10:30am May 21, 2014

Self and Other

Someone asked me to elaborate on the differences between the following states:

No Self, No Other
All Self, No Other
All Other, No Self
Simultaneous Self and Other

These are terms coined by Donna Williams for stages that people go through during development. Autistic people are more likely to end up in the first three stages for much longer than average, although autistic people can end up in all four.

One important thing about this is that we are talking about conscious awareness. A person in a state of all self, no other, may be aware of self and totally unaware of other, but they may also be aware of self but unconsciously aware of other. Those two situations can produce very different results.

No self, no other is the most basic state, and the hardest to explain. Most people can’t remember the time in their development when this was how they experienced the world. Most autistic people who communicate online can’t even remember it, or at best can only remember it as a distant past at the bare fringes of their memory. They certainly don’t tend to know what it’s like to grow up in such a state and adapt to it, or at least to grow up where such a state is common enough that they become used to it.

Here is how Donna Williams describes no self, no other:

When you experience something external to you, there is the experience of your own boundary. When you experience something, you experience its ‘themes’. You experience its boundaries, its separability and separateness from you. Its existence within those boundaries is not just about its appearance, its surface, its physical substance. It is about its ‘beingness’; its energy within those boundaries, beyond that appearance, that surface, the external appearance of that physical substance. It is possible to experience an entity outside of oneself without taking account of its appearance, its surface or its physical substance. It is possible to be experienced by another entity without it taking account of or experience your own appearance, surface, or physical substance. The energy bound up in these physical forms can be experienced beyond them, not just when this energy gives up its form, as in death, but in life, too. This energy can escape these boundaries and experience other energies beyond their boundaries just as some can leave their own boundaries and experience yours.

[…]

The system of no self, no other is one which does not require the use of body. It has its uses. Living through one’s body, one loses the ability to feel what it is to be as that cake even though one can now use body to pick up the cake and eat it. ‘Socially’, the system of no self, no other is one not of ‘with’, nor ‘at’ nor ‘in front of’ but of ‘as’. This state, though mindless, is the place where the soul is in its purest state before the contortions of mind; a place of total objective subjectivity, before hierarchy or prejudgement.

I know such a description can sound very ‘out there’ especially to the type of autistic person who is very logical and rational. But it’s how many autistic people do in fact experience the world, and Donna is one of the few people who’s managed to wrap any words around it at all. No self, no other is also where what she calls the 'system of sensing’ most flourishes. As a person who is highly sensing, I’m also someone who’s spent a lot of time as 'no self, no other’ and what she describes is as accurate as anything I could add to the matter.

Usually people, including most autistic people I’ve met, move on quickly from no self, no other to the next two phases. The next two phases are equivalents to each other. They are what happens when someone is mono-tracked, and can maintain a conscious sense of self, or a conscious sense of other, but not both.

One reason that I object to any term for nonautistic people that suggests that they are “other-centered” while autistic people are “self-centered”, is that all other, no self is just as autistic a state of mind as all self, no other. If autistic meant all self, no other, and allistic meant all other, no self, I would have no problem with using the words that way. We’d need a new term for autism, though. And I’m not big on neologisms, so. Anyway.

Here is what Donna Williams says about all self, no other:

In the state of all self, no other, I could perceive myself as a person and it was totally natural to express this self equally aimed at a tree as at an animal, object, person, the wind or nothing at all.

In the state of all self, no other, all action is perceived as being from self, to self. It is not a social state of ‘with’, nor even ‘at’. It is a state of ’among’ and ‘in front of’.

In this state, when expression was aimed at other, the sense of other remained theoretical, an impression, not held within the same simultaneous context as self. So selfhood remained whole but the sense of other was partial.

And here’s what she says about all other, no self:

The sense of other can cause a switch to the opposite state, able now to perceive a whole sense of other but robbed of a simultaneous sense of self; it is as though the approach of other causes the self to disappear. Information continues to be accumulated but by a computer now devoid of self. The ‘thank you’, the ‘please’, the perception of having been given something or being meant spontaneously to act upon hints are like color to the blind in this state. In this state, you exist in relation to you even if your actions are aimed at me, just as my actions, even aimed at you, are felt to be from me to me, only allowing you to observe or to hear.

About changing, and staying stuck:

For some, insistent on staying in this phase and hooked on existence, it may become important to stay only in all self, no other, avoiding the switch that would cause the loss of the experience of self. For others, hooked on non-existence, swimming in the purity of affectless information accumulation, the state of all other, no self, life as a walking information centre is preferable.

It is in the switch from sensing to interpretation that the system of all self, no other; all other, no self, begins and it is here also that the body as a tool of sensory exploration begins to be put firmly in place. Here the foundations of relating socially through bodies begins and being in the company of objects and creatures becomes progressively demoted down the rungs of hierarchy in a world governed by formalized and systematized human values. These values simultaneously call us forward and burn the bridges behind us.

Many people switch back and forth between all self, no other, and all other, no self.

Simultaneous self and other is the next phase, and most online autistic people I’ve talked to seem to have reached this phase at least a lot of the time. Sort of where simultaneous self-other is their default phase, and they may switch back into all self, no other, or all other, no self if they get overloaded.

We move from no self, no other to all self, no other; all other, no self and from there into simultaneous sense of self and other — the place of ‘with’ in which we discover comparison, reflection and the competition and hierarchy born of it. As we do this we move from body as a tool of resonance into body as a tool of sensory exploration into body as self through which we express ourselves socially. We develop a sense of social and communicative self and of a personal and internal relationship to body, not as separate to it and often no longer even separable from it.

Here we see ourselves not trapped within body but coming through it like a vehicle for the self within and an extension of that self. Then, with fashion and other often illogical social learning, we begin to shape the expression not of who we are, but of who we think we should be or wish we were and so seal our path as we move away from both true self and the life path that would have sprung from that self which some call destiny.

As we develop, expression, which should spring naturally, diminishes as it is sold out and replaced by stored movements, lines, voices, stored thoughts, wants, likes, and even thoughts about thoughts which are often accessed so much more quickly than connected true expression. This can be especially compounded when true connected expression is blocked by anxiety, accessing problems, guilt, shame, denial, fear, an overwhelming sense of one’s differentness or the need for acceptance.

Here, as we begin to construct false ‘self’, we become demi-gods but we lose company with our first and most basic security — our sense of connected real self. We begin to know inferiority and the possessiveness born of it. We begin to know emptiness and attempt to fill time or bury our heads in the sand. We begin to mistake control for caring, possession for self-worth, defensiveness for strength, dependence for love, submission for respect, and compulsion and obsession for like, want and choice. Here we find our politics and religion, our economics and other God-replacements as we become part of society. In death we again let go of body and return to no self, no other in the great belonging of collective mergence of energies no longer confined to the varied physical forms they clung to. “In my end is my beginning”, wrote T.S. Eliot.

Those are all quotes from the excellent book Autism and Sensing: The Unlost Instinct. You don’t have to agree with all of her conclusions, but she’s pretty much the only autistic person writing about these things. And finding out about sensing was very important to me, because being a highly sensing autistic person explained a good deal of the differences between me and many autistic people I’ve known who were highly interpretive and can’t even comprehend what sensing would be like. I can switch back and forth between sensing and interpretive thought, but sensing feels more like 'home’ to me and it’s the easier of the two for me to use. And there are times I can’t climb up into interpretation at all.

So Donna wrote an article called “In The Real World” which deals with facilitated communication. The reason I’m quoting it is not to talk about FC, but because she describes these self-other problems again, within the context of the article. I linked to the article above, be aware it’s a PDF file.

Here’s the part where she talks about self-other difficulties among autistic people who are mono-tracked:

Another problem with testing is the issue of self and other. As mentioned, one of the problems that can arise from a lack of systems integration, is an ability to hold awareness of two tracks at the same time-I call this being “mono.”

On a simple level, this sort of “mono” can mean that one can process a sentence about “what John did” as long as John remains the central or only subject. When one of the things that John did was to meet the dog who did X, Y, and Z, cognitively either the part about the dog doesn’t get processed and the part about John gets aborted as useless information. “Mono” happens on every information level.

Another expression of “mono,” on a more complex level, is the inability to monitor consecutively a sense of self and other (internal-external) at the same time-the “self-other system.” Although there are many adaptations to this difficulty, what this essentially means is that there is awareness of either (a) only self without a sense of other; (b) a conscious sense of other with no sense of self; © a fluctuation between the two; or (d) in some cases, a shutdown or forfeiting of the entire system with no awareness of either.

Any of this being the case, the manipulation of FC interaction by a tester can be a reckless and ignorant undertaking that takes no account of the adaptations the person with autism may have worked out regarding sense of self and other (internal-external). Here are some examples:

1. A person with autism’s adaptation to self-other difficulty may be consciously aware and voluntarily responsive of external other (the facilitator, one’s own hand, the keys) but be unconsciously aware and only automatically responsive regarding what one is expressing. In this adaptation, what one wants to express is difficult, if not impossible, to retrieve voluntarily upon request (as required by a tester), though it can (as in dreams) be prompted or triggered (which testers won’t allow on the ground that it interferes with the “scientific” procedure). The output in this adaptation would be more in line with the facilitator’s prompting and, therefore, assumed invalid.

2. Now, consider the opposite case in which one is consciously aware and voluntarily responsive regarding (internal) self but unaware of (external) other (including one’s own hand). The prompting touch of a facilitator may be essential to getting the person to use his or her hand as a tool to communicate this awareness (as in the same case with one’s mouth, lungs, voice box- but this involves more complex interactive mechanics than a hand for someone mono). In this case, the output would be different also. The output likely would be more idiosyncratic and less accommodating (or not accommodating at all) of the facilitator’s attempts to guide monologue into dialogue.

3. Consider another situation of the self-other (internal- external) system at work. Not all people with autism have developed the adaptation as simultaneously maintaining conscious/voluntary and subconscious/automatic to get around self-other difficulties. Such a person, in practice, may have only subconscious awareness and automatic responsiveness of self. In a relaxed flexible FC situation, such a person may be able to express fluently, receiving feedback and conscious awareness through the reading process as the words come back through the eyes. Introduce a tester with a rigid format into this situation and the FC user may be pushed to become consciously aware of his or her actions in a way they have never been able to function and this case is doomed to “fail” the test.

4. In the opposite case in which the person has conscious awareness only of self and no awareness, subconscious or otherwise, of other, this person may be as intelligent or more intelligent as anyone in spite of a mountain of labels, but may be unable, regardless of the amount of physical guidance, to connect with his or her own hand (or voice box, lungs, or mouth) enough to demonstrate this trapped awareness. In such a case, the facilitator can only be ultra-attentive to the barest impulse within the hand and must guess the rest, stopping at the point of selection to detect any counter hand impulse. Such a case would have no hope of passing rigorous testing, yet be valid.

5. Consider another, more tragic case, in which one is subconsciously aware and automatically responsive to (external) other but has no connection with self-a case that is vulnerable to the manipulation of an overzealous facilitator-a puppet with puppet-like output.

6. Consider the case in which an FC user is consciously aware and voluntarily responsive of other but has no connection to self and you have a robot with robot-like output.

Now, finally, imagine the situation in which the FC user’s adaptation to self-other difficulties is to fluctuate between several of the combinations above. Introduce a constant change of facilitators and testers and there is bound to be a dramatic shift in the nature and quantity of output, none of which proves that the FC was invalid (as suggested by critics). Just as likely, it may be the case that critics assume this to be proof of invalidity, because they do not understand mechanisms and adaptations they have never experienced and, therefore, have extreme difficulty imaging or catering for these in their non-autistic, integrated, non-mono, perceptual-cognitive- emotional-linguistic-and social-reality). Add to this (though secondary) that the facilitator supports the FC user in adhering to the adaptation that works for that FC user, and the FC user is also more likely to feel a rapport with the facilitator than with the tester.

Anyway, I’m very familiar with no self, no other; all self, no other; and all other, no self. I suspect that most readers here will be at least somewhat familiar with all self, no other, and/or all other, no self, and also simultaneous self/other, but may have trouble comprehending no self, no other. Most will either have simultaneous self/other as their default, or some combination of all self, no other, and all other, no self.

The first three states are extremely common in autistic people. All self, no other is not “more autistic” than either no self, no other or all other, no self. All three of those states are very autistic in nature, although autism isn’t the only thing that can cause a person to stay in them.

I hope this has been useful, both to the person who wrote asking for more information, and to anyone else who is curious.