Asperger's Syndrome and Psychological Type

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I want to contribute two stories. Both are by people who feel that they were born into the wrong planet. From the name of this web site and from some of the comments posted here, I suspect that many people have had experiences similar to those in the first story, but not the second.
The first story is by Clare Sainsbury, who was diagnosed with Asperger's Disorder at age 20. She has written a book in which she talks about the difficulties of growing up "different." Here she shares an incident from her childhood.

"Here is one of my most vivid memories of school: I am standing in a corner of the playground as usual, as far away as possible from people who might bump into me or shout, gazing into the sky and absorbed in my own thoughts. I am eight or nine years old and have begun to realize that I am different in some nameless but all-pervasive way. I think that I might be an alien who has been put on this planet by mistake; I hope that this is so, because this means that there might be other people out there in the universe like me. I dream that one day a spaceship will fall from the sky onto the tarmac in front of me, and the people who step out of the spaceship will tell me, "It's all been a dreadful mistake. You were never meant to be here. We are your people and now we've come to take you home."
In the next few years, I would work out that the spaceship was never going to come and rescue me, but it wasn't until I was twenty that I finally found a name for my differences, when I was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, a mild form of autism." (pp. 8-9)

The second story is from Katharine Downing Myers. In an interview, she was asked to share an anecdote from her long experience with Carl Jung's concept of psychological type. She said:

"At a conference, a man in his late 20s asks to speak with me. He has something important he wants to tell me. We go to a corner and sit down to talk. [He said,] "When I was a little boy, I felt I had been born into the wrong planet. Then I was told that if I prayed I would get what I prayed for. I used to stand by the window and look out at the night sky praying for the space ship that would come to take me to the planet where I belonged. None ever came. At college, I was given a questionnaire called the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. When I went to the counselor for the results, he said, 'Sit down, I have something important to tell you.' He explained that there was something called a [type deleted], described the personality, and it was me. He said this preference type often felt out of place, that it was natural and perfectly OK to be that kind of person, that like all types there were advantages and disadvantages, and that there were other people like me in the world, and I could learn to spot them." The young man closed the conversation by saying this session with his counselor saved his life." (p. 48)

Asperger's Syndrome is considered to be a neurological disorder.
Jung's psychological types describe the ways in which normal people go about being themselves.

References:
Myers, K. D. (2002). Eminent interview. Journal of Psychological Type, 61, 43-50.
Sainsbury, C. (2000). The Martian in the playground: Understanding the schoolchild with Asperger's syndrome. London, UK: The Book Factory.

Martian in the Playground is available in many libraries. The Journal of Psychological Type is available through the Interlibrary Loan program.

Geezer

I think psychological typing is indeed compatible with AS. However, unlike g-factor and other attempts with only neurotypicals and with narrow traits, the organization of traits is not correct. I've found Aspie, NT, g-factor, introvert-extrovert and some of the other classificatioms in that order. For instance, the introvert-extrovert aspect is not independent of Aspie-NT, but it is correlated. Extroverts with many autistic traits probably are more likely to receive ADHD dx than AS.

What's your point exactly?

It sounds to me like you're describing two people with aspergers.

i think he is trying to suggest aspergers syndrome is simply a personality type. i might agree to an extent.

I hear a lot of people with AS being the INTJ personality type (I could be wrong) but I doubt that's always the case because there are many factors that can influence your personality that aren't completely genetic. I have taken the personality evaluation myself and I'm an INFP. So I'm not sure how accurate the personality type would be correlated with AS.

from the Foreword to "Autism and Sensing, The Unlost Instinct" by Donna Williams (who is autistic, and uses the term in this book to cover all related conditions including AS):

'Autism' is simply an internal human 'normality' with the volume turned up. We all have experienced moments when we aren't quite aware or when we are too aware to handle the world. Or moments when we aren't quite aware of the company we are in or so overly aware of it that it gets hard to function. We all have had times when we've had hardly any awareness of our bodies, even been out of them, or felt so in, weighed down by them, that we become hypercritical, eager to escape, tune out, or disappear. We have all had times when we've lost the plot, the why, the what or been distracted by the meta-reality inside our heads to the extent that we are suddenly jolted out of a daydream. So too, have we all had moments when we have been so aware that we have taken things in ... almost overwhelming, extreme detail. For me, the experience of 'autism' is not any of these things in themselves, but rather the frequency and extremity with which they are experienced and the degree to which these experiences affect how one expresses oneself and relates to one's inner world and the outer world. It's a matter of whether you visit these states or whether you've lived there.

I'm INTP.

My guess would be that most of us are introverts but that we'd be fairly split among the other preferences.

that sounds like an interesting book, pi_woman. i just found donna williams website after googling her name, looks like there may be some interesting stuff there.

Introversion, if it is a restriction of the self and a narrowing of the relations to the environment, may well be autism in essence.
Hans Asperger (1944, in Frith, 1991, p. 90)

I believe that there are more than enough genuine pathologies around requiring our attention. Introversion is not one of them.
Naomi Quenk (1996, p. 41)

Naomi Quenk is a Jungian psychologist who lives and works in Albuquerque, NM.

Reading those stories was really amazing to me...I could have written them.I used to believe that I came from a place called Krexafa/krexalox(ie.my nick)I developed many theories about why my alian brethern had put me here and decided it was to observe humans,read,and try and get an understanding of their psychology so that I would be able to report my findings(down load)my memorys apon my return.I think my learning style of reading and observing came from this belief system....then I went into therapy and had an epiphaney....I was really waiting for my biological family...I had been adopted by a family of blue eyed,emotionally cold people who disliked just about everything about me and shared none of my interests or tastes(adopted at 5)When I was finally reunited with bio family I was amazed at how our tastes were similiar,relating style,mom was social phobic also...but there was also alot of differences from environmental factors...like middle class education I had gotten......guess Im still looking for my home planet,but for now, this place feels more like home then anything else I've found..