Autism as an Archetype

Post Reply New Topic

I'm fascinated by archetypes, the idea that different characters in mythology and media (the wise old man, the trickster, the seductress, the hero, etc) are something deeper than a trope. What Jung calls the collective unconscious. The scientist, the absent minded professor, the geek, are all modern concepts, which make them a trope rather than archetype.

Maybe the trope is a more culture specific manifestation of an archetype?

The two ancient concepts that could relate to autism that I can think of are the changeling - the child that is stolen by faeries and replaced by a faerie child (regression) and the shaman - the individual who instead of engaging in social relationships is obsessed with patterns in the natural world, so becomes a go-between for the tribe and nature (i.e., the human and non-human/spiritual world)

Guess the shaman role isn't so much an archetype as an actual historical role, but I figure it's related to some archetype but not sure which one.

When I googled "autism as an archetype", this is the first thing that popped up:

http://www.autisminsideout.com/autism-faq/

It's fairly out there and I can't quite make heads or tails of it; a few parts make sense to me though.

I want to understand Autism less as a medical, neurological issue, and more as an anthropological concept. That to me is the real way to understand it as having a role in society rather than being just a quirk.

Anybody have any thoughts?

The issue with medical definitions of disability is that they ignore the subjective, lived experience of the people affected by the constructed definition. Defining a condition by observing just outward behaviours (this is called positivism in science) actually describes the perspective of those who don't have that difference, not what the difference actually is, what it is to be born with that difference, or experience the socially constructed prejudice of the normative majority who don't share that difference; normative authority figures, such as psychiatrists, are privilieged to construct definitions which all members of the normative group can use and benefit from in some way (even if the benefit is only that they can feel normal/superior to the different/disabled, or have a label to apply to a different minority group).

Interesting though Jung's thinking was, and still is, he very much based that thinking on the conception of collective archetypes - collective being a very important word - which he thought were perceptions buried in the collective unconscious. The genetic diversity in the ASD spectrum, combined with the diversity of cultural experience and family of origin experience makes any single one of us so unique that I don't think Jung's theory can be cherrypicked to suit a particular neurological difference. It does apply perhaps in that we are human and share in the human condition - if the collective unconscious exists, then we are affected by it because we are human, not because we are autistic.

I think Jung was very important in challenging the rigidly narrow conceptions Freud formulated - some of which we now know to be ridiculous, others we now know to have been deliberately misrepresented by Freud himself (based on work done on the archives his sister Anna Freud made available to researchers like Jeffrey Massam).

We live in very different times now, and the work of those 19th century men seems to me more of historical interest than descriptive of the actual lives people live in the cultures that we inhabit.

"if the collective unconscious exists, then we are affected by it because we are human, not because we are autistic." (B19)

Have to agree. Thanks for the response.

I do think, however, that Jung's concepts are relevant today, and for the future, unlike Freud.

To the extent that humans always have, and always will, use memories, dreams, reflections and symbols to make sense of their inner experiences, I agree. Jung is indisputably the forefather of what became 'psychology of the soul' later on, represented by psychologists such as James Hillman, and another branch called 'transpersonal' psychology.

All these approaches completely reject the idea that we can study individuals in isolation as if they were insects under a microscope, and understand their reality, - as postivist approaches try to do.

Generally you could say that Freud was a positivist, whereas Jung was interested in multi-levelled, subjective and objective reality, human consciousness on a grand and interwoven scale. And perhaps it is... some quantum and theoretical physicists in our time would probably concede that some of Jung's conceptualisations are not incompatible with some of their theories.

I'm interested in this idea of the autist as 'shaman'. The tech-focused programmer autist, such as myself, mediates between the human world and the logical, ordered world of the computer.

There seem to be two kind of autistic people, the scientific type and the artistic. One is the rational, the other the intuitive. I think that our society would benefit from both worlds to find eachother: where science meets art, new ideas arise.

^

I don't have anything important to contribute, but this is a rare opportunity to quote a Herman Melville poem:

Greek Architecture

By Herman Melville

Not magnitude, not lavishness,
But Form—the Site;
Not innovating wilfulness,
But reverence for the Archetype.

I'm with rooooby. Although I'm a coder I believe the knowledge is more important in its' own right; computers are within the humanities to me, we aren't so sure about the universe at large.

_________________
"Standing on a well-chilled cinder, we see the fading of the suns, and try to recall the vanished brilliance of the origin of the worlds."
-Georges Lemaitre
"I fly through hyperspace, in my green computer interface"
-Gem Tos

I wouldn't say modern-day practices therein exclude NTs though.

_________________
"Standing on a well-chilled cinder, we see the fading of the suns, and try to recall the vanished brilliance of the origin of the worlds."
-Georges Lemaitre
"I fly through hyperspace, in my green computer interface"
-Gem Tos