Yesterday I posted a piece at the Neoteny site http://www.neoteny.org/?p=385, that suggests a new direction through which autism can be explored. Conducting Google searches for sites or theorists working with the concept of Freud’s primary process (one time, one place, no negatives) that characterizes dream consciousness and the thinking of animals and infants, I found few sites connecting this to autism.
What is at issue is an understanding of primary process as a stage in human evolutionary development, both as a species and ontogenetically as individuals. Freud believed in four-fold parallelism or transformation exhibiting correlations at a species, societal, ontological and individual levels. The impact of autism being the same as an exhibition of primary process suggests autism is an evolutionary condition.
The ramifications are numerous and potentially useful. If there are aboriginal societies that seem familiar with primary process, dream states, and language structures more focussed on the hear and now, then those societies may have something to offer us regarding how to guide into adulthood those modern children unable to extricate themselves from a primary process frame of reference.
