Autism and Existentialism

What if there are multiple fundamentally different ways to experience the world as a human ? The emerging neurodiversity paradigm asserts that this is true, that some people’s brains operate in qualitatively different ways, with different needs and different outcomes in the way they assemble perceptual information. Understanding neurodiversity is a social responsibility at this point in our culture, but it is also an opportunity to expand our conception of the possibilities for how to be in the world. This, my friends, leads us directly to the doors of existential philosophy. What the neurodiversity paradigm and existential philosophy share is radical openness to discover and even welcome alternative ways of being human.

Existentialism poses questions (and—very occasionally—answers) about how we understand our life, and how we make choices to create meaning within it. An existential lens can help us conceive how a person’s neurotype might impact their mental health and contribute to what a life worth living means to them.

As rates of Autism diagnosis continue to increase the neurodiversity paradigm is becoming ever more relevant to our society.

The National Institute of Mental Health defines Autism Spectrum Disorder as “a neurological and developmental disorder that affects how people interact with others, communicate, learn, and behave.” The DSM-5 similarly defines Autism as consisting of two primary criteria of “Persistent deficits in social communication and social interaction across multiple contexts” and “Restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior, interests, or activities.”

Frankly, these definitions to me have always seemed like vague to the point of useless. They amount to an evasive statement of “something’s different about these folks” but without any central binding concept.  What actually is Autism?  It turns out that presentation between individuals is so diverse that even the definition and underlying structure is still under debate.

One organizing principle that has gained traction in recent decades is the theory of monotropism. Monotropism was first described in the 1990s by Autistic researcher Dinah Murray. Murray hypothesized that while most brains sort and process environmental information via a multitude of small simultaneous streams, Autistic brains select for, take in, and process information by way of selecting a single or very small number of intense streams. Because of this Autistic individuals are very good at deep focus and understanding, often moreso than allistic (aka non-Autistic) brains. However, the flip side of this is that they frequently struggle with processing the multiple, rapidly changing channels of information that other people expect them to.

Existentialism’s radical openness to individual experience invites curiosity and acceptance of these different processing styles. Friedrich Nietzsche invoked us to seek our own path away from “the herd.” Martin Heidegger urged us to untangle our authentic self from our “They-Self”, ie the way we present to conform to the needs and expectations of society. The They-Self, in fact, is a concept directly analogous to Autistic “masking.”

Masking, as you may know, is the act of pretending to experience the world and one’s surroundings in neurotypical ways, of pretending to be “normal.” Masking constructs a facade personality that helps one to avoid dealing with invalidation and prejudice, but constant masking ultimately prevents true contact and a sense of being known. With prolonged use, the mask makes one a stranger not just from others, but eventually from one’s own self.

Autistic wellbeing hinges on finding safe ways and places to unmask and allow yourself permission to be as you are, with a differently structured way of experiencing and relating to the world. To understand and accept this another foundational concept of existential philosophy might prove useful: that of phenomenology (which I’ve written more about here.) Phenomenology requires that we not take anything on authority, but instead encounter our world as a first-person subject, suspending the proscriptions of others as well as our own assumptions based on past experiences.  For an Autistic person, phenomenology supports their encounter with the world on their own terms, which might include different intermediating thoughts, inner experiences, and needs from what they’ve been told is “normal.”

Devon Price’s Unmasking Autism is a great resource and much-beloved in the late Autism diagnosis community.

Phenomenology is a useful lens for others to use when trying to better understand Autistic experience, as well. As a therapist, a phenomenological attitude reinforces my commitment to take at face value how my Autistic clients describe their experience and challenges. It means that I as a clinician must consider the information I’m given within its own apparent internal logic, and check my own expectations of “what it means to be Autistic” at the door. A phenomenological attitude is particularly important considering how diversely autism presents, with modern advocates highlighting how it might present in heretofore unrecognized ways in demographics that have been traditionally underdiagnosed such as women, sexual and gender minorities, and people of color. 

One last existential concept we will connect to Autism is that of Martin Heidegger’s “Dasein.” Dasein translated from German means “Being-In-The-World, and it describes the “Being” of a person as inextricably formed by its relationships of “concern” with its world. Consciousness is not just in the world, but always related to and involved in it, always directed “toward” a direct object of its attention. For example we are not just in a classroom, we are concerned about our relationships with the other students and the teacher, with the subject matter, perhaps with our sense of how it will connect to our future endeavors, etc. We are an entity whose edges blur and tendril into its surrounding context.

The relationship between Autism and Dasein was explicitly explored by Ludwig Binswanger, a Swiss psychiatrist whose work in the early 20th century sourced heavily from existential philosophy. Binswanger imagined Autism as an impairment of Dasein, seeing it as a failure of the ability to experience the fluid give-and-take with one’s surroundings that this contextual placement involves. 

There is, unfortunately and unsurprisingly for its time, a distinct flavor of paternalism and ableism that characterizes Binswanger’s work. However, if we take his ideas with the lens of monotropism, Autism is not an impaired Dasein but it is a differently structured one. Maybe a different neurotype signifies a different category of Dasein, a different essential way of Being-In-the-World. If we imagine a neurotypical Dasein as one embedded in a nexus of fine weblike strings, with each of these denoting an attitude of impact or concern, an Autistic Dasein might look like existing in the center of a sparser network but whose linkages consist of strong, thick cables. 

Existential philosophy affirms Autistic experience as both different from the norm and as an equally valid way of being in the world. Existentialist values of nonconformity and openness overlap with the principles that Autistic advocates of the last several decades argue are essential to create a society meaningfully inclusive of neurodivergence. The two perspectives of the existential tradition and the neurodiversity paradigm converge, in an affirmation of how neurodiverse members can enrich a modern pluralistic society with fresh options for how to see, know, and connect with our world.