Autistic Memory (Kristeva Amoebaen)
In recent decades, different conceptions of autism have appeared, which highlight sensory perceptual abnormalities as the basis of core features of the disorder. Some researchers describe autism as a disorder of the senses rather than a social dysfunction, where each sense operates in isolation and the brain is unable to organize the stimuli in any meaningful way […].[i]
The psychic and technical complexity of autism impels us to expand our philosophical paradigm and to posit what must be called another cave, one even more profound and inexpressible than Plato’s. Indeed, since this cave is deprived of the intelligible and evaluative Fire-Sun, it is a sensory cave without any symbols (without “shadows,” as Plato would say). In this sensory cave, a lived Experience (Erlebnis) that has not yet been given form by cognitive experience (Erfahrung), and that often resists it, can nevertheless encounter thing-presentations that endow its inner workings with form and signification. Sensory experience, which is indicated by thing-presentations, plays an important role in the psychic experience of the speaking subject. Word-presentations do not necessarily convey this experience.[ii]
April, 1978. I am four-and-a-half years old. I am in the basement of a church in Frankfort, Kentucky. The basement is a long, gray, cinderblock hallway, with perhaps ten rooms off the central corridor: five on each side, their evenly spaced openings turning this dull piece of American institutional architecture into an arcade, a covered bazaar. Pale light leaks from the windows at the top of the stairs, which descend unceremoniously straight down into the basement, landing immediately before the first door to the right. Another window, at ground level, opens at the very top of the ceiling at the end of the long hall. It is grated, although it seems clear that if anyone were to breach it, he or she would break a limb in the fall to the basement floor. The drippy sunlight cannot compete with the strong white fluorescents overhead.
Somehow, no illumination ever seems to make it to the bottom of the floor, which is darker gray than the rest of the hall. It is cooler, too, and I like to press my back against this low, dark coolness. Especially under the stairs. The wall there is moist with the basement damp of earth pushing against concrete, trying to fight its way back to fill this now hollowed, now hallowed home. I imagine myself in a cave here, and I believe it, and I want to stay.
Right now, I am not against the wall, nor in my cave, but standing in a group of excited, jostling children. We are clumped together behind a line drawn in chalk across the basement floor. I’m excited, too, because my brother has explained the game to me. We are awaiting the annual Easter Egg Hunt, my first. The sky is overcast – it has rained, or it will rain – so we are having the hunt in the basement.
The other children push against me, amorphous and stinging like anemones I’ve seen on Jacques Cousteau. It sounds, too, like I am underwater – I hear no words in the chatter of these hunters, just a warbling, swelling din.
I will fill my basket with brightly colored, loosely jointed fake plastic eggs; I will have more jelly beans than I can eat. I might even find the most eggs, I might win the chocolate bunny. I am good at finding things. I notice every small thing: pebbles, pennies in the parking lot. I am bad at finding things. My mother sends me to the laundry room after my favorite pair of socks. I search and search through the basket, but I cannot see them. She returns with me, and they are there, on the very top. How could I have missed that? I see a spider in the corner, beg my mother to take it outside.
Someone yells “Go!” and the other children are yelling, scrambling, running and climbing over everything, rushing in and out of the rooms along the corridor. I am pushed aside, although I am not sure if any other bodies have touched mine. I may be responding, as I sometimes do, to their proximity – my sense of “me” isn’t firmly linked to this body, and I am easy to assault.
All of these children seem to have too many limbs. They are arachnids, raising their legs to show off their prey, triumphant, displaying the shiny plastic jewels to an accompanying thunderous “FOUND ONE.” I stand still, frozen. “You’d better hurry,” some adult advises, “or they’ll all be gone.”
Suddenly I am under the stairs, my back pressed desperately against the wall, my knees tight up under my chin. I am weeping, shaking, clutching my basket in front of my legs. I try to bury my face in my knees, but there are people there, perhaps my mother?, asking me what’s wrong, asking me what happened, talking talking talking and the children are yelling and running up and down the steps above and the light is burning into my cave now and it’s just too bright and too loud and too awful.
My mother collects me, carries me to the car. My brother has won. He teases me for being such a big baby, and jokes about how much fun I must have had at the egg hunt. He hugs me, and promises one of his prize bunny’s chocolate ears when we get home.
I cannot speak for several hours.
I spent the largest percentage of my life trying to cope with what the world around me had bombarded me with, with little or no extra processing time for the luxury of having any conscious thoughts about that world. If anything, my ‘autism’, like that of so many others like me, was often an example not of a kind of ‘self-ism’ but of a kind of ‘other-ism’ where any conscious and conjoined or consistent sense of selfhood doesn’t come easily at all.[iii]
[Some] sensations are “cognitively impenetrable,” such as akrasia (the term used to describe the phenomenon by which sensations tend either to be delayed or to linger even after our affective judgment has changed). In other words, the rational control of sensations is not enough to change them.[iv]
December, 1994. I am twenty years old, recently turned. I am standing on a street corner in Zagreb, Croatia. I have pneumonia, there’s a war on, and it’s two weeks till Christmas. I have come to Croatia after a semester’s study in Hungary. I’ll spend my next semester in U.K., but I’m not due in London till February. I’m supposed to meet a friend in Munich for the holiday, and then to Berlin for New Year’s. I’ve been all over Eastern Europe, although this is my first trip to a new country entirely alone. I have arrived in Croatia just in time for a transportation workers’ strike, so buses and trains aren’t really running and I’m not sure when or how I’ll get out of the country.
This corner opens onto a street-bounded public square, fairly common in its landscaping, the ubiquitous fountain hedged in this season by four giant Christmas trees decorated with white lights and huge red ribbons. Croatia was more prosperous than most of the former Yugoslav countries, and it shows. Zagreb is lovely, and the town center is nearly as well-heeled as its bigger baroque brothers Vienna and Budapest. But there’s something strange, here, too. After three-and-a-half years of fighting, and with Serbian occupiers closing range on the capital, Zagreb is holding its collective breath. Although people and cars move about, there is not much noise, and almost no one seems to converse on the street. The few men I’ve seen in my time here have been elderly, disabled, or in uniform. The one exception I can remember, a middle-aged man in business attire, spat at me when I passed him.
There is nothing for me to do here. After the war, Zagreb will regain its attraction for tourists – it’s really a lovely town, with an amazing cultural history. With the exception of the spitter, everyone I meet is welcoming and kind, though clearly on edge because of the ongoing war. The family I am staying with has shared with me their home, many fascinating stories, too much tar-like Turkish coffee, and their daughter’s unused antibiotics. I am grateful beyond expression, which is largely why I’m wandering around today. I know that as long I’m in the house, their attention is with me, and I suspect they have other things they’d like to do with their time.
So I’m standing here on this corner, sick and anxious, feeling very much the Ugly American as I try to decide which sidestreet I’ll explore. The air has taken on that quality of shimmering density that I’ve come to associate with the sense of “not quite right.” I see two young men in fatigues and berets walking their guns up and down the opposite street. I see the traffic light change, signaling me to cross. Just as I start to step into the crosswalk, three young boys, eight- to ten-ish, run past me, laughing and yelling. I am pushed aside, although I am not sure if any other bodies have touched mine. Suddenly I hear a series of small explosions that sound, to my untrained ears, like gunfire. I scan the street to find the danger, and see that everyone else, while startled, is moving about as before. I see in the street the remnant ropes and paper of some firecrackers the boys have lit -- and I see the boys, much further away now, pointing at me and laughing at the obvious fear in my face.
I do not cross the street. Instead, I wander for several blocks, away from the open square onto some street, I don’t know, just anywhere. At some point, I stop, walk backwards, and press myself against the brick façade of a dumpy-looking apartment building. The Easter Egg Hunt, which hasn’t entered my memory in so long that I can’t remember remembering it, is replaying over and over in my head. “Have I always been a coward?” I wonder. “What is wrong with me?”
By the time I meet my friend in Munich, I can quickly answer a direct question.
It came as a kind of revelation, as well as a blessed relief, when I learned that my sensory problems weren’t the result of my weakness or lack of character.[v]
The process of naming sensations requires an identification […] that mobilizes my entire psychic apparatus. I identify with his biography, his presumed and even transgenerational memory, and his presumed sensation. The resulting display of countertransference is an imaginary operation, yet it is also a real one. It is a sort of transubstantiation (Joyce, another extremely sensitive author, used this Catholic liturgical term to describe the subjective economy of writing as the advent of new signs and a new body).[vi]
August, 2002. I am twenty-eight years old. I have been sitting in a circle in a garage-turned-studio in some big suburban house in Chapel Hill. I am surrounded by ten other mothers and their three-and-under children. Judah is about to turn three, and I have enrolled us in a music class. He loves music. Before he could walk, he would crawl over to his father’s guitar and bang or rake the strings to produce sound. “Guargar” (“guitar”) was one of his first words. He has amazed us since before he could really talk by his ability to hum back tunes he’s heard once or twice.
Although he’s not coordinated enough to mesh the motions with the music himself, Judah loves sing-alongs like “The Itsy Bitsy Spider.” He asks for me to sing it to him over and over; he flaps excitedly while I sing and do the hand movements. “AGAIN!” he yells each time I near the end – my spider never quite gets to go “up the spout again” before he has to go “up the spout—“ “AGAIN!”
At this point, we’ve been through a number of evaluations, and I’ve done a good bit of reading, and it’s pretty clear that Judah’s got some “sensory issues,” although we’re not sure exactly what that will mean. He is smart and very verbal, and he clearly has some motor delays (he doesn’t really negotiate stairs or catch a ball. He does bump and crash constantly). He is easily over-stimulated, which shows itself in his spinning, his voicing, his tantrums. It is difficult to imagine Judah in a group setting like a classroom, although Matt half-jokes that he’ll be fine if we can find a way for him to go to school riding in the car – the motion and vibration do often seem to chill him out.
I cringe, remembering our prior, wrecked attempts to participate in “Toddler Time” at the local library. I have joined this music class, thinking it will be a good way to get Judah involved in something social in preparation for starting daycare next month. Here, I hope, he will be able to focus on what he likes (the music) while getting used to having other people do the same in close proximity.
Judah began our second class today by running around the circle, screaming “A-E-A-E-O!” (his latest take on “Old MacDonald”). He “settled down” for the welcome song, which meant that he hummed while crawling all over me. As he yanked my hair for the third time, I had to remind myself that I should have expected this, I know what can happen when we go out in the world.
At this moment, mid-way through the class, Judah is sprawled out on the floor, face down, howling. We were just singing “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” as a group, the other moms happily showing their cooing, crooning tots how to make their spiders go up the spout, when he lost it. When I lost him.
I tell myself not to worry about the other adults’ judgments of Judah and me, which I feel, even when they are not openly expressed. I worry, too much, that they see us -- Judah, me, our family -- as failed, as freaks. Looking at him lying there on the floor, I feel worlds away from him. I know that I cannot help him. I feel intimately, frighteningly connected to him. I know that I have been where he is.
He looks like he is trying to make his body as flat as possible. He looks like he is under attack. He looks like he has been pushed down, although no other bodies have touched his.
I will do my best, I will expect nothing. I will rub his back. I will pick him up and carry him to the car. I will hold him very tightly, very close to my body. I will talk to him in as even, as unemotional a tone as I can manage. I will not cry. I will not get upset. I will not join him there on the floor. We are both responding to the stress of this situation. Although I think I’m managing to control my freak out, my internal river is rising. Threats of flashfloods broadcast across my field of vision, and I know this will be our last class, at least for a while. “This is not his problem,” I think to myself, hoping the dam will hold. “It’s yours.”
Matt arrives home from work, asks how was our day.
“Hard,” I answer, finding—AGAIN!—my voice.
By hypothesizing that the sensory cavern is ubiquitous and for the most part irreducible to language, am I subscribing to the notion that autism is universal, endogenous, occurring before what Melanie Klein calls the ‘depressive position,’ and at the fringe of psychic life? Not exactly. If we borrow the terms of what Freud calls an ‘economic’ conception (as opposed to a model that relies on chronological or developmental stages), we may consider the sensory cavern to be an essential part of the psychic apparatus, which is heterogeneous. The psychic apparatus is a stratified significance that excessively rigid linguistic and cognitive discourses sometimes conceal or restrict to the dimension of language modeled on the Idea.[vii]
[i] Olga Bogdaschina, Sensory Perceptual Issues in Autism and Asperger Syndrome. New York: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2003, p. 25.
[ii] Julia Kristeva, “Is Sensation a Form of Language (abridged),” The Portable Kristeva, Second Edition. ed. Kelly Oliver, New York: Columbia University Press, 2002 (1997), pp. 122-123.
[iii] Donna Williams, Somebody Somewhere: Breaking Free from the World of Autism, Los Angeles: Three Rivers Press, 1995, p. 14.
[iv] Kristeva, “Sensation,” p. 121.
[v] Temple Grandin, Thinking in Pictures, and Other Reports from My Life with Autism, New York: Vintage Books, 1995, p. 78.
[vi] Kristeva, “Sensation,” p. 124.
[vii] Kristeva, “Sensation,” p. 123.
The psychic and technical complexity of autism impels us to expand our philosophical paradigm and to posit what must be called another cave, one even more profound and inexpressible than Plato’s. Indeed, since this cave is deprived of the intelligible and evaluative Fire-Sun, it is a sensory cave without any symbols (without “shadows,” as Plato would say). In this sensory cave, a lived Experience (Erlebnis) that has not yet been given form by cognitive experience (Erfahrung), and that often resists it, can nevertheless encounter thing-presentations that endow its inner workings with form and signification. Sensory experience, which is indicated by thing-presentations, plays an important role in the psychic experience of the speaking subject. Word-presentations do not necessarily convey this experience.[ii]
April, 1978. I am four-and-a-half years old. I am in the basement of a church in Frankfort, Kentucky. The basement is a long, gray, cinderblock hallway, with perhaps ten rooms off the central corridor: five on each side, their evenly spaced openings turning this dull piece of American institutional architecture into an arcade, a covered bazaar. Pale light leaks from the windows at the top of the stairs, which descend unceremoniously straight down into the basement, landing immediately before the first door to the right. Another window, at ground level, opens at the very top of the ceiling at the end of the long hall. It is grated, although it seems clear that if anyone were to breach it, he or she would break a limb in the fall to the basement floor. The drippy sunlight cannot compete with the strong white fluorescents overhead.
Somehow, no illumination ever seems to make it to the bottom of the floor, which is darker gray than the rest of the hall. It is cooler, too, and I like to press my back against this low, dark coolness. Especially under the stairs. The wall there is moist with the basement damp of earth pushing against concrete, trying to fight its way back to fill this now hollowed, now hallowed home. I imagine myself in a cave here, and I believe it, and I want to stay.
Right now, I am not against the wall, nor in my cave, but standing in a group of excited, jostling children. We are clumped together behind a line drawn in chalk across the basement floor. I’m excited, too, because my brother has explained the game to me. We are awaiting the annual Easter Egg Hunt, my first. The sky is overcast – it has rained, or it will rain – so we are having the hunt in the basement.
The other children push against me, amorphous and stinging like anemones I’ve seen on Jacques Cousteau. It sounds, too, like I am underwater – I hear no words in the chatter of these hunters, just a warbling, swelling din.
I will fill my basket with brightly colored, loosely jointed fake plastic eggs; I will have more jelly beans than I can eat. I might even find the most eggs, I might win the chocolate bunny. I am good at finding things. I notice every small thing: pebbles, pennies in the parking lot. I am bad at finding things. My mother sends me to the laundry room after my favorite pair of socks. I search and search through the basket, but I cannot see them. She returns with me, and they are there, on the very top. How could I have missed that? I see a spider in the corner, beg my mother to take it outside.
Someone yells “Go!” and the other children are yelling, scrambling, running and climbing over everything, rushing in and out of the rooms along the corridor. I am pushed aside, although I am not sure if any other bodies have touched mine. I may be responding, as I sometimes do, to their proximity – my sense of “me” isn’t firmly linked to this body, and I am easy to assault.
All of these children seem to have too many limbs. They are arachnids, raising their legs to show off their prey, triumphant, displaying the shiny plastic jewels to an accompanying thunderous “FOUND ONE.” I stand still, frozen. “You’d better hurry,” some adult advises, “or they’ll all be gone.”
Suddenly I am under the stairs, my back pressed desperately against the wall, my knees tight up under my chin. I am weeping, shaking, clutching my basket in front of my legs. I try to bury my face in my knees, but there are people there, perhaps my mother?, asking me what’s wrong, asking me what happened, talking talking talking and the children are yelling and running up and down the steps above and the light is burning into my cave now and it’s just too bright and too loud and too awful.
My mother collects me, carries me to the car. My brother has won. He teases me for being such a big baby, and jokes about how much fun I must have had at the egg hunt. He hugs me, and promises one of his prize bunny’s chocolate ears when we get home.
I cannot speak for several hours.
I spent the largest percentage of my life trying to cope with what the world around me had bombarded me with, with little or no extra processing time for the luxury of having any conscious thoughts about that world. If anything, my ‘autism’, like that of so many others like me, was often an example not of a kind of ‘self-ism’ but of a kind of ‘other-ism’ where any conscious and conjoined or consistent sense of selfhood doesn’t come easily at all.[iii]
[Some] sensations are “cognitively impenetrable,” such as akrasia (the term used to describe the phenomenon by which sensations tend either to be delayed or to linger even after our affective judgment has changed). In other words, the rational control of sensations is not enough to change them.[iv]
December, 1994. I am twenty years old, recently turned. I am standing on a street corner in Zagreb, Croatia. I have pneumonia, there’s a war on, and it’s two weeks till Christmas. I have come to Croatia after a semester’s study in Hungary. I’ll spend my next semester in U.K., but I’m not due in London till February. I’m supposed to meet a friend in Munich for the holiday, and then to Berlin for New Year’s. I’ve been all over Eastern Europe, although this is my first trip to a new country entirely alone. I have arrived in Croatia just in time for a transportation workers’ strike, so buses and trains aren’t really running and I’m not sure when or how I’ll get out of the country.
This corner opens onto a street-bounded public square, fairly common in its landscaping, the ubiquitous fountain hedged in this season by four giant Christmas trees decorated with white lights and huge red ribbons. Croatia was more prosperous than most of the former Yugoslav countries, and it shows. Zagreb is lovely, and the town center is nearly as well-heeled as its bigger baroque brothers Vienna and Budapest. But there’s something strange, here, too. After three-and-a-half years of fighting, and with Serbian occupiers closing range on the capital, Zagreb is holding its collective breath. Although people and cars move about, there is not much noise, and almost no one seems to converse on the street. The few men I’ve seen in my time here have been elderly, disabled, or in uniform. The one exception I can remember, a middle-aged man in business attire, spat at me when I passed him.
There is nothing for me to do here. After the war, Zagreb will regain its attraction for tourists – it’s really a lovely town, with an amazing cultural history. With the exception of the spitter, everyone I meet is welcoming and kind, though clearly on edge because of the ongoing war. The family I am staying with has shared with me their home, many fascinating stories, too much tar-like Turkish coffee, and their daughter’s unused antibiotics. I am grateful beyond expression, which is largely why I’m wandering around today. I know that as long I’m in the house, their attention is with me, and I suspect they have other things they’d like to do with their time.
So I’m standing here on this corner, sick and anxious, feeling very much the Ugly American as I try to decide which sidestreet I’ll explore. The air has taken on that quality of shimmering density that I’ve come to associate with the sense of “not quite right.” I see two young men in fatigues and berets walking their guns up and down the opposite street. I see the traffic light change, signaling me to cross. Just as I start to step into the crosswalk, three young boys, eight- to ten-ish, run past me, laughing and yelling. I am pushed aside, although I am not sure if any other bodies have touched mine. Suddenly I hear a series of small explosions that sound, to my untrained ears, like gunfire. I scan the street to find the danger, and see that everyone else, while startled, is moving about as before. I see in the street the remnant ropes and paper of some firecrackers the boys have lit -- and I see the boys, much further away now, pointing at me and laughing at the obvious fear in my face.
I do not cross the street. Instead, I wander for several blocks, away from the open square onto some street, I don’t know, just anywhere. At some point, I stop, walk backwards, and press myself against the brick façade of a dumpy-looking apartment building. The Easter Egg Hunt, which hasn’t entered my memory in so long that I can’t remember remembering it, is replaying over and over in my head. “Have I always been a coward?” I wonder. “What is wrong with me?”
By the time I meet my friend in Munich, I can quickly answer a direct question.
It came as a kind of revelation, as well as a blessed relief, when I learned that my sensory problems weren’t the result of my weakness or lack of character.[v]
The process of naming sensations requires an identification […] that mobilizes my entire psychic apparatus. I identify with his biography, his presumed and even transgenerational memory, and his presumed sensation. The resulting display of countertransference is an imaginary operation, yet it is also a real one. It is a sort of transubstantiation (Joyce, another extremely sensitive author, used this Catholic liturgical term to describe the subjective economy of writing as the advent of new signs and a new body).[vi]
August, 2002. I am twenty-eight years old. I have been sitting in a circle in a garage-turned-studio in some big suburban house in Chapel Hill. I am surrounded by ten other mothers and their three-and-under children. Judah is about to turn three, and I have enrolled us in a music class. He loves music. Before he could walk, he would crawl over to his father’s guitar and bang or rake the strings to produce sound. “Guargar” (“guitar”) was one of his first words. He has amazed us since before he could really talk by his ability to hum back tunes he’s heard once or twice.
Although he’s not coordinated enough to mesh the motions with the music himself, Judah loves sing-alongs like “The Itsy Bitsy Spider.” He asks for me to sing it to him over and over; he flaps excitedly while I sing and do the hand movements. “AGAIN!” he yells each time I near the end – my spider never quite gets to go “up the spout again” before he has to go “up the spout—“ “AGAIN!”
At this point, we’ve been through a number of evaluations, and I’ve done a good bit of reading, and it’s pretty clear that Judah’s got some “sensory issues,” although we’re not sure exactly what that will mean. He is smart and very verbal, and he clearly has some motor delays (he doesn’t really negotiate stairs or catch a ball. He does bump and crash constantly). He is easily over-stimulated, which shows itself in his spinning, his voicing, his tantrums. It is difficult to imagine Judah in a group setting like a classroom, although Matt half-jokes that he’ll be fine if we can find a way for him to go to school riding in the car – the motion and vibration do often seem to chill him out.
I cringe, remembering our prior, wrecked attempts to participate in “Toddler Time” at the local library. I have joined this music class, thinking it will be a good way to get Judah involved in something social in preparation for starting daycare next month. Here, I hope, he will be able to focus on what he likes (the music) while getting used to having other people do the same in close proximity.
Judah began our second class today by running around the circle, screaming “A-E-A-E-O!” (his latest take on “Old MacDonald”). He “settled down” for the welcome song, which meant that he hummed while crawling all over me. As he yanked my hair for the third time, I had to remind myself that I should have expected this, I know what can happen when we go out in the world.
At this moment, mid-way through the class, Judah is sprawled out on the floor, face down, howling. We were just singing “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” as a group, the other moms happily showing their cooing, crooning tots how to make their spiders go up the spout, when he lost it. When I lost him.
I tell myself not to worry about the other adults’ judgments of Judah and me, which I feel, even when they are not openly expressed. I worry, too much, that they see us -- Judah, me, our family -- as failed, as freaks. Looking at him lying there on the floor, I feel worlds away from him. I know that I cannot help him. I feel intimately, frighteningly connected to him. I know that I have been where he is.
He looks like he is trying to make his body as flat as possible. He looks like he is under attack. He looks like he has been pushed down, although no other bodies have touched his.
I will do my best, I will expect nothing. I will rub his back. I will pick him up and carry him to the car. I will hold him very tightly, very close to my body. I will talk to him in as even, as unemotional a tone as I can manage. I will not cry. I will not get upset. I will not join him there on the floor. We are both responding to the stress of this situation. Although I think I’m managing to control my freak out, my internal river is rising. Threats of flashfloods broadcast across my field of vision, and I know this will be our last class, at least for a while. “This is not his problem,” I think to myself, hoping the dam will hold. “It’s yours.”
Matt arrives home from work, asks how was our day.
“Hard,” I answer, finding—AGAIN!—my voice.
By hypothesizing that the sensory cavern is ubiquitous and for the most part irreducible to language, am I subscribing to the notion that autism is universal, endogenous, occurring before what Melanie Klein calls the ‘depressive position,’ and at the fringe of psychic life? Not exactly. If we borrow the terms of what Freud calls an ‘economic’ conception (as opposed to a model that relies on chronological or developmental stages), we may consider the sensory cavern to be an essential part of the psychic apparatus, which is heterogeneous. The psychic apparatus is a stratified significance that excessively rigid linguistic and cognitive discourses sometimes conceal or restrict to the dimension of language modeled on the Idea.[vii]
[i] Olga Bogdaschina, Sensory Perceptual Issues in Autism and Asperger Syndrome. New York: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2003, p. 25.
[ii] Julia Kristeva, “Is Sensation a Form of Language (abridged),” The Portable Kristeva, Second Edition. ed. Kelly Oliver, New York: Columbia University Press, 2002 (1997), pp. 122-123.
[iii] Donna Williams, Somebody Somewhere: Breaking Free from the World of Autism, Los Angeles: Three Rivers Press, 1995, p. 14.
[iv] Kristeva, “Sensation,” p. 121.
[v] Temple Grandin, Thinking in Pictures, and Other Reports from My Life with Autism, New York: Vintage Books, 1995, p. 78.
[vi] Kristeva, “Sensation,” p. 124.
[vii] Kristeva, “Sensation,” p. 123.
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