I have seen and continue to see books and articles attempting to explain autism. All these books and articles do not contribute other than a symptomatic description: the triad of impairments: lack of eye contact, rejection of physical contact, social inability. The autistic is an individual under siege in social life. But why? I haven’t seen any description from the inside of the experience. They lack what Baron Cohen calls TOM (theory of mind), that is the capacity to guess others‘ intentions: but how do you feel; which is the quality of your life if you lack TOM? It’s hell, but how would you describe autistic hell? For what I know only in literature you find some rich and meaningful descriptions. Descriptions by writers who were autistic: Kafka, Patricia Highsmith, Robert Walser, Agotha Kristof. They have coined the term magical realism for some of this literature, because nothing apparently extraordinary happens in this fiction (which is not fiction, in fact). Only the overall atmosphere is weird. Well I think we should start from here, not from external symptoms, the triad etc.
