Grandin - Thinking in pictures: and other reports from my life with autism

Oliver Sacks

IN 1986 a quite extraordinary, unprecedented and, in a way, unthinkable book was published, Temple Grandin's Emergence: Labeled Autistic. Unprecedented because there had never before been an inside narrative of autism; unthinkable because it had been medical dogma for forty years or more that there was no inside, no inner life, in the autistic, or that if there was it would be forever denied access or expression; extraordinary because of its extreme (and strange) directness and clarity Temple Grandin's voice came from a place which had never had a voice, never been granted real existence, beforeand she spoke not only for herself, but for thousands of other, often highly gifted, autistic adults in our midst. She provided a glimpse, and indeed a revelation, that there might be people, no less human than ourselves, who constructed their worlds, lived their lives, in almost unimaginably different ways.

The word autism still conveys a fixed and dreadful meaning to most peoplethey visualize a child mute, rocking, screaming, inaccessible, cut off from human contact. And we almost always speak of autistic children, never of autistic adults, as if such children never grew up, or were somehow mysteriously spirited off the planet, out of society. Or else we think of an autistic savant, a strange being with bizarre mannerisms and stereotypies, still cut off from normal life, but with uncanny powers of calculation, memory, drawing, whateverlike the savant portrayed in Rain Man. These pictures are not wholly false, but they fail to indicate that there are forms of autism which (while they may indeed go with ways of thinking and perceiving very different from the normal) do not incapacitate in the same way, but may (especially if there is high intelligence, and understanding, and education) allow lives that are full of event and achievement, and a special sort of insight and courage too.

This was well realized by Hans Asperger, who described these higher forms of autism in 1944but Asperger's paper, published in German, was virtually ignored for forty years. Then, in 1986, came Temple's startling book,