@autistics @adelinej
I just read the Wikipedia article on "Empathy in autistic people", and discovered that there's at least one prominent autism researcher who had already reached the same conclusion I recently did, about the "theory of mind deficit" theory of autism: namely, that it is almost the opposite of the truth. From the article:
> Peter Vermeulen argues that “people with autism, especially the most intelligent ones, do not so much suffer from a deficit in theory of mind, but rather from a deficit in ‘intuition’ of the mind.” He further states that “given the efforts that autistic people make to understand the inner world of others, one could even say that they are the only ones who truly possess a theory of mind.”
Just as I had thought: neurotypicals mostly rely on "click, whirr" hard-wired automatic mechanisms — what I have termed the #EnvironmentalYoke — for their understanding of the social world; WE are the ones who are left to do the actual theorizing about it.
Having read that, my first thought was to get hold of the book from which these quotations are taken. But for me there's one slight problem: the book is in French, a language I don't read!:
Vermeulen, Peter (2009). Autisme et émotions [Autism and emotions]. Questions de personne. Série TED (in French). Brussels: De Boeck Supérieur. ISBN 978-2804103941.
Vermeulen has published books in English, but none of the ones I found appears to be a translation of this specific French book.
If anyone has read this book, or anything else by Peter Vermeulen (in any language!), I would be interested in hearing your reactions!
In any case, I can highly recommend the Wikipedia article. Although Vermeulen is the most explicit, several researchers whose work is referenced in the article also tend toward the conclusion that what we #autistics lack is intuitive — not theoretical — understanding of other minds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathy_in_autistic_people
