Abstract
In recent decades, the focus in autism research progressively expanded. It presently offers extensive material on sensorimotor disturbances as well as on perceptive-cognitive preferences of people with autism. The present article proposes not only a critical interpretation of the common theoretical framework in autism research but also focuses on certain experiences common to some people with autism and which can be appropriately understood by phenomenology. What I will call “hypnotic experiences” in autism are moments in which some individuals withdraw into intense sensorial and perceptive experiences. Following their examples, I use the term “hypnosis” primarily to describe a trance state in which the individuals become highly alert to and awake for an experience of a totally new kind. Through a close analysis of autobiographical writings from people with autism I defend the idea that the particularity of hypnotic experiences in autism consists in a certain qualitative shift within experience itself: what changes, in the hypnotic moments, is the way a person with autism relates to his/her own bodily experiences. If this qualitative shift is indeed difficult to account for within a reifying and intellectualist research perspective, phenomenology offers a large conceptual framework for understanding it. Phenomenology, and precisely, phenomenological psychopathology, will thus emerge as a major device in accounting for such “hypnotic experiences”. The argument mainly draws on the twofold structure of experience which is traditionally used in phenomenological research: it claims that in hypnotic experience people with autism are inclined to focus on non-reified “sensings”, “perceivings” and “movings”, and thus leave aside the object itself and any intentional reification of it. Finally, I will claim that this restriction to mere non-reified sensings might lead to a completely new conception of self and world. In the hypnotic experiences of autism, neither the subject nor the object come to a full-blown and independent existence. A thorough phenomenological analysis of hypnotic experience in autism therefore also has to face the question of a corresponding ontology of these experiences.
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Notes
Even though psychoanalysis is today largely dismissed in autism research, it is worth mentioning that the English psychoanalyst Frances Tustin was one of the first to pay special attention to the particular use of sensorial events in autism. What Tustin called “autistic sensation shapes” are shapes detected by a certain way of having an experience of one’s own experiencing and sensing body. As Tustin puts it, these forms are “››felt‹‹ rather than heard, smelled, tasted or seen.” (Tustin 1986, 120)
This article does not intend to evaluate hypnotic experience in autism either way, neither in a therapeutic way nor in regard to the individuals’ striving for a good life and happiness. Our sole focus is a systematic description of the experience itself and its egological as well as ontological implications.
“Inside” and “outside” are here used as topological metaphors and not descriptive moments of constituted three-dimensional space.
„Bewusstsein ist gegenwärtiges Bewusstsein, das in sich selbst Bewusstsein von gegenwärtigem Bewusstsein ist, und nur als gegenwärtiges Bewusstsein ist Bewusstsein „wirkliches“, das also in seiner Wirklichkeit das Bewusstsein seiner Wirklichkeit oder Gegenwart einschließt.“(Husserl 2001, 45)
The hypothesis of a fusion in space-time is inspired by an observation from Bettelheim who once claimed that in severe autism the progression of the day might not be ordered in abstract temporal or spatial concepts like “morning”, “noon”, “night”, or “dining room” and “school” etc. Rather, according to Bettelheim, the individual acquires a unitary “space-time concept”: “These concepts cover a unitary experience comprising both the time of day when they go out from the dormitory to the dining room or class room, and the movement through space when they [the children] get to these places.” (Bettelheim 1972, 53) This description might be true when correctly restricted to hypnotic experiences as analyzed here above. Again, “hypnotic experience” is not coextensive with “autistic experience” altogether. An identification of both would be a dangerous shortcoming and tend to obliterate the complexity of the condition.
It must be added that referring locally to psychoanalysis within a theoretical account on autism does not mean to take position within the debate of a psychogenetic origin of the autistic disorder (and, above all, it does not mean to defend the unjustified and inherently false accounts on depressive and emotionally ‘cold’ mothers). The paper’s baseline theory is phenomenological psychopathology and not psychoanalysis.
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Grohmann, T. Hypnotic experience and the autism spectrum disorder. A phenomenological investigation. Phenom Cogn Sci 17, 889–909 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-018-9563-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-018-9563-1