw one of my customary and ritualized temper tantrums. Properly staging my self-presentation had evolved into a full-time, and largely ineffectual, occupation, even as my oft-repeated attempts to dissimulate the diagnosis were hindered by an unyielding social inaptitude.

For me, life has been a succession of culture shocks. What should be prosaic and native is, instead, occasionally exotic. In many ways, blending into my diverse social settings has often been accompanied by the uneasy feel of an acculturation through ethnography, as I will strain to comprehend the peculiar values and norms of my seemingly antipodal surroundings, while attempting a bit of mindful fluency in its foreign tongue. The pages of the phrase books are ever-present in my thoughts. No matter how well I can now function in most situations, some still, customarily, bring with them the noir ambience of the alien.

Family and Kinship Relations

As far back as I can trace my Autism is to my father's maternal uncle. He died when I was only a little boy, and I scarcely remember him. He was, I have been told, regarded as an unusual individual. A bachelor, he worked as a mail sorter and spent his entire adult life with his sister and brother-in-law, my paternal grandparents. Whenever I would visit, I sat on his lap, while he seemed lost in a world to his own. He was always in the same chair, next to the living room window, and he was constantly fiddling with one thing or another. The diagnosis did not exist in those days, and my knowledge of him is scant.

My mother, a teacher aid and the oldest child of a struggling grocery store owner turned food salesman, pressured me into permitting her to toss my beloved G.I. Joe down the incinerator. Given my attachment to it, I suspect she meant well, but such fervent bonds to objects, as to my ventriloquial knee figures and to a polished agate stone I owned, are commonplace among Autistics. Holding the agate and looking at ivory were immensely pleasurable. Consequently, whenever my family went on vacation, I wished for my most treasured possessions to come, too. If refused, seeing them again, upon returning home, was like a family reunion. I still mourn for a Tommy 7 (TV show) clown nose, stolen by a neighboring fellow preschooler.

The aggregation of moments through my lifespan, primarily over the course of my junior years, has been vexed with manifold contradictions. Relentlessly, in my boyhood and, at times, into adulthood, I was badgered by my mother concerning my egocentricity, which is an Autism trait, and told, time after time, that I cared for no one but myself. If, she insisted now and then, my coreligionists became wise to my conceit, they would shun me. Yet, in attempting to be empathetic, my stiffness and plasticity left me exceedingly frustrated; and despite being verbose in deportment, I hardly ever seemed to utter the right words.

Frankly, as I have systematically mulled over my relations with my mother, my infuriation and befuddlement concerning her frequent denigrations, her impatience with my stuttering and my pacing, her demands that I leave her alone, her accusations of deafness when I tuned her out, her outrage at my paucity of benevolence, and even her well-intentioned proddings to make me smile have, in weaker moments, turned to resentment. "How could I have given birth to such a selfish person like you?" They are words etched, even embedded, into my consciousness and betray a distinct nescience to the Autistic implications of my early diagnosis. Except for when she entertained company, she seemed to be continually exasperated with me.

I loved my mother irrespectively, and I craved her reciprocation. Nevertheless, I believe I did, over the years, internalize her emotionally abusive accusations and tirades. As my all but constant state of deliberation trained, from time to time, on my mother's outbursts, on whether I truly was an abhorrent person, I could not figure out what had gone wrong. Why, considering my general spiritual orientation, my devotions, my meditations, and my studies of religious texts, was I still so self-centered? I wondered whether I had failed to live up to my Lord's expectations, or if, perhaps, I had embraced a false belief system.

Early in 2009, Vinny, who has been my closest friend since 1971, recounted a story in which my mother, when I was still a teenager, expressed her misgivings regarding my future as an adult. She was, Vinny reported, apprehensive concerning my means of subsistence once unable to return to the family home. This anecdote of her affection, really quite understandable given the exiguousness of my Autistic adaptation at the time, called to mind the abundance of discrepancies between my mother's private relationship with me, dominated by aggravation and disparagement, and the manner in which she presented that relationship, and her feelings about me, to others.

Kinship Diagram

In hindsight, I have attempted to be understanding. Setting my own issues off to the side, my family maneuvered through multiple obstacle courses. To cite one of them, our lives were left unsettled by my mother's insomnia. It was, I began to surmise within months of my own diagnoses, a disturbance secondary to OCD, which also exhibited in her phobias of heights and escalators, and hyperacusis. Obsessions on noises – whether anticipated, real, or imagined – permitted her a modicum of sleep. A near total silence was demanded after her bedtime, but even with the quiet came complaints and a perennial crankiness.

I willingly concede that living with certain individuals on the Autism spectrum can be arduous. In addition to myself, and the stresses and strains which my Autism imposed upon my family, my mother contended with my father, an eye care professional and the oldest child of a semiprofessional boxer and, subsequently, a successful grocery store owner. For his poor grasp of social nuance, dazed countenance, blindness to subtext, clumsy speech, inelegant and unremitting naiveté, and ignorance of current fads and fashions, I coarsely described him, typically in frustration or anger, as having "something missing." Graceful speech was generally possible for him only in highly structured situations, as with his optical patients.

My father's brother, alleged by his wife to be very weird, told me in a March, 2008, phone call that their maternal uncle, markedly after retiring, and my father were both decidedly odd. My mother was a talented woman who, if not obligated to help support her family during the Great Depression, might have become a physician. When she expressed an interest in marrying my father, her entire family, her cousin informed me, thought she had gone stark raving mad. To be fair, he was a handsome young fellow, and, admitting his habitually idiosyncratic and often bizarre mannerisms, he could even be slightly charming at times.

My father thrived on his routines and rituals, threw fits when our family disrupted them, despised certain clothing fabrics, and was captivated by counting, waiting by the window, and being on time. Indeed, the latter was so much so that, whenever he got his way, we unfailingly arrived at events well ahead of schedule. Privately, he preoccupied himself with science fiction novels, "the garbage," the science and technology magazine, Popular Mechanics, and his huge and omnipresent collection of American flags. Then, truth be told, even while the hospital staff was busily caring for my debilitated mother, my father droned the hackneyed tales of a medic in World War II.

After first hearing about Autism in 2004, I immediately thought of my father and hypothesized that he, but not myself, was an Autistic. That same year, while my mother laid dying in her hospital bed, I broached the possibility of my father's Autism with my parents' physician, but he was, at the time, principally unfamiliar with it. Ensuingly, owing to my father's various problems with decorum in his new assisted living community, I phoned the physician, in late 2007, and asked him to arrange for a psychiatric assessment. While the process dragged on more than I would have preferred, eventually, my father was assigned a psychiatrist.

In February, 2008, my father's psychiatrist told me he has Autism symptions and (with mixed results) is treating him, pharmacologically, as an Autistic. Although a formal diagnosis of Autism, the psychiatrist continued, is, due to the aggravating effects of geriatric dementia, no longer possible, he provided, in our two conversations, enough of a diagnosis to suit me. Suddenly, in a flash, years of indefatigable turmoil with my father were elucidated. Still, notwithstanding our common Autism, an undeniable asymmetry, whether in avocation, capability, or personality, has outdistanced, in considerable measure, any proportionality.

Neither my parents nor I had adequate emotional control. A continual fracas revolved around my father's virtually incessant emotional, and occasionally even physical, abuse of me. Now and again, my mother would alternately threaten to put me up for adoption or to leave my father. As she acknowledged to me over the years, she remained with him for financial reasons, for which I never entirely forgave her, but never wholly forgave him. Looking back, I attribute these hapless plights to a mutual frustration of two social misfits. We had precious little insight into the norms of propriety, but we each knew how to go for the jugular and make it really sting.

For as long as I can remember, my father, like myself, has had gastrointestinal problems, and its foremost symptom was a loathsome flatulence. Whenever he neglected to spray the bathroom disinfectant, the entire area came under a tacit quarantine. Since, to boot, he generally used the upstairs facilities in the house, which were directly adjacent to my bedroom, this lone issue, even though superficially minor, only served to exacerbate any coexistent tension or enmity between us. Subsequently, with his advancing age, he has, regrettably, developed both irritable bowel syndrome and an incontinence of the bowels.

I am doleful that my mother died prior to the revelations of my father's and my Autism. A mere knowledge of it would, quite possibly, have ameliorated her relationships with both of us. The tremendous stress that my father's Autism had produced in my mother, which she generally believed to be intentionally bad behavior, may, I have sometimes speculated, have contributed to the stroke which began the long, downward spiral in her health. Over the two years after the stroke, she also wondered, as did I, why I did not spend more time at her side, but the sensations, and cessations in routine, would have been unbearable.

Nonetheless, I probably do not languish over death, in the conventional sense, as much as most persons, if there is such standardization. Perhaps I thwart intense empathy to avoid being overwhelmed, but I am only guessing. In late 2004, when my mother died, following two lengthy years of suffering, I was grateful her pains had ended, and have occasionally missed her, but I did not mourn hardly at all. At that time, about two years prior to my new diagnoses, my mothers accusations about my selfishness, so long ago, came back to haunt me briefly.

As to my father's death, I was informed of it, over the phone, on the afternoon of December 15, 2008. He died that morning of, as they say, an apparent heart attack. Given that his quality of life was minimal, and he was barely conscious while he was awake, his passing was, in many respects, a blessing. Had he lived much longer, he would, according to his physicians, begin to experience tremendous pain. Still, knowing what I came to know about my father's Autism and my own, I had accurately predicted that I would grieve more at his, than my mother's, passing. Yet, by the same token, perhaps my sadness reflected the realization that both my parents, those who raised me, had left this world. It is a strange sensation.

At my father's funeral, only two of us addressed the congregation. Given the rabbi's preference, fearing an extreme emotion from family members which would prevent others from making their tributes, a friend spoke first. In amazement, I listened as this friend described a very kind man who was, by all measurements, a complete stranger to me. Subsequently, in my short, rather matter-of-fact speech, I referred to my father's physical and emotional abuse during my childhood, having once hated him, becoming closer in recent years, and, finally, feeling a connection from our shared Autistic diagnosis.

Nothing in life is ever perfect. If we imagine otherwise, we will, sooner or later, be jarred out of the delusion. I reject the trendy psychobabble about people doing their best. Since I have frequently failed to perform as well as I might, it would, I long ago concluded, be absurd for me, out of mere expediency or a desire for closure, to expect a pristine moral infallibility from others. Although I cannot say my parents have always done their best, neither can I claim it for myself. What binds us together is that, in my genetic and social inheritance, I own both my father's Autism and my mother's OCD. I am their looking glass.

Other Social Contexts

The unceasing intimidations of my formative years are far too abundant to enumerate here, but I will provide some background. Outside of my family, I preferred the company and conversation of adults to playing with other children. Among my peers, I routinely confounded kindness with bullying and bullying with kindness, even as, in defiance of all my mother's urgings, I grew increasingly more solitary. On account of putting on my mother's makeup, contrary to her wishes, to cover my facial scabs, my top-buttoned shirts, my butterfly collars, my briefcase, and my unfashionable accoutrements galore, not to mention my stuttering, my rapid speech, and my generalized penchants for peculiarity, an anxiously anticipated bullying or teasing was repeated well nigh diurnally and almost like clockwork.

I had little comprehension of the prevailing tastes of my cohorts and, as a consequence, donned whatever attire seemed, to me, most rational. Since I despised the press of a wallet against my skin, I attached one of those green bicyclists' pouches to my belt. Although it was visibly soiled, I saw no point in having it washed. How would cleaning the pouch, I reasoned, improve its overall function? Although the teasing I endured could have, in this one respect, been easily nullified by no longer wearing it, I, for whatever reason, never connected the dots. Similarly, in the early years of high school, I frequently clipped a few religious buttons to my shirt and trousers. With barely a shred of social discrimination, pragmatism overshadowed common sense.

I was, discounting my usual oddity, well behaved, but my fourth-grade teacher, who must have been familiar with my psychiatric record, was evidently provoked by certain of my eccentricities. Along these lines, I once, perhaps wrapt in some improvised abstraction, politely asked her to repeat a question. She pulled back on my left earlobe and shouted it into my ear. Being an inordinately sensitive child, I felt totally humiliated. When I arrived home, I cried to my mother who, I am grateful, complained to one of the school's officials. Still and all, the next year, my former teacher would be promoted to assistant principal.

In the fifth grade, walking to and from school, I began focusing on a voice, slow in meter but mellow and deep in tone, inside my head. I recall asking myself whether I was losing my mind. Although I was aware that the voice was fanciful, and I controlled it voluntarily, it did, in fact, do little more than to recite my name over and again. In review, the unwise divulgement of these inner imaginings to my inimical psychiatrist may have reaffirmed his earlier diagnosis of schizophrenia which, in turn, culiminated in my being committed. Sorrowfully, I only read belatedly, in 2007, that obsessions on thoughts can be indicants of OCD.

I was only 11, and my first time away from home was as a state hospital inpatient for two grim months. The place had an awful turpentine smell and, as I imagined it, the aura of a prison. I was, in retrospect, unsuitably delivered a series of electroconvulsive therapies (ECTs). While painless, I recall being strapped down, drugged, and, in my peregrinations back to the ward with Mr. Watson, for me a grounding ritual, becoming lucid. On the one day he was busy, being escorted by another man was severely discomposing. I had bonded to Mr. Watson, and I would inquire about him, on his days off, from the other attendants.

One of the more burdensome side effects of receiving ECTs is, quite frequently, varying lapses in long-term memory. In the face of months of nearly total amnesia, I would arrive home, whether for a weekend stay, only after the treatments were completed, or at the conclusion of my hospitalization period, and fail to recognize practically anything in my surroundings. The overriding exclusion was, through it all, that I never forgot my parents; and they were forewarned I might not recognize them immediately. However, when each weekend home had terminated, I became, in anticipation of resumed lonliness, inconsolable.

To reiterate, the major problem was in psychiatric construction. Given an insufficiency of research into Autism, the boundaries of the schizophrenias had been demarcated far too broadly. Consequently, ECTs were futilely administered to individuals with Autism and, perhaps, a secondary or aggravating condition, such as my OCD. Barring blatant misdiagnosis, such a tragic state of affairs is, in the twenty-first century, unimaginable and could only be attributed to the most horrendous malpractice. Yet, lamentably, I am not alone and have interacted, online, with others, including the son of an Autistic man, about my age, who suffers a continued memory loss from that interval of his childhood.

Sadly, I witnessed injudicious beltings by all the attendants in my ward. Even Mr. Watson, who treated me kindly and was tipped by my father, flagellated others. Mercifully, I was beaten only once. After I told my parents, my father threatened the woman. Consequent to the reprimand, I received only the occasional dirty look. If the criminal battery by those monsters occurred today, and not in the psychiatric dark ages (1967 to be precise), I am fairly confident that the majority of them would be serving time. I later protested when events prior to the ECTs were discussed and became agitated while driving past the hospital.

Ensuant to a castigation by my dreaded and arrogant child psychiatrist that, absent some rectification of my illness, he might once again have me committed, as if I were to blame, I methodically and assiduously hid my thoughts and feelings from him. I also persistently pleaded with my mother, who sadly liked and trusted him, not to report certain episodes. Even as a preteen, I recognized his threat to be counterproductive and diligently worked to defeat it. What is more, these difficulties had worsened, in my mind, after his brusque repudiation of my accounts of the abuse. Much as my mother interceded to support me, I remain doubtful whether, in his hubris, he gave them any credence.

By the summer following my hospitalization, I had turned 12. I spent one homesick month at Ramapo Anchorage Camp, now Camp Ramapo, in a luxuriant facility for special needs children in rural Rhinebeck, New York. (Supposedly, I had consented, but I did not recall.) Besides learning how to swim, I devoted as much time as possible to ritually wandering from end to end of the camp, by myself, and rowing around the lake. The multitudinous hours I lingered alone aboard those boats were immensely pleasurable. As usual, some of the boys bullied me, but I was clueless about how to associate with other kids anyway.

The camp counselors, disgruntled that I kept mainly to myself, insisted that I participate in some group activities, including softball. One of them, apparently acquainted with my psychiatric profile, expressed surprise, though pointedly no less than my own, that I had played reasonably well. Not to let him get the better of me, I incisively retorted, "Well, I may not like it, but I can do it." "You are smarter than me," he replied. When my parents arrived, I was astonished, given my well-rehearsed litany of complaints, that they inquired if I wished to stay for another month. Without hesitation, I inexorably declined, and we headed home.

More precisely, we were driving to our new home on suburban Long Island. I had visited the ranch house before, but only as we rode from place to place with various realtors. As I subsequently discovered, my endless victimization was the major reason for the move, and it was accomplished while I was at camp. Since I was completing the fifth grade, had we remained in New York City, I would have been bussed to my new middle school, and my parents were understandably concerned over how I might be treated. Although I was hopeful that, beginning afresh, I might at last be accepted, my optimism, I soon learned, would be unjustified.

I only attended my new suburban elementary school during the sixth grade, since, the following year, I would be transferring to one of the district's junior high schools. As my homework for Mr. Galluzzo's sixth-grade class, I penned a poem, morbid and melancholy, and I read it out loud. Even while other students giggled, Galluzzo appeared to genuinely like it. "Being able to write like that takes real talent," he asseverated. After some serious consideration, I rejected the notion that the poem was self-referent. However, more than I would care to admit way back then, its trenchant verses had encapsulated my abject wanness and estrangement.

A boy of youth was white with fear.

His death he thought was growing near.

In tears he sat right by the clock.

Awaiting till it came to stop.

His mouth was dry.

His feet lie still.

He listened, numb and clawed with chill.

He slowly rose, all crushed and sad.

That all the earth stood up and stared.

The angels sobbed, the devils gay.

A big dark cloud then cov'd the day.

But then more fright came to the lad.

The clock of death was going mad.

It turned at thrice the speed of time.

Then four, then five, then eight, then nine.

It then, yes, then, came to a stop.

But then the boy just smashed the clock.

And there it ended.

With a tock.

A year later, in the seventh grade, as I waited in the cafeteria line, I stood up to a boy my age, among my inveterate tormenters, and refused his demand to cut in front of me. After slamming me into a wall and breaking my sternum, he was suspended for no more than a week. I endlessly worried he would take revenge, but, for the most part, he avoided me. Some ten years afterwards, he saw me on a bus. As it turned out, we were both students at the same graduate school. He did not apologize, not that I had been counting on a mea culpa, but he was cordial and, in an indirect manner, may have sought to make amends.

In that same grade, a boy who, using the seating chart, sat right beside me in one class seemed to derive a sadistic gratification from repeatedly kicking me in the leg. Fearing retaliation, however, I complained to no one. This student was among the school's few evangelicals in a disproportionately Roman Catholic suburb with smaller Protestant and Jewish populations. Before class started one day, I asked him whether he thought Jesus approved of his behavior. He glanced down, appearing momentarily disheartened, but he responded with, "That's not what Christianity is about," and the persecutions resumed.

As a ninth grader, I began to stay home due to nervous stomach aches. (Tests for ulcers were negative.) The perpetual bullying had exacted its toll. I was physically and emotionally spent and consumed by anticipatory anxiety. At the time, I can recall, I simply wished to be left alone in my room. In retrospect, I believe that I was, quite possibly, experiencing the symptoms of a chronic post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Unfortunately, there were not, as best I can determine, any treatment programs for PTSD in the 1960s. The term, shell shock, was in use, but PTSD was not coined until the 1970s.

Due to my excessive absences, and encouraged by the school, my mother brought me to an orthomolecular psychiatric clinic which dispensed megavitamins. One of their psychiatrists, whom I vehemently refused to ever see again, described me, while in his office with my mother, as "obviously very sick." However, on the first day medication, I noticed that one of the capsules handed to me by my mother appeared to be an old friend, thorazine. Although she was impressed with my perceptiveness, I only accepted the neuroleptic represcription after a rather heated argument.

My enthusiasm for attending the clinic was nonexistent. On the surface, it impressed me as medical quackery, and I am now somewhat astounded that my mother was sufficiently persuaded of its merits. Sadly, as a junior high school student, I had none of the requisite learning and background to formalize a reasoned objection. However, in negotiating with my mother, she yielded to my precondition that my father be assessed there, too. Once more, I fully expected him to receive a diagnosis and was shocked and incensed he did not. In those days, Autistics without overt comorbidities, like my OCD, were simply quirky.

Some weeks or months later, my mother, owing to my displeasure, phoned my former child psychiatrist who, based on the literature, expressed a justifiable skepticism. Given my present-day access to an extensive online database, I believe that I have since read the article which gave him pause. In any event, since he saw no current need for any therapy, we simply discontinued with the treatments. Needless to say, the villain had become the unexpected hero. While this incident could never, in my mind, compensate for his having institutionalized me, my previous Manichean view of his quidditative evil had, nonetheless, softened. The surprise was also twofold in that my mother never presaged me on her plans to phone him.

Concurrent with the orthomolecular treatments, I was sent to a school for problem children. As the well-behaved victim, the change in venue made no sense to me, and, inevitably, the bullies multiplied. Most of them would today, I suspect, be diagnosed with ADHD or oppositional deviant disorder. Once, while being bussed, a boy rubbed nasal mucus on my pants. Later, after a month or so, on learning that I could now only test for a high school equivalency diploma, I vigorously protested and was, reluctantly, returned to my former school. The very first day, a former drama teacher dismissively inquired, "Why did you come back?" However, for reasons unknown, though perhaps age, the frequency of the bullyings precipitously diminished.

Auspiciously, any ill-treatment and duplicity has, during my succeeding years as a university student, and even well beyond, become even more sporadic though no less grievous. As a case in point, I altogether missed the cues when, in roughly 2004, one of my erstwhile best friends unexpectedly engaged in conduct, spinning a yarn about losing five friends due to my behavior and no longer desiring my attendance at his parties, which appeared premeditated to drive me away. Considering we had only recently initiated a project of recording podcasts together, his chastisements took me completely by surprise, and I initially found myself being apologetic. My ex-fiance, for her part, referred to me as "a poster child for nerds."

In September, 2008, I decided to phone a friend of mine of around 28 years. Although we presently live in different parts of the U.S., we continued to keep in touch. On this one occasion, however, after telling him about my Autism diagnosis from the previous year, he began to procedurally criticize me for a number of situations which occurred many years earlier. For instance, referring to a poor woman I dated in the early 1990s, he reprimanded me for not informing my psychiatrist about my attraction to "trash." When I expressed sympathy for his poor communication with his sister, he accused me of attempting to impose my value system upon him.

Predictably, I picked up on his modus operandi only while reflecting on his comments after the conversation. During out dialogue, I inappropriately responded logically to everything he said and, consequently, became frustrated with the irrationality of his comments. Given my failure to recognize that, ostensibly, his sole motive was to simply brush me off, it would appear as though my ability to read people, at least in this one respect, did not significantly improve from previous encounters of this type, and, moreover, that I seem to have considerable difficulty learning from past social experiences. Still, I wish that these individuals, instead of displaying such brazen cowardice, would have the moral backbone to express themselves more straightforwardly.

During the final phases of my Ph.D. work, in 1983, I audited a graduate practicum, in the Counselor Education Department, on group psychotherapies. When the professor, and my pro bono Gestalt and Rogerian therapist for a while, conducted an encounter group in his home, people attended from across the U.S. Given my sense of justice and fair play, I objected after, under the guise of "being real," one fellow excoriated a woman for being late, and I adamantly refused to participate in an exercise of designating the person we each most disliked. Foreseeably, virtually everyone, including the professor, chose me.

For years, I feared leaving the protective confines of my closet. Out, once and for all, I feel fortunate. Some Autistics, in addition to having difficulties with social relations and with such executive functions as planning, response inhibition (including temper), and decision-making, are confronted with considerable intellectual challenges. For them, an escape into the depths of reason and imagination may not come as effortlessly. While I struggled, in my youth, with exorbitant executive problems, I turned many of them, as an adult, to my benefit and advantage. Currently, I would contend that I make decisions, plan, and inhibit my affect with a commensurate ease, or hardship, to most folks I know.

Many Autistics remain unemployed, underemployed, or poor throughout their lives, but I have been greatly privileged to work in a profession which affords me considerable seclusion, flexibility, and tolerance of my eccentricities. Yet, I remain cognizant that functioning in most fields extrinsic to academia might be quite onerous. For all my problems in developing rapport with my students, issues with which I still struggle occasionally, I am deeply aware that, given my social challenges, I would, in the majority of other careers, have faired far worse. As a teen, most summer jobs were, to me, next to impossible. I either quit, performed poorly, or was, in one instance, terminated by a taxicab servicing company.

On November 21, 2008, I was, following a two-hour laboratory test conducted the previous day, diagnosed with diabetes. Since my father is also a diabetic, albeit one who was able to control it entirely through diet for most of his life, this condition would appear to be the second one I have inherited from him. I suppose that, technically speaking, the diabetes now places me into the hypernym, multiply disabled, which is defined as persons with two or more disabilities. Nonetheless, at least for me, the diabetes, when compared with the Autism, is a relatively light burden. Unlike my father, who frequently attempted to hide his candy from my mother, I have never been one to crave sweets.

As I survey the unfolding panorama of my lifetime, in protocols defined substantively through stagecraft, I call to mind the exigencies I have consistently faced, some of them profoundly agonizing, which, in their instantiations, have often appeared tragic, possibly irremediable, and, especially concerning my own rehabilitation, I had grown progressively despondent and hopeless. However, with the passage of time, I accrued colossal dividends from my trying circumstances, or, if not, I realized some other, perchance fortuitous, profit. Even setting aside all determinative speculations, I can hope, needless to say, that such a well-pleasing serendipity will be an abiding characteristic of my future.

Empathy and Compensations

In my youth, I had genuine antipathy toward the strong and heart-felt sentiments which exuded from anyone nearby me. Unable to respond adequately, even less to identify with the other person's feelings, I characteristically froze to within a few degrees kelvin and, locating my point of least resistance, became instantaneously distant and illogically rational. Whether my interlocutor's passion could be categorized as positive or negative was beside the point. I had no baseline to react in a way which most might regard as equal to the occasion and became overpowered. Yet, even as my own anger and happiness came quite facilely, I stringently restrained myself from crying, in public, at the emotions of others, even in the cinema.

These days, having participated with, and observed, the virtual Autistic community, I find that there is frequently a sense of understandable frustration over claims that Autistics lack empathy. Significant confusions have often arisen due to differences between how medical and social scientists delimit empathy in their researches and professional publications, on the one hand, and colloquial usages, on the other. To humbly set the record straight, as the term is ordinarily employed, using informal conversation, to denote the human virtue of caring for others, anyone, whether she is Autistic or otherwise, can be empathetic.

More technically, empathy is a myth or a cultural story. As folklore, empathy presents us with narratives through which social actors may, under specified conditions, engage with others. As a multidimensional construct, empathy, like any empirical variable, must be clearly circumscribed. Research metrics demand a consistency which is unfamiliar to the average person. In an attempt to shed some light this issue, I will, through my personal biography, present two distinct academic definitions of empathy. To begin, I will discuss cognitive empathy and take up the relevancies of methodological empathy afterwards.

Should I assert that a meager one percent of my book stacks consists of novels, I would be exaggerating. The majority of volumes, as artifacts of my rapturous preoccupations, examine religions, social sciences, languages, and, mountingly, the Autism spectrum. In the cognitive rendering of empathy, some persons might say that my nearly fictionless shelves signify a poor theory of mind, or capacity for intersubjective conceptualization, by Autistics. While my problems in this area had been sizeable throughout my childhood and teens, I am much improved now. I have, from my teaching, become a keen observer.

In applying theory of mind to my attitudes and feelings with respect to others, I tend to be concerned for anyone who has endured suffering, irrespective of my conversance with them, but seldomly have I worried about specific individuals. Therefore, as I am refining these terms in the present context, to care for people is sympathy. To care about them is cognitive empathy. I have cared for my parents as they became dependent, distressed, elderly, and ailing. In like manner, I care for, and only sometimes to a lesser degree, victims of natural and manufactured disasters. Yet, I am hardly ever, if at all, distraught about them.

Some contend that Autistics can rarely lie convincingly. This proposition relates to theory of mind in that, deficient in empathy, Autistics may be brutally honest. Indeed, as a youth, I was consumed by ideals of transparency and equity in others and myself, was forthright and tenacious in my intolerance for whatever I regarded as mendacious, nonsensical, or nebulous, and was hypersensitive to authority and correction but judgmental and critical myself. Among my patented slogans were, "It's not fair!," "Is that true?," and "But why?" In my teens, I often unknowingly offended, as a house guest, with my comparative evaluations on the quality of food.

While these days, as a ripened college professor, much of my black-and-white thinking has pleasantly hued gray, my bluntness, especially as a backlash to antecedent evaluations of injustice or impropriety, may manifest in a righteous, perhaps occasionally self-righteous, indignation. Consequently, if I feel slighted, particularly by someone of higher social status, if I believe that performance expectations attendant to a circumstance are unsuitable, or if I witness race baiting, I may, in my response, be quite outspoken. Yet, my sense of fairness and impartiality has resulted in elections to chair of numerous groups.

Moreover, I have regularly sported far leftist t-shirts here in the red state of Kansas. (If you would pardon this brief aside, I must admit, given the historical association of that primary color with communism, to finding the more recent, and presumedly coincidental, attribution of that particular shade to the Republican Party quite humorous.) Additionally, when I openly objected, at a college-sponsored retreat, to selecting an object from the surrounding environment and then listening to it, I was, unrepentant during a private meeting with the organizers, effectively barred from future events in the series. To be entirely pellucid on the matter, I had no objection to the activity per se. My protest concerned its propriety in a academic context.

On the other hand, I would, as a teenager, oftimes exaggerate my parents' success, not to be deceitful for its own sake, but, rather, in order to make my distraught life appear more stable and, hopefully, to elevate the minimal level of esteem in which I was held by my peers. While plagued with guilt at first by my subterfuge, I slowly became accustomed to fibbing and was fairly good at it. The stories were believable, not fantastic, and, so far as I know, most people did believe me. Although such contrivances by Autistics are apparently not all that uncommon, with my higher education, the motivation for prevaricating was eliminated.

An alleged deficit in cognitive empathy, in theory of mind, may be the overarching factor which predisposes many Autistics to logic and to a detached problem-solving. It is not by accident that Autism has many times been compared with the mentalities of various Star Trek series characters, such as Mr. Spock, the original Vulcan, or Data, the android, prior to his emotion chip, or Seven of Nine, the Borg, before surgery made possible a romantic affair with Chakotay. These days, when an identification with feelings is warranted, I will, rather than succumbing to my desire to analyze, practice my well-honed expertise at listening.

By the same token, in teaching my Social Problems classes, the only handout I distribute, a booklet which I wrote in the early 1990s, is The Sociological Thinking Map which is, substantially, a road map to logical and critical thinking. The first section navigates students through evidentiary issues. It also includes a paragraph on the sociological imagination, characterized by the late Columbia University sociologist, C. Wright Mills (1916-1962), as the recontextualization of private problems into larger social issues. The second section is a guide to some of the more common logical fallacies, or errors, in evaluating evidence. Admittedly, I have sometimes prided myself in possessing the ability to refute an argument, even concerning an unfamiliar topic, simply by pointing out its logical fallacies.

Expressively, I have had a proclivity for neologism, and my theorizings have afforded me reliable media to communicate this predilection including, frequently, during the long-winded verbal expositions of my youth. Besides neurelitism, I have coined, alethionomy (science of reality), pneumaticonomy (spiritual science), physiconomy (material science), and, though I subsequently discovered that others (including an old, now departed, friend) have employed it, soulology (soul talk or study of the soul), as well. Some researchers have claimed that neologistic usages by Autistics are symptomatic of possessing a poor theory of mind. To me, however, they have been a means of drawing attention to the ingenuity of my ideas.

Furthermore, I have discovered, in the wake of my education and in my decades spent as a professional sociologist, that, though my empathy is not of the superbly high calibre of many individuals off the Autism spectrum I have known, it has appreciably improved over the years. As I have pondered over this situation, I began to broadly distinguish between empathy, as a psychological and psychiatric construct, and empathy, as it has been developed and understood, over the last century, within my own field of sociology. These constructions of empathy, while not exactly antonymous, could not be regarded as synonymous either.

Growing up as a child, I had virtually no empathy for, or understanding of, the feelings of others. That I lived in my own world was partially a choice but mostly a product of lacking many of the most basic competencies to relate to others. Over the years, my adaptations to normative, so-called neurotypical, behaviors, while certainly far from being complete, have accelerated considerably. These have enabled me to be a full-time college professor since 1985, the head of a social sciences division in the 1980s, and a past president of the Kansas Sociological Society.

Since my diagnosis, I have met other Autistic adults my age, from across the spectrum, who have not experienced similar educational and occupations successes to my own. Some have been on disability throughout their adult lives. Others have worked only sporadically. Still others have had bouts of homelessness. An Autistic woman I met online once remarked to me that, although many Autistics she has known have become economically successful, none, or virtually none, had the severity of problems I did as a child. Consequently, I have reflected on the reasons for my accomplishments.

I suspect that, whatever empathy I may now possess has been developed from two distinct sources: my religion and my education as a sociologist. It is difficult to say which of these two has been the greater influence. Their influences on me have been quite distinct. However, if I were compelled to choose between them, my first inclination would be to select the religion I joined. While I did not begin my graduate studies in sociology until I was 22 years old, I embraced my religious faith at the age of 14. By the time I was a graduate student, even an undergraduate student, I had already experienced considerable improvements in this area.

Through my religious involvement, I developed a genuine concern and love for others. It was in that context and in the cultivation of intense interpersonal sentiments, that I first developed empathy. This process has steadily increased up until the present day. My opening up to others and their lifeworlds has been a product of my prayers and devotional meditations. Through my religion, I served others even when I did not wish to do so. Gradually, an awareness, like an inner light rising, developed within me. God met me where I was, as an autistic person. From that place, He then gently drew me to Himself.

Proceeding to the more mundane, in the sociological glossary, the German verb Verstehen (to understand) has, substantially due to the influence of the German sociologists Max Weber and Georg Simmel, acquired a connotation of methodological empathy. Verstehen does not depend, for its successful implementation, on a putatively neuronal operation, nor does it rely upon the emotional discernment of theory of mind. Limpidly, it is not a hard-wired neurological trait. Verstehen is, rather, the bracketing of one's own values and beliefs and the subsequent examination of another culture, or of persons and artifacts of that culture, within that culture's particular and lived-in contexts. Verstehen is, approximately, cultural relativism.

As a cultivated methodological praxis, Verstehen can, much like numerous other dimensions of social scientific research strategy and design, be taught, learned, and eventually implemented. Whereas cognitive empathy requires a susceptibility to tone of voice, posture, kinesics (body language), and proxemics (spatial distance), Verstehen principally demands a willingness to abandon ethnocentrism and to deferentially approach another culture through its own social constructions and histories. Practically anybody can practice Verstehen. Theory of mind presents no critical impasse.

Previously, my worldviews, such as Neoplatonism, were my windows to the universe. Perspectives other than my own were to be deprecated and dismissed, assuredly not to be examined and penetrated. Even in journalism school, while I was an undergraduate, a sequence of think pieces I wrote prompted one of my professors to insist that I produce a standard news article. My boredom with regular reporting, and my unrealistic intention to become a columnist, is what at first induced me to pursue graduate studies in sociology. My minor for the Bachelor of Arts in Journalism had been sociology and English anyway.

It was, as a graduate student, that I encountered Verstehen. Sociology taught me about Verstehen, and, in addition to my religion and faith community, it was through Verstehen that I have approached cognitive empathy. As strongly as I resisted, I could no longer be engrossed only in my own ideations. Although I wished to write my Ph.D. dissertation on my own religion, as I did for my M.A. thesis, I was talked out of it, as potential employers might question my objectivity. So, in place of my religion, I chose pentecostalism. By immersing myself in the lives of pentecostals, in my methodological empathy, I had further compensated for a lack of cognitive empathy.

Besides Verstehen, my intellectual conversion, to borrow Bernard Lonergan's term, from essentialism to social constructionism has been instrumental in my compensations. As, initially, a Neoplatonist and, subsequently, a critical realist, I espoused the existence of universal essences, or ideal forms, and, therefore, doubted the cogency of independent human will and agency. Presently, however, as a social constructionist, I consider transpersonal essences and absolute, axiomatic truth claims to be no more than nominal categories, susceptible to deconstruction, even while I scrutinize these relative thought or social systems with my intentionally acquired empathy.

Analyzing the diverse morphologies of empathy vis-a-vis the Autism spectrum might yield, even on its own, some demonstrable benefit. From my informal observations of Autistspace, my term for the zone of cyberspace dominated by Autists, sociology is not among the more widespread occupational or avocational choices by and other Autists. Academic majors in the hard sciences, computer programming, mathematics, and psychology surface with considerably greater regularity. Yet, if Verstehen, which was rooted in the epistemology of a rationalist liberalism, and social constructionism were salutary, indeed invaluable, for my own affective development, then perhaps other Autists, especially those at ease with logic, would find them to be similarly serviceable.

Finally, with regard to my empathy, intrinsic to my personal life philosophy has been the view that harmony, both in terms of an individual's ego integrity and modes of social interaction, can be facilitated through the progressive attainment of an integral balance between the cognitive and affective aspects of one's lived-in experiences. This conscious enterprise together with my deeply held sentiments of loving-kingness toward others, and their deliberate cultivation into acts of altruistic benevolence, have assisted both my intrapsychic development and my accommodations to a neurotypical society.

The Ideology of Neurelitism

Behavioral intolerance, like those based on race and other differences, should be openly and unambiguously censured. All quiescence is acquiescence. So, in my own story, the ignorance of the numerous, often nameless, individuals concerning both my Autism and my OCD is not only a feeble excuse for my years of mistreatment. It is irrelevant. Indeed, I myself had a clouded and distorted view of the plethora of issues I faced. An ubiquitous haze enveloped me until I was 51 years old. Clarity was then introduced only through the diagnosis. It was as if a fog light had been switched on. The brume abruptly dissipated.

Through my musings on the nearly ceaseless terrorism of my childhood, I had gradually constructed a conceptual model of institutionalized and internalized oppression, but I was powerless to entitle, much less to explain or even describe, it. Given the dismissal of my original diagnosis, neither my afflictions, nor the ordeals they so consistently produced, could be usefully contextualized. In short, without a label, I was impeded from achieving either personal insight or the shared wisdom of a community of peers. Toward these twin objectives, the diagnosis and fellowship with other Autistics have been a noetic revelation.

Defined globally, ableism (British, disablism) might be encapsulated by reference to a social structure, a system or set of conventional rules, which justifies or enables actions detrimental to the differently abled. Notwithstanding that oppression has been an academic interest of mine for many years, notably within my Social Problems classes, I have only recently initiated a reflexive sociology of my own life history as a text for ableism. While typifications, such as Kanner's Autism and Autism, are merely linguistic conveniences, and devoid of essence, they can often function as helpful tools for private cogitation and personal development.

I considered several possible designations for neurological ableism. Among them, neuronism, neurologism, neurism, neuroism, and neuralism have, heretofore, each been employed to delineate particular subject matter. Of two other candidates, neurologicism impressed me forthrightly as entirely too cumbersome, whereas neuronormativity squarely embodied the phonetics of a tongue-twister. Another contender, neuricism, read more like a neurological disease or malformation. Since neuroelitism, with neuro- preceding a vowel, is bad English form, I ultimately, in October of 2007, settled on the appellation, neurelitism.

Recalling the writings of C. Wright Mills (1916-1962), a sociologist, on the U.S. power elite, incorporating the presidency, the Defense Department, and the corporatocracy, we may likewise observe a neurological power elitism, or neurelitism, in which a discourse of normality is constructed through the knowledge and power of the neurological majority. An illustrative comparison might well be situated in the ableist species of audism with the sanctioning of the disentitlement of the Deaf and hearing impaired. While oppressions will remain uniquely indexical, they can be associated in a grand web of joint resistance.

The mainline Autistic self-advocacy movement has, in its promotion of neurodiversity, many correlative concerns with the identity political wings of certain other movements. As Autistic self-advocates reject the pro-cure agenda of numerous, largely parent-run, organizations, so the intersex rights movement resists attempts to force a dualistic prototype of sex on their bodies, the LGBT rights movement has, consonant with mainstream psychiatry, dismissed the view that homosexuality is a disorder to be cured, and the Deaf rights movement has rejected the proposition that cochlear implants and lip reading are superior to medical nonintervention and signing. Thus, each opposes, not only the territoriality of exclusion, but the narrative of being cured.

However, the essentialist foundationalism of identity politics has been widely criticized by an array of academics and pundits from both Right and Left. Some on the Right consider identity politics to privilege parochial interest groups over the nation weal. On the Left, the concept has at times been regarded as a category of false consciousness, namely, a dilution of efforts to dismantle the neoliberal hegemonies of global elites for the achievement of perceived short-term gains.

One solution to this dilemma, from a somewhat progressive perspective, has been proposed by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. In her recognition of the fictive character of identities, she at one time discussed a strategic essentialism in which organizations representing oppressed peoples would, for the attainment of certain pragmatic objectives, present themselves as a united front. In other words, they would address the public as if they were an ontologically distinct unit. Yet, to me, Spivak's utilitarian approach bordered on Machiavellianism or realpolitik.

I agree that identity politics, as generally nuanced, is largely unsatisfactory. However, by rejecting essentialism, identity politics can morph into a post-identity politics. Indeed, the online Autistic community has been bound together by self-identification, not by diagnosis. Participating in this community entails a presentation of self, not of one's medical records. Personally, I have many identities, many selves, and Autistic is but one of them. Moreover, some members of the community even consider diagnosis to represent a surrendering of one's own determinative power to the therapeutic establishment and have, on that basis, refused to obtain one.

Neurelitism, as with other oppressive constructs, is chiefly a collective, not an individual, phenomenon. In truth, neurelitism cannot only be objectified in the institutions of society, such as family and government. It can also be subjectified, internalized, or reverberated, in the consciousnesses of the oppressed, whether as self-hatred, a lashing out at others, shame, disaffection, and underachievement, or, in the affirmative sense evinced in my own odysseys, by an awareness of neurelitist tactics in struggles for liberation and, with an often coerced turning inward, an ardent soul-searching and appreciable accomplishment.

An everyday modus operandi by which neurelitism, and similarly oppressive ideologies, function is by means of marginalizing, or othering, specific demographic categories as outgroups. If persons occupying the higher statuses within particular social structures – such as NTs in neurodiversity, males in gender, and European Americans in race – turn a blind eye to those perceived, for whatever reason, as different from the norm, then, in the contexts of power, privilege, and prestige, the different become the other, their voices collectively silenced, and their very presence among us finally dismissed or ignored.

Doctor Foster
Went to Gloucester
In a shower of rain.
He stepped in a puddle
Right up to his middle
And never went there again!
~ Poet unknown
England, xiii c.

This nursery rhyme was purportedly written in
reference to King Edward I (b.1239 AD d.1307),
"Doctor Foster," after he tumbled from his horse
into a muddy puddle. Angered and embarrassed by
the incident, he refused to pay any further
visits to Gloucester. In a bygone era, the story
became a warning to children that the puddles
found on roads might be deeper than they appeared.

I knew that I wanted to be "Dr. Foster" from the first time I heard the poem as a young child in New York's borough of Queens. Fortunately, receiving a Ph.D. in sociology has afforded me the opportunity to be both a scholar-practitioner, a person who not only examines oppression academically but is actively engaged in combatting it, and a public intellectual and public sociologist, one who endeavors to communicate academic constructions of knowledge to certain publics. My higher education has provided me with a voice, and an idiom, through which to express my own experiences with oppression. Thus, in teaching my Social Problems classes each semester, I periodically, when relevant to course material, raise issues from my own life and personal experiences. From the first day of classes, all of my on-campus students know that I am an Autistic.

The fact is that I and myriads of other Autistics, whether diagnosed or self-defined, have, as a consequence of our neurodiversities, been subjected to traumatic and sustained abuse. Healing the scars is heavy labor. This oppression of a neurological minority, as revealed in the stories we tell each other, conveys an ideology of neurelitism. Like homophobia and psychiatric normalism, two additional performance-focused social constructions, neurelitism cannot be explained away as mere individual harassment. Moreover, in identifying that which is good with the neurologically normative, neurelitism may be especially troubling to those Autistics, like myself, with strong senses of social justice.

Deplorably, in the frame of popular psychological reductionism, fashionably promoted on daytime television talk shows, no one can be truly victimized. Being a victim is purely a mindset, and apparitions in air castles do not bite. This subjective idealist epistemology comes perilously close to blaming the victim for her own victimization. It also conflates two independent issues. Victimizations should be conceived as objectively measurable phenomena. However, while clinging to anger might hurt no one but the victim, whether to forgive can only be an individual decision. Speaking personally, I have tried to forgive.

During my years of maturation, neurelitism was, for me, the hidden curriculum. I was bereft of any data on the sociological construction of ableism, a neologism coined subsequently in the 1980s, but I learned it nonetheless. Neurelitism, and its impact upon my Autism, has been my experience. It was, is, a part of me. When I am asked concerning what has been, or so I am told, the unusual extent of my personal adaptations into a mainstream society, and my compensations, my response is inescapably generational. I adapted without knowing I adapted. I compensated out of necessity. The subject was, back then, never deliberated.

Initially, observers often notice the first-personhood of the Autism community. Many of us will say, "I am an Autistic," and not, "I have Autism." Any descriptor is limited, but why object when the topic is Autism and not one's job, religion, or gender? I recall, as a child, proudly identifying myself as a numismatist and explaining it to anyone who inquired. In adopting the first person, I am eschewing the marginalization or compartmentalization of my Autism and attesting to its integral character. Yet, calling myself an Autistic does not prevent me, in other contexts, from referring to myself as a sociologist or a ventriloquist.

So, to the query, "Am I defined by my Autism?," I might coyly respond, "Am I defined by my Ph.D., by my I.Q., or by my Jewish ancestry?" Each of us is a mosaic. Autism is a guidepost to where certain of its tiles may, in some of us, be pinpointed. Considering that, due to my profession, I have been compelled to minimize my Autistic traits, much of what is recorded in this chronicle, I had long forgotten. By a, veraciously, self-centered reminiscence on this one back corner of my mosaic, memories, some painful, recurred to me in the composition. Writing has, for me, always been a meditation and self-disclosure.

Encountering Autistic Culture

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master -- that's all."

- Lewis Carroll (1832-1892), Through the Looking Glass

My preference for capitalizing Autism and related words has likely stood out. However, just as one is a Gambian, one is, in the first person, an Autist or Autistic. One does not have Gambia or Autism. This approach to capitalization, which is already being practiced by some Autists, has long been in use within the Deaf community. As explained on the Alternative Solutions Center blog:

Far from viewing “Deaf” as a way of excluding people, we see the term as an inclusive one. To us, “Deaf” refers to any people who happen to be Deaf. It has nothing to do with having Deaf or hearing parents, or using ASL, SEE, spoken English, cued speech, or any other communication modality. Neither does it matter if one was mainstreamed, educated at a Deaf school, or homeschooled. Degree of hearing loss, being Deaf from birth or being late-Deafened, using a hearing aid or a cochlear implant - none of these, in our minds, precludes anyone from being Deaf.

Capitalizing Deaf parallels capitalizing African American, Jewish, Hispanic, and so on, with each of these capitalized designations referring to a group of people with their own culture and physical characteristics (i.e., skin color, bloodline, hearing status). All of these terms are inclusive. Some Jewish people may be observant Orthodox Jews, centering their lives around their religion, while others may simply identify as Jewish through their family lineage and never set foot in a temple. Some Jewish people speak Hebrew, while others don’t.

Similarly, capitalizing Autism and its forms emphasizes the culture of Autistics. While the Autistic community is certainly heterogeneous, or diverse, in its viewpoints on a host of issues, few cultures, even those which have functioned under extraordinarily rigid, authoritarian, or totalitarian political systems, have ever achieved a true consensus or unanimity. For this reason, a culture may better be appreciated, not as a system of uniform or mechanical behaviors, but as a way of life or as a symbolic toolkit for resolving problems and addressing existential challenges.

Furthermore, in accordance with the person-first movement, I am an individual with Autism. However, in the autism-first movement, I am an Autistic person or an Autist. Consequently, in person-first language, my Autism is a medical condition, an undesirable, and hence de-emphasized, appendage to my personhood. In Autism-first language, my Autism is among my different selves, one of the many subjective conditions, or lifeworlds, in which I think, feel, and operate. Hence, I, and not the medical and psychotherapeutic establishments, has the authority, or legitimate power, to define myself and, to the degree I have chosen, to present that self to others.

Human cultures do not arise without precedent. Their development, whether systematic or haphazard, occurs within historical frameworks of interaction and adaptation. Social groupings are, as sociologist Anthony Giddens has observed, ongoing accomplishments. That is to say, as willful agents, we need not be passive objects of grand cultural processes. Instead, we can, individually or collectively, express our voices concerning the maintenance, modification, or deconstruction of contemporary cultures. We can also become actively engaged in building new and emancipatory ones grounded on human rights.

A culture, in its nonmaterial aspects, incorporates a population's language, values, and norms. With respect to the first of these, language, cultures and subcultures are defined, in part, by a characteristic semantics or lexicon. A stranger on an Autistic discussion forum might have difficulty following most conversations. Moreover, opposition to curing Autism is, perhaps, the most ubiquitous value of the self-advocacy Autistic community. In establishing territoriality and appropriate social norms or rules of conduct, this value serves to differentiate self-advocates from many largely parent-dominated groups.

Cultures and subcultures move through stages. Given that Autistic online culture remains in its early phases of development, it would be patently unfair to compare its nascence with online culture as a whole. Similarly, it would be unjust to compare online culture with the cultures of Western industrialized countries. In other words, culture is not an object which a population "either has or does not have." It is, as a lifeworld, defined by its process – the lived-in experiences of a community. Perhaps, in my own case, that subculture is, considering my neo-Marxist preferences, closer to Theodore Roszak's construct of a counterculture.

Personally, when I first connected with other Autistics online, I had to learn the significances of various terms: neurotypical (NT), aspie, curebie, nonspeaking autistics (and not "nonverbal"), and so forth. I also had to study the values (and value debates) and norms in the online Autistic community. I have been involved with computers for many years and ran a dialup bulletin board service (or BBS) on a dedicated line in pre-Internet days. Even though I watched virtual culture, in general, develop, becoming a part of online Autistic culture required me to discover a new vocabulary, value system, and normative framework.

Howard Gardner (1943-present) has authored his continuing series of volumes on multiple intelligences. Although apparently developed separately, an ostensibly similar concept, neurodiversity, expresses an appreciation, on the part of many Autistics and others, for a model of multiple neurologies. While neurodiversity, as a segment of the earth's greater biodiversity, presents us with various human predispositions, the representation of typicality and disorder is human categorizing.

Take the oppressive and subjugating medical model of disability which labels, even tacitly promotes, disempowerment, aiming at defining who is normal and repairing all the rest. The emancipatory social model of disability, however, values collective empowerment and enfranchisement over compulsory cures. An Autistic may seek out palliatives, medically or otherwise, without necessarily wishing for her neurology, which contributes cardinally to her personalty and individuality, to be deformed to the psychiatric touchstone of normalcy.

Consider that all of us, Autistic or not, are in need of continuous assistance. We depend on the electric company to power our appliances or on the bank not to foreclose on our mortgages. Complete self-reliance, in health care included, is a veritable pipe dream. On the scale of dependence to independence, each of our lives is a matter of degree. Hence, the problem is not medicine, per se, but medicine as social engineering and eugenics. Rather than building more inclusive human communities, the ideal of the medical model, with its neurelitist emphasis on fixing the Autistic, is fitting her into a respectable society.

From the social model, I deduce a semantics of disability and typicality. Challenged, as a construction of disability, is acceptable but insufficient in scope. My Autism challenged me as a poorly adapted youngster to become, through my plentiful compensations, a generally well-adapted adult. I now rarely feel so challenged. However, I frequently observe a dialectic juxtaposing persons who are, given their tropes or empirical attributes, differently abled and typically abled and a power dialectic, framed around interactive syntaxes, between the differently enabled and typically enabled. The second dialectic becomes a substructure to the first.

Additionally, by opposing the ideal types of neurodiversity and disability, a third dialectic can be delineated. In this light, the portmanteau neurodiversity, as a largely descriptive construct, may be empirically formalized, neuroscientifically and sociologically, into useful categories and dimensions; while disability, as a relational construct, would be observed in conjunction with human agents of neurelitism and disenablement. Comparatively, an individual might, from an intrinsically descriptive standpoint, be depicted as an Autistic but, from a relational and an instrumental perspective, not be substantially disenabled by it.

In a neurelitist structure, the differently abled and enabled would denote those on the Autism spectrum and with other developmental differences, like dyscalculia, whereas the typically abled and enabled would consist of everyday persons who are largely accommodated by present rules. Thus, in my own case, I am differently abled in that my strengths, such as my sociability, diverge from many typically abled persons. I had, more crucially, differentlial enablement, since, relative to the typically enabled, I once required distinct, and distinctly lacking, support systems. What I did get was generally oppressive.

Outside of disenablement as an externalization of disablement, articulations of disability can be hypostatization. That is to say, in the uncomplicated act of materially personifying and implanting disability inside a statistical category, its propagators might duly become, even without precalculation, the creators of a disabled other. The category, once spoken into existence, and outlined, by experts, can be transformed into a marginalized group of disabled persons. Yet, in coding for Autism, the authors of the DSM-4 and ICD-10 could never have predicted that they would be the progenitors of an emergent Internet phenomenon.

Moreover, the Autism spectrum may itself be differentially constructed under these models of disability. Within the medical model, a diagnosis is one's passport to variegated treatments and, sometimes, an eligibility for government benefits. Self-diagnosis, while incompatible with the medical model, can, from a social perspective, provide one with a previously unattainable sense of identity and belonging, such that an official diagnosis may even be irrelevant. Viably, however, strict distinctions may be impossible. Some Autistics, like myself, not only subscribe to the social model but are formally diagnosed.

Subjectively, while my countless perpetrators outwardly buttressed my seclusion, they unwittingly, though propitiously in the long run, granted me time to explore comparative religions and theories concerning abnormal psychology, hypnosis, and Wilhelm Stekel's Interpretation of Dreams. These preoccupations, wedded to my punctilious and scholastic manner, opened a wide avenue to compliments and attention. Once in my new religion, negative, disabling social reinforcements gradually gave way to positive, enabling ones, which may partially explicate my grownup successes. Perhaps comparable enablements reveal why many Autistics pursue pivotally cerebral occupations.

Some Autistics object to the term, disorder, and its often euphemistic, but virtual medical synonym, syndrome, in the descriptors, disorder, syndrome, and Autism spectrum disorders. Given my personal narrative, my sociobiography, and the incalculable miseries I underwent, I share their concerns, feel a sense of commonality and camaraderie emerging out of certain discussions, and often identify with, sometimes even mirror, their experiences. Considering that victimization is all-around unremarkable to a legion of us, these labels pile innumerable insults upon untold preexisting injuries.

To be honest, as someone once diagnosed with childhood schizophrenia, in a generation when that characterization may have rivaled the current ADHD pandemic, I would have been highly relieved by essentially any other unmalicious label. Although I favor as much self-determination as possible on issues of psychiatric, occupational therapeutic, and other treatments, I am also, as an academic, interested in hearing the perspectives which contrasting voices, including from social constructions as seemingly incommensurable as the "pro-cure" and "anti-cure" movements, may contribute to a practicable dialogue.

Furthermore, several writers have proposed a more wide-ranging Autism spectrum. By augmenting the metacategory, symptom complexes displaying similar problematics in executive functioning and other areas can be consolidated. In addition to Autism, Kanner's Autism, and pervasive developmental disorder – not otherwise specified (PDD-NOS), an expanded rubric might incorporate such hyponyms as ADHD and some type A personality disorders, such as schizoid and schizotypal, while adjoining such non-DSM entities as semantic pragmatic disorder, sensory processing disorder, and, unless judged to be isomorphic with Autism, nonverbal learning disorder (NLD). Patently, labels can and do oftentimes matter, expressly to the child or young teen first being diagnosed. They can also be important for influencing, through a public sociology, how average citizens and social policy makers will relate to individuals on the spectrum.

The question of distinguishing between NLD, originated by neuropsychologists without reference to the Autism spectrum, and the more universally utilized Autism diagnosis remains controversial, and it may also be a case of splitting hairs. Given that even NLD experts disagree on the utility of distinguishing it from Autism, the chances of its inclusion in the DSM-V, other than as an Autistic dimension, would seem remote. Personally, if I were to quibble, I am more generally more proximate to Autism than to NLD. Although special interests, which have animated my life, are not in most NLD formulations, nonverbal challenges are assocated with both. Indeed, when someone directs me to MapQuest, or a similar site, I relinquish the map and select the written directions.

I read occasionally that Autistics are brain damaged. Aside from being value-laden, highly offensive to some, and presumptive of injury, "brain damage" sets up an unnecessary dualism. Damaged brains imply undamaged ones. Dualisms are frequently employed to institute political dominance and self-serving standards of evaluation. Predicated on whose criteria are Autistics, and not those with other neurologies, brain damaged? Neurodiversity, on the other hand, does not presuppose a foreordained set of neurological categories. Both terms are social constructions, but neurodiversity is value-neutral and socially inclusive.

With regard to the Autism spectrum, which can be extended to other neurological or psychological conditions, all views of normalcy are interpretations of observations. The appellative, norm, can itself designate: a statistical norm (a mean, median, or mode), a social norm (a rule of conduct), and, of concern here, a textbook norm. Persons who satisfy this norm for a DSM construct are labelled abnormal. Subsequently, the selfsame specialists who vetted the norm are privileged to treat those who match its criteria. This circularism demonstrates the salience of language games, or phrase regimens, in the social institutionalization of power.

Within the Autistic community, ostensibly in an effort to devise a genteelism for normal, the term neurotypical, often abbreviated as NT, has been widely employed. To a much more restricted extent, neurotypicalism has been utilized by others and, though fleetingly, by myself for what I am presently calling neurelitism. Neurotypical and its derivatives, even if improvements over normal, are not without their drawbacks. Principally, I find neurotypical, when used to exclusively identify persons not on the Autism spectrum, to be both erroneous, defaulting to all exceptional neurologies but Autism, and marginalizing, while neurotypicalism is, accordingly, not only unseemly but stereotypic.

On the other hand, perhaps most readers would concur that neurotypical is preferable to normal, a word which evokes its unsavory antonym, abnormal. Moreover, considering that we know so little about the possible neurological etiologies of conditions mentioned in the DSM-IV-TR, both neurotypical and normal inevitably become substantially informal, nontechnical designations. Although, for a brief period, I elected not use the word, neurotypical, after giving the matter more thought, I have once again adopted it, but only as the opposite of neurodivergent, referring to all classes of unusual neurologies itemized by qualified psychiatrists and psychologists, including Autism. (I actually prefer neuratypical to neurodivergent, but the latter is already established.)

Through my vision for a liberation narrative theology, promoting equitable redistributions of power has been a core religious praxis. In so doing, I dismiss those decontextualized hermeneutic methods which disfigure certain scriptures into a contrived conformity with Enlightenment constructions of science and history. Instead, the questions I have often raised concentrate on religious narratives as mythopoeia and, when appropriate, as tales and prophecies of social justice and emancipation. For Autistics, as for other oppressed peoples, ruminating on stories of struggle in our own faith traditions may be inspirational.

The liberty of self-definition must be accorded to each individual. As a boy, I would gladly have kissed the person's hand who offered to provide me with some hypothetical cure. Now, I would, politely, send her on her way. The issues, however, become substantially more complex when discussing the treatment of children or, from a futurist standpoint, prenatal genetic engineering. Here, I believe that medical ethics should, with due regard to situational variance, be both flexibly and inclusively formulated in close consultation between all interested parties, whether Autistics, parents, health professionals, or others.

Launching attacks on the pro-cure movement and its proponents is as counterproductive as it is unjust. I, for one, do not wish to see anyone deprived of medical options. Among the few parents of Autistic children I have come across, most impressed me, like my own parents who wanted me cured, as altruistic in their dispositions. A far more positive, and perhaps singularly efficacious, method for minimizing an interest in cures is to actively promote inclusiveness and neurodiversity. All Autistics must, without regard to levels of functioning, be appreciated and encouraged within the full range of societal institutions.

Whether the Autisms present some people with perspicuous advantages is substantially contingent on social indexicality. As an analogy, placed into American special education, some dyslexics might discover that, due to personalized tutoring, they eventually wind up as better-than-average readers, even if, in a signally divergent context, their dyslexia amasses no discernible benefits. Everyone has their strengths and weaknesses, but, for Autistics, these can, relative to the general population, become exaggerated. The Autistic savant may excell in particular areas but be incapable of discharging certain daily tasks.

Differences are not inherently disorders, and whether to embrace or to discard the social constructions of reality by the mental health establishment, including its scholars and practitioners, is a fundamentally personal decision. While the multiple relations between neurology and environment, or nature and nurture, may ultimately take time to map, the basic proposition of our neurodiversity is not in dispute. If a medical category contributes to a framework of personal discovery, all well and good. However, labels should emerge out of dialogue, not neurelitist imposition, and, even then, they can be deconstructed.

In this connection, is a sociology of the Autism spectrum plausible? At first blush, it might appear to be an oxymoron, analogous to proposing a botany of antelopes or a mineralogy of squid. Yet, two Autistics, Temple Grandin and Sean Barron, have already tackled similar subject matter in their book, Unwritten Rules of Social Relationships. Such a sociology, besides examining issues of neurelitism and the social model of disability, would present social constructions of reality from the standpoints of those, like myself, for whom any successes follow considerable perseverence and, often, outright imitation.

Indeed, the Autistic community and its knowledges are, like all communities and knowledge frameworks, socially constructed realities. In this regard, I would like to explicitly distinguish between the presence of particular Autistic traits, on the one hand, and the Autism spectrum with its posited categories, such as classical and Autism, on the other. Communities, including virtual ones, are principally the products of shared identity and group negotation. The presence of common biological, genetic, or neurological traits is of secondary importance.

Paradoxically, even as a number of Autistic traits increasingly appear to be grounded in sound neuroscientific research and its peer-reviewed literature, there remains an assortment of Autism spectrums, or constructions of Autistic types, among various groups of researchers, clinicians, Autistics, parents, and others. Similarly, while one may discuss the biological evolution of racial traits, or geographically based biological distinctions, the so-called races, in their multiple global versions, are now acknowledged by researchers to be social constructions – and highly selective ones at that.

Many Autistics refer to themselves either as aspies or, less commonly, as Aspergians. Although, in principle, I have no strong objections to either of these terms, neither have I been enthusiastically taken with them. Aspie, while generally used in a friendly and conversational manner, is, like autie (for Autistic), a bit too cutesy to suit my tastes. Nonetheless, with a bit of reservation, I eventually fell into the pattern of employing the expression myself on message boards, chat rooms, and email lists.

Subsequently, however, I abruptly stopped utilizing it, partially as protest but also because I genuinely like thinking of myself as an Autistic, after witnessing a number of posters on web message boards insist that they were aspies, not Autistics. I even met one Autistic woman who told me that, even though she is not an Autistic, she nonetheless introduces herself as an aspie. I recognize not everyone uses the word hierarchically, or perhaps to escape supposed disgrace, but I wanted to be unambiguous in my rejection of vocabularies and syntaxes of exclusion. As to Aspergian, I am admittedly not drawn to the mythos, or thought experiment, of a forgotten civilization of Aspergia, which is, at least to me, implied by that word.

These days, I will refer to myself, conversationally, as an Autistic or, in those instances where more precision may be required, either as an Autistic or, informally, as an aspie Autistic. I know of other Autistics, particularly other Autistic activists, who follow a similar convention. I also know a woman, diagnosed with classical Autism, who nonetheless introduces herself as an aspie to escape a perceived stigma. Yet, I consider it preferable to embrace a word than to run from it. There has been a history of oppressed peoples taking ownership over designations which had been historically associated with socially stigmatized statuses. On its most basic level, owning a word deprives the bigot of a portion of her power to hurt the targeted individual.

For instance, Quaker was at first a term of derision for members of the Religious Society of Friends, while Shaker was a taunting appellation for members of the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing. Even the initial use of the word, Christian, was, in the ancient Roman Empire, gibelike. In recent years, the pejorative fat has been embraced by the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance. Some lesbians now openly speak of themselves as being dykes, and many Lesbians and Gay men routinely refer to themselves as queer. (There is even a queer theory in the humanities and social sciences.)

One may argue for a substantive, or at least mitigatory, value in calling oneself an Autistic when others have tried to flee from the Autistic label. As I have grown ever more self-conscious in the biographical social alienation of my Autistic self, ownership has, to me, become a statement, an affirmation, of Autistic pride, a sentiment I would, nonetheless, immediately distinguish from a platitudinous arrogance or banal superiority. As I am proud to be an Autistic, I am, within the compasses of my other selves, proud of being a sociologist, a journalist, a ventriloquist, and so forth.

Moreover, if there is to be a reconstruction of our knowledge, absent the omnipresent specter of oppression, it will surely not entail, as some youthful Autistics have conjectured, a separatist, escapist, and, indeed, neofascist social polity with Autism dominance; a Social Darwinist, internalized neurelitist dogma of evolutionary supremacy; or a cartoonish existence with mental superpowers over bullies. However, even in my unreserved forsaking of these triumphalist notions, and their reifying and demonizing of the neurotypical construct, I am not unsympathetic. Many teens have identity and self-esteem issues which, as Autistics, may be compounded by rejection. In my own teens, I, too, would likely have acceded to them.

Oppression, and its internalization, can, and often does, induce an understandable anger or even wrath. Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam and Dwight York's Nuwaubian movement, with their denials of caucasian souls, mirror some White racist teachings which dismissed Black Africans as the cursed and soulless progeny of Ham. Similarly, the male-bashing of the 1970s and 1980s, driven by the women's liberation movement and its consciousness raising, frequently attributed to men the same undesirable characteristics, such as helplessness, which men had for generations ascribed to women.

With this understanding, I have, for much of my life, attempted to contextualize, not to criticize. Indeed, in my recognition of stuggles against the oppressions which so many have faced, I honor the indignation which they experience and regard it as an early stage of consciousness formation. I see, in their dissent and in their resistance, the beginnings of a liberation even while hoping, simultaneously for dialectical resolution of the resentment and umbrage within a more encompassing inclusiveness. Conduct has its reasons, even if they are emotional ones. Moreover, I have come to recognize that the supremacists are not the other. They could have been me.

Despite the events which have thus far transpired, or perhaps more as their denouement, I endeavor to be sanguine. By enriching our shared frames of reference, as together we uncover the commonsense lifeworlds of Autistics from across the spectrum, I remain hopeful that the normative ethic of tolerance will be eclipsed by a transcendent ethic of active engagement and learning in all communities and societies with a radical democracy structured upon difference. Among the more outstanding features of this civil rights movement, as I presently envisage them, would be the inauguration of a universal human right to neurological autonomy coupled with an inclusive consciousness of neurodiversity and, vitally, an unmitigated renunciation of a false consciousness of neurelitism. Let it be.