Abstract
ABSTRACT This article offers a neuroscientific explanation of the experience of autism as a disruption to the embodied experience of the Core Self. It recognizes human experience is integrative by nature. Attending to the insights of Penelope Dunbar (Pum), who has lived with autism for decades, we explore an affective neuroscience understanding of autistic experience as a disruption to embodiment and coherence of the Core Self, and how to work creatively with its impulses for health and personal development. Pum describes her autistic disruptions to the intra-personal coherence of her basic states of being, moving-with-feeling in self-awareness, and how this disturbance to her internal subjective coherence of mind challenges her capacity to self-regulate arousal, and communicate with others. By examination of the source of her problems in childhood and ways of working with them, Pum has clarified fundamental elements in the development of her capacity to regulate self-care in creative efforts that facilitate both affective embodiment and sensory-motor coherence in growth of understanding in her mind and body. With her advice, we explore how current neurobiological insights in autism as a disruption to the regulation of affective embodiment and sensory-motor integration leads to new recommendations for therapeutic care to relieve autistic distress and restricted modes of being. Although particular to her circumstances and cultivated habits of autistic expression, this analysis offers insight into the fundamental nature of autism, and ways of positive working with one’s autism for creative gains.
Highlights
In the human mind, consciousness of ‘the self as agent’ (Macmurray, 1957) is not a singular, homogenous phenomenon, but is a layered set of systems integrated by a hierarchy of phylogenetic principles of brain growth and animated activity that give rise to sympathetic actions and reactions that connect ‘persons in relation’ (Macmurray, 1961)
Comparative neuroscientist of emotions, Jaak Panksepp (Panksepp, 1998a; Panksepp & Biven, 2012) identified three levels of neural processing in mammals, each generating an awareness of the Self made in relation to internal and external environments, and mediating between the two. His view advanced by detailed comparative neuroanatomy with penetrating observation of affective expressions and responses common to rodents and primates gave psychology improved description and richer evolutionary understanding of the basic notion of a ‘triune’ brain of Paul MacLean (1990) – the idea that evolution of vertebrate ecology in social groups toward human cultural intelligence incorporated three distinct, but inter-connected levels of processing
As Solms and Panksepp (2012) put it in their title, “The “Id” knows more than the “Ego” admits.”. We accept this as the hierarchy of neurotypical human motor intelligence, and how it grows between the intuitive invention of activity in awareness of the body, and the articulate record and interpretation of thinking with semantic codification of foci of interest in gestural and linguistic syntax with affective prosody (Delafield-Butt & Gangopadhyay, 2013; Delafield-Butt & Trevarthen, 2015; Malloch & Trevarthen, 2009a; Trevarthen & Delafield-Butt, 2017)
Summary
Consciousness of ‘the self as agent’ (Macmurray, 1957) is not a singular, homogenous phenomenon, but is a layered set of systems integrated by a hierarchy of phylogenetic principles of brain growth and animated activity that give rise to sympathetic actions and reactions that connect ‘persons in relation’ (Macmurray, 1961). It’s unique format presents layers of neurons stacked as vast, broad sheets of integration that can process the rich variety of experiences near-simultaneously This new element of the brain provides capacities of enhanced perceptual discrimination, memory, abstract reflection, conceptual organisation, planning, and evaluation. As Solms and Panksepp (2012) put it in their title, “The “Id” knows more than the “Ego” admits.” We accept this as the hierarchy of neurotypical human motor intelligence , and how it grows between the intuitive invention of activity in awareness of the body, and the articulate record and interpretation of thinking with semantic codification of foci of interest in gestural and linguistic syntax with affective prosody (Delafield-Butt & Gangopadhyay, 2013; Delafield-Butt & Trevarthen, 2015; Malloch & Trevarthen, 2009a; Trevarthen & Delafield-Butt, 2017). The basic facts of motivation for human life are common to individuals with their different characters and experiences, and a typical disruption of these within autism may be identified
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