Autism from the Second Person Perspective

Authors

Abstract

In psychology and clinical psychiatry, Autistic Spectrum Disorders have been characterized mainly by an impairment of social functions, and therefore described as a disorder of social cognition; this disorder has been often identified with a lack of a Theory of Mind. This chapter challenges that characterization, arguing that it&s;s inadequate because it clashes with both certain empirical facts about people with autism and the phenomenology and lived experience of autistic people themselves. The alternative It propose is twofold: instead of a deficit of social cognition, autism is instead a cognitive style of social interaction, whose interactive “failures” are only so because they are framed in the expected response of neurotypical social interactions: and that those interactions are better understood through an interactive theory of social cognition, namely the Second Person Perspective. Finally, I propose that classical internalist psychiatry lacks the tools to adequately treat autistic people. Instead, it would be better to therapeutically intervene with autistic patients from an externalist point of view, easing their coupling with the world through cognitive scaffolding and the development of affordances similar to those of the neurotypical social mind.

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