Life is looser at TPS blog these days. Here is an observation based on three clients, ages 23, 21 and 21. All are male, bi- and hetero-, all qualify for Asperger’s Syndrome (or “high-functioning autism spectrum” or whatever is the delicately correct term today). Two of them have a strong intellectual bent, naming highfalutin solid and abstract ideas. The other one produces endless thoughts about his personhood and history but no worldly wisdom. Perfunctorily humble, he says “I don’t know” a lot and shows no interest in challenging that status quo.
All three are minute variations of what is called the “know-it-all.” They either know everything, or they know all they need to know. They are complacent, wise, glib speech-giving. They all pause zero milliseconds before rejoindering to me with their concurrence, the truth or a truer truth.
One would think they are Narcissists. One might fantasize: Are all young twenty-something Asperger’s men serene, bloviating, full-of-themselves, omniscient? Of course not – and neither are these three clients. Their fragile identity is clear to see. Unlike Narcissistic Personality-disordered men, whose disintegrative lost-little-boy interiors are deeply hidden, these three old boys are somewhat more inner child than surface lie. The Narcissist’s shell is seamless, polished, hard and brittle. The young men’s have hairline cracks, are smooth and slippery like thin ice.
Yet the surface lie is quite jazzed.
Here is today’s casual theory: They have to “know” – that is, to be buoyed by their head – in order not to feel. Feeling dire historical pain is anathema to most people. But to someone with Asperger’s, dire historical pain is their bedrock of lava. Bettelheim need not be right about “refrigerator mothers” to see that autism spectrum individuals were repressed from feeling at the earliest stage of their lives. This concept is evidenced by the minutely gradated continuum of out-of-syncness with self and world on which countless repressed people lie. I, for one, am far from autistic, but when I’m not knowing and talking and delivering therapy, I feel a recondite disturbance among people. As do many of my clients outside of their own medium.
Asperger’s is like the big personality disorders – Narcissism, Borderline, Antisocial, Schizoid, Dependent, Schizotypal – in one main way. James Masterson discovered the infant stage – separation-individuation – origin of Borderline Personality, its cause in “maternal unavailability” and the “abandonment depression.” The infant, avoiding rejection pain, must adapt to the immature mother’s extreme oscillations. For that adult, years and decades later, to re-experience that pain – by therapy or abandonment – would be, essentially, to be killed again. A similar consequence would happen were someone with Asperger’s to be thrown into his abyss of infantile buried feeling. The cause of early pain need not be an analytical or neurotic mother. It might be any birth or pre-birth force that led to pain and its chemical repression. Janov wrote extensively on birth trauma and the nine months predisposing the fetus to it. There’s some interesting (if overly creative) information at the defunct Primal Psychotherapy Page regarding birth trauma (http://primal-page.com/birthart.htm).
My Asperger’s young men found necessary refuge in their heads, in knowledge. Doubt and openness mean feeling, which they must avoid.
