Autistic Encapsulation----Protecting The Self From Pain

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I think this thread is referring to something called aphanisis, which has been described as a kind of autistic pseudo-depression in people with schizophrenia characterized as "a stance of isolated 'blankness' that occurs as a defence against vague and undifferentiated feelings of discomfort." This is from this study:

http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/i ... awler=true

I'm not sure about aphanisis occurring in autism spectrum disorder, though.

think you are very brilliant, but I am intuiting that most people probably don't understand what you are talking about, meaning not that they do not understand, but that they are missing the complete gist which is connected to the insight you are attempting to express.. I do not get the inclusion of an abstract about an article a person would have to purchase, which abstract gives little if any info,,,could this be a symbolic way of 'expressing' aphanisis? I have noticed this tendency in some of your other posts where you have given an insight followed by link which seems to cut off rather than enhance the possibility of comprehension by the person you are attempting to communicate with. First you have a brilliant insight and then follow it with a link that functions as a kind of disconnect (ha ha...weep:-)..it is a real link to something, but also kind of fake..

.I get to converse with a few schizophenics as they come to my job which is in a public marketplace and sometimes talk to me because I'm so friendly, and this is what they do...yes, I think it is a little different from autism, but probably all kinds of people, nts. anyone, use this device of whiting out material...I think it is the degree to which it is done and how it is used that would need to be looked at....and that would be quite a study.

Do you think it would be possible for a schizophrenic who is doing this kind of thing to observe himself doing it and know it is a device rather then just blankly believing in it? (Believing is not quite the right word...maybe "subscribing to it" would be better.). I have no idea, but I have already wondered this..

What do you mean by "device of whiting out material"?

(Something was wrong with the formatting on this thread, so had to delete this, as my new message became inserted into the thread at the wrong spot, probably because I mistakenly pressed the edit button on the post that was previously here. You can see my rfesponse to beneficii's question which was what Verdandi was responding to in her Martin Luther King message quoted at the beginning of my post below.).

Last edited by littlebee on 25 Nov 2013, 1:15 pm, edited 5 times in total.

Sorry. I'm confused. What are you talking about?

Finding ways to frame black as negative is not interesting.

littlebee responded:

and Verdandi wrote:

Verdandi, please try to understand what is being written here, and participate in that vein. If you consciously and not mechanically read what I wrote, you will see it is not about what Martin Luther King wrote about, and by the way, African African Amercan females in the seventies had a big problem with that aspect of the black liberation movement in that the rhetoric was always framed in terms of manhood and women were left out). You can see this in something I quoted yesterday on another thread about how African American men spoke of liberation in terms of manhood and did not include women into it, similar in some way, though not entirely parallel to a problem certain autistic people have with Autism Speaks.

The reason I selected that quote on the other thread yesterday had nothing to do with what you wrote here, but it very much does apply in the sense of how material is contextually sorted and graded. The way we frame things does affect the way we think and we do tend to connect or fit this and that into our own framework and personal interest, so I am going to use what you have written as an illustration of how to do this, as 'anything' can be connected to everything or 'everything' back to anything. In this sense one thing can represent something else, which relates back to the subject of this thread, which is autistic encapsulation but this last it may not be that easy to grasp the significance of.

To begin, when I read what you wrote I was shocked and I kind of crashed, as it gave me a different opinion of your intellectual ability than I previously had, though I still see you as smart. but then I realize I tend to idealize people because of my own limited theory of mind, but still it was a shock, and then I thought,-- wow, since she has read my previous writings and knows I will be able to use this material..what if she deliberately inserted it into the topic as an obvious discrepancy factor in order to enhance the discussion? This was an exciting thought.Then I struggled back and forth between these two notions, thinking yes, yes and then thinking no, no. I wanted it so much to be the second and not the first, and yet there was in my mind some kind of evidence toward each direction. Then I had a third notion which was, what if she is inserting this discrepancy factor to say hello? It is her way of simply presenting who she is. This was not a sudden flash of insight like a light bub above my head as in the co---mix:-)-- but more a soft light of inner understanding that brought me into a different dimension, and I thought to myself, I love this person. However the second situation is for me the most exciting, though I still love you, Verdandi, and now it occurs to me what if it is both the third and the second, or possibly the first and the third, or what if it is all three?

In any case, as much as I admire the work of Martin Luther King, that material does not contextually apply to the way I was looking at the word black and white in this instance here. The word black meaning something negative as applied to African Americans was contextual to a particular situation which came after the original construction of the word black and also black does not really traditionally express negativity, though it did int he instances he was talking about, and today in many ways it does not. My second culture is African American. I have admired and been a student of that culture my whole life, plus I am an amateur musician who has spent thousands of hours jamming with African Americans (went and did it yesterday after writing my last message here-- I have even been called black, and nothing implied by use of this word was negative..

So a word is what we make of it, and, as you know, since I am assuming you are reading my other threads, the use of word roots in order to communicate certain concepts can be a helpful device.

littlebee wrote:

And Verdandi replied.



Well, first of all, this does come across as disingenuous, as it was obviously interesting to you in that you took the time to respond to it:-) but you're right, this thread was verging off track. I really was kind of at a blank about what to write next...

Verdandi, the way I am seeing it, you are trying to fit everything into your topic of interest, which interest centers around activism.. Could it be that your topic of interest represents yourself to you? This would not be extraordinary, as I think it is the case with many if not most people. However, ones topic of interest is not oneself. What you have written regarding what I said about the color black is a perfect example of how the brain works by encapsulation, as what I wrote about the color black has nothing to do with what you wrote. And I do not know what is what in your case, but generally speaking, the way the brain naturally processes data from fine tuning to broader generalizations and then back again to fine tuning, etc. can turn into autistic encapsulation.

I will be writing more about black and white, dark and light, as it relates to the subject of autistic encapsulation, and thanks for your message. I do find it very interesting, as it very much helps to clarify what I mean by encapsulation. I think you wrote that deliberately to help people understand how the brain can look at the 'same' material differently and so make a framework out of that particular way of seeing things and then try to fit everything else into it. Your message was stroke of brilliance. If a person tries to explain it, it is very easy to get lost in the abstract, but if one makes an actual example as you did, then it is much clearer---like turning the light on in a dark room;-) Everything was already there, but we just didn't see it....

.

o continue, the word black is related to "lack," because it is an imprint. It is what one takes away by putting only part of something, ones own contextual interpretation on top of everything. so an overlay. Therefore, and thanks again for this, Verdandi, when Martin Luther King phrased his terminology in terms of manhood, he was not including African American women. In the sixties I do not think African American women saw it this way,or if they did, the struggle at hand was more important, but in the seventies when they became more radicalized, then they did. Same as you may not see what I am saying now, but later you will.

In fact this is so fascinating I just now almost started to shake, as I understood how whit relates to white, so the difference between lack and whit, whereas before I kind of got it, but not quite---.whit would relate to right brain function as it is of the same, but a very small 'amount' meaning particvcle of, so whit relates to form, as in whittle..

I hope the people who are reading appreciate this, and thanks, again, Verdandi. I think you are a very smart person.. Of course society would give someone like you a hard time. Sorry about that.

So blanking something out, whiting something out and blacking something out are kind of similar. When you take away contrast, there is the same effect, whether something is blacked out or whited out, but if you have a black garment and are cleaning the sink and get cleanser on it, which contains bleach, that garment is ruined, or if you get a black stain on a white garment, then that garment is ruined. I mentioned on my other thread yesterday that in mystical Islam there are two blacks, conventional black, and then also a state of mystical realization referred to as the black beyond black, which I think is intended to represent an understanding that goes beyond conventional conceptualization, and in Tibetan Buddhist tantra, black is actually used to represent a higher level of realization than white---the levels are represented, in ascending order, by white, red, black and clear (the clear light)..

I remember when I was a new freshman in college this older guy named Mark (interesting name in this context:-), who was a premed student, walked me back to my dorm before curfew one night after we were drinking at a bar. He was just being nice and not at all interested in me romantically, as, looking back on it now, I see he saw me as very naive and immature to the point of being a turn off to him. Anyway, I started eating snow and he said--"-don't eat that, it's dirty", and I replied, "but its so white and beautiful," and he answered, "So are syphilis sores." This seemed to me at the time like an extreme thing to say--actually the snow was probably not that dirty, though it wasn't the world's cleanest snow, but for some reason this incident stuck in my mind all these years. Looking back on it now, it occurs to me that he was saying something to me about my own naive theory of mind. This was in 1960, the tail end of the beatnik era when the concept of "purity" such as expressed in the writing of certain Christian mytics like William Blake and also some contemporary writiers was made into a kind of naive idealization of certain human qualities..

The point here being that all of this material is contextual, and, no, Vendandi, when I am speaking about white, I am not talking about caucasian people----they are beige:-), and also, black people chose to call themselves black, not as a reaction to the n word, which they appropriated into their own vernacular and kind of turned around but which still has negative connotations, but as a a deliberate expression of being positive, meaning black is beautiful and does and should stand out because being black is good, so in this sense it is a cultural statement, but in the context of this thread I am using black to represent ink writing on paper or an impression being made on the mind.. You cannot write on white paper with white ink. I mean you could:-) but there would be no sense to it unless you are trying to do some kind of invisible ink trick..

So would THIS be an example of how I encapsulated and missed the mark? :

When I was a little kid (6 to 10) we would play ball in an empty lot. We played for the fun of it, people changed teams depending on who was out that day. And I played with the rest of them, picked near last mostly, but that was ok. And I felt like a normal, regular kid and (if I thought about it at all) I thought I was about average or a little above.

The REALITY raised its ugly head when I, along with others, were encouraged to try out for Little League. That was a humiliating (and learning) experience for me. All the other kids with me were invited to sign up and I was not. It took me a while to figure it out.

All this time the picture in my head had told me I was at least the equal of any neighborhood ballplayer but I was fooling myself all the time. By whiting out (or explaining away) all the little inconsistencies in my ball playing record I easily fooled myself into believing the preferred scenario.

Would this simplified scenario be an fair example of your subject proposal?

Hey ZenDen, thanks for the personal example...have to think about it some more and am in a hurry to go to work, but I think this might be more an example of seeing the glass as half full rather than half empty, such as if it works (and it was working) then don't try to fix it (by thinking about in a different light. I have been thinking recently, in the past few days, that an immature theory of mind meaning atheory of mind that does not develop to the extent of fully seeing another person as other except to a limited degree is more about this angle--- I or whoever face that another person is real (meaning not me) then I feel I will die as from this perspective I do not have enough internal substance, meaning comfy feeling of being safe, to individuate myself from the outside world. This goes back to object relations theory.

Anyway, imo at this time,, the best way to begin to understand autistic encapsulation is to observe how the brain works by ordinary encapsulation. That is kind of hard to get a sense of, since it is happening at every moment, so built in to even the process of trying to observe it, but one can get a sense of it by thinking about framing and seeing how ones frames the world out of ones own context, so how predjudice or idealization> I think the situation could touch on this, but not really, as any child would probably think the way you did in that kind of situation.

We had backyard ball in my neighborhood at the end of the day and I was on the edge of okay because it was always when it was almost dusk, and I could see, but in regular sports I was sun blind, so could not see the ball a lot of the time, so already had low self esteem.

Anyway, in my recent messages on all threads I have been approaching from the angle of looking at encapsulation in regard to brain function in general, as I think approaching the subject of austistic encapsulation directly might be too emotionally painful. At least it is very painful for me, and I suspect it would be for many others, too.

Maybe there should be a pain day once a week on this thread:-) I know, that's kind of a joke, but even writing it was painful.

Zen Den, after responding to you about my own sun blindness I have been thinking of this a lot. There is this one theory of autism I read by this one psychoanalyst that autism can form around a sensory defect. such as if a child can't hear that well, then he begins to have a story of reality that becomes more and more at odds and discrepant and at odds with other people's stories. with other people's stories. I will have to find previous material I wrote on this.

Also, at the beginning of this thread Marybird mentioned the intense world theory, and I am very grateful for that. I have looked over this theory and kind of dismissed it as being in some ways over simplistic as it leaves out the psychological element, but after further consideration, I think we should not throw the baby out with the bathwater here, and this theory bears looking at again, as though I do not think it is a complete explanation it is really quite eloquent in the way it goes into how brain function works on what i think they call a neurobiological level, and explains how various areas of brain function oe 'sets' interconnect, reinforce and builds one another..

http://www.frontiersin.org/human_neuros ... 00224/full

I think if we combine this idea of discrepant story with some of the material presented in the intense world theory and also begin to understand the basic principle of how the brain works by encapsulation (constantly moving from from fine tuning to the general and then from the general back to the 'specific') and how a developing child will logically use this biological principle of function as a form of psychological buffering, then we will begin to come to a new understanding of what autism is and how to work with it.

********* key material:

http://www.frontiersin.org/human_neuros ... 00224/full

Originally when Marybird mentioned the intense world theory on the first page of this thread, I kind of dismissed it, but then later I found this link, in which article the authors explain their theory in pristine and eloquent detail.

The reason I dismissed the theory even after reading the material on the second link is that it it not comprehensive in that it does not cover the subject of autism from a psychological perspective but merely from a neurobiological angle, and this is correct, but I should acknowledge that from a scientific perspective the presentation of this theory would be flawed if they tried to cover it from both angles.

What this theory does explain, as mentioned recently, is how material (data in the form of sensory impressions or even broad sets of conditioned responses)) neurobiologically intersects into the previous functioning of a human being according to already established conditions, so is bridged or factored into the edifice of functioning that is continuously being built upon..

The implications of understanding how this works and how this understanding can be applied from a purely sensory angle and/or a psychological angle and then by conscious artifice played backward into the functioning of a human being so as to dissolve at the root certain ingrained tendencies, specifically an autistic child, in order to help him, is so exciting I am shaking to even contemplate it.

The big mistake people are making, imo, and it seems a natural and easy mistake to make, is around the principle of encapsulation in that they are trying to look from either one end of the stick or the other. I think if we go into this very simply, step by logical step, we will begin to see emerging a way to look at autism that is much more comprehensive and at the same time offers a practical approach.