I think many people would like to be like this: to tell the truth and not take offence at it, to look at the world wide-eyed and without emotional value judgements, and to be able to write ten thousand lines of code without a single mistake, or to draw a city plan in the same fine detail. People such as Elon Musk are born with that ability.
Musk has the autistic personality type, yet people of this type never suffer from autism. The names of the personality types are taken from clinical practice, but they do not denote psychotic illnesses. The same mistake was made with Elon Musk: he was supposedly given a diagnosis, Asperger's syndrome, which is precisely an autism spectrum disorder. So it is too early to brand yourself with an illness and hand out diagnoses: we are talking about features of the personality. Let us call such people “Observers”, because they watch the world simply as witnesses, and are always busy with their own thing.
The Observers are introverts in a passive life position with the Ego type “Contact with Reality”. They belong to the antisocial group (in grandpa Freud's language — with an oral fixation), with a violated Right. What does that mean?
- Introverts — meaning that what they study is not so much themselves as the world around them, and they are perfectly capable of sitting alone and studying the beauty of the world
- Passive — meaning that they will not break through social barriers, fight for the heights or discover new worlds. They find it more interesting to tinker with construction sets, do jigsaw puzzles or read a book
- The main Ego axis, “Contact with Reality”, explains why the Observers are capable of “non-judgemental perception of the world around them”. Their emotions are weakly expressed, their inner system works on an “excitation–inhibition” scheme, that is, the perception of external signals, receptivity to bodily sensations, a fixation on the notion of “pleasant – unpleasant”. The problem moves on the physical level, on the physical plane, with a fixation on the theme of comfort.
- The violated right to Be — I do not exist. A person minimises himself, hides himself, and this is expressed on the bodily plane. How does this show itself in the personality? An undeveloped, blurred sense of one's own presence in this world.
For these people the world consists of a stream of bodily signals, and that is the main and key thing. At the same time they spend most of their time in a state of observation. They watch the world, noticing practically every small detail.
That is exactly why they are very good at establishing, seeing, noticing and remembering facts without any personal appraisal. It never gets as far as a personal, emotional appraisal here. Personal appraisal is not switched on yet, and so the Observers remember a fact best of all just as it is. Fitting that fact into a system, though — that is where the difficulty begins.
“Gestalting” — a feature of the autistic personality type
What is special about people of the autistic personality type is that they gestalt their environment without ever stopping. Everyone “gestalts” all the time, in order to get their bearings in the space around us. Say I have drawn some little figure on a board. What is it? Five dots, a box, a little man, a star — we have begun to “gestalt”.
For a person of a strongly expressed autistic type it will not even be five dots! These are different objects, they are all different, there are no similar ones! They are all distinct, and they cannot be put together into one group. In this respect one can say that people of the autistic type
tend not to see the wood for the trees
They see each separate tree very well indeed, with all its features and differences.
Normally, to grasp a room as a territory it is enough to fix the four corners. If one of the objects in the room has been moved, everything else has stayed as it was.
The Observers, though, who find it hard to put all the signals together into a system, need a great deal of attention and work to get their bearings in a space. Like “Rain Man” (the character of the film of the same name), an Observer simply stares into space, and at the same time notices every detail very precisely.
If an object at the periphery has been moved, a “flash” occurs: literally, a change in every single element changes the whole system radically. The world collapses when one chair in a room is moved, and this makes the Observers uncomfortable, and even causes them pain.
The urge to control the environment
Hence the obsessive urge to control the environment in the Observers, that is, in people of the autistic personality type. And in women it is expressed more strongly than in men.
In childhood, boys of the autistic type come up against the mega-figure of the mother, who — shout or do not shout — will “gestalt” the environment the way she sees fit. And at some point a man of the autistic type learns to defend himself against this, literally growing “armour” against external reality. They begin to concentrate more on inner reality, on their own sensations and comfort. If the world around him has started to change, he withdraws into himself at once, into his comfort, freezes there, minimises his actions, and feels fine.
Girls, on the other hand, compete with the mother and learn to control the environment. To someone looking on from outside this may look like an obsessive control over people, because a human being is just as much a part of the surroundings. But it is important to understand here that this is not about power and not about control in our usual sense of the word, but about a completely different task — creating and preserving a particular external environment.
