It is now known that autism is a pre-birth neurological dysfunction. A cacophony
of cant has surrounded the disease for many years, not least of which was the
prevalent myth that these children developed withdrawal symptoms as a result of
an unfeeling mother, commonly referred to as 'the refrigerator mother'.
Emotional trauma was yet another diagnosis, together with the view that these
children had been brought into a hostile, alien universe. Nothing could be
further from the truth. It is an established medical fact that primary autism
is congenital and not acquired.
Stephen, like many other autistic children, was mute as a child. From the age of
five years old, he communicated to the world by drawing on scraps of paper.
Children normally draw, not an aerial view, not the rear or the side elevation,
but a simple front view. This is because children draw those normal symbolic
forms which are essentially conceptual. Stephen was different. His inability to
draw those normal symbolic forms might suggest that he draws not what he knows
but what he sees, although it must be stated that Stephen's early drawings
which illustrate two-dimensional representation in three-dimensional space, are
symbolic in themselves. His drawings of buildings or cars are not photographic
images despite his attempt, with automobiles, to represent graphically what is
seen. The psychology of perception is such that the attempt for any artist to
reproduce 'what he sees' is at best, an equivalence.
I should also like to suggest, albeit tentatively, that autistic artistic
savants 'see' everything without necessarily focusing upon anything in
particular The vision of lesser mortals is unconsciously highly selective.
Stephen's powers of observation bear an uncanny resemblance to that of Dickens.
Peter Ackroyd, in his biography of Dickens, sates: '...and there are many pages
in his journalism or fiction where he unveils incidents and passages from his
childhood with a clarity that seems extraordinary. It is a point to which he
draws attention, all the time emphasising the natures and powers of his
observations. 'I was a child of observation, ' he says: 'I look at nothing that
I know of, but saw everything...' he says again, and he makes the same point in
part of the autobiographical fragment he once wrote of his childhood, 'Their
different peculiarities of dress, of gait, of face, of manner were written
indelibly upon my memory.'
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: MARGARET HEWSON
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