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Intuitive pathways of the autistic mind

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Journal of Medicine and the Person

Abstract

When you enter in conversation with someone else, waiting for the answer takes a minimal amount of time that if exceeded creates some kind of embarrassment and hindrance. If a third subject is present, she/he will usually intervene either to remove the hindrance, or to solve the embarrassment. But when one subject exceeds systematically the minimal time for answering, she/he is bound to be diagnosed as autistic. Of course, there are other criteria, is not so simple, but if you read novels like Stephen Hero, by Joyce, you can get an idea about what Autism can be conceived from the point of view of literature. In the following work we will read back the main steps that made the autistic guys psychopathologic, with no hope, and the other gaze on Autism, which was always shaped by a kind of admiration in front of a “mysterious” form of existence.

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Notes

  1. When we talk about “Discursive practices” we are following the discourse analysis method, particularly [1, 2].

  2. Among them Enrico Valtellina (PhD), Michele Capararo (MD), Conny Russo (PhD), Andrée Bella (PhD), Beatrice Catini (PhD Student), Nadine Tabacchi (Free Lance Philosopher), and other students of psychology at the University of Bergamo.

  3. Babil is a French neologism, we take it from Le Clézio [4].

  4. http://neurodiversity.com/main.html See also [14].

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Correspondence to Pietro Barbetta.

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This is to confirm that in the essay The Autistic Way, written by Pietro Barbetta and Enrico Valtellina, I, Pietro Barbetta, have no conflict of interest of any sort.

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Barbetta, P., Valtellina, E. Intuitive pathways of the autistic mind. J Med Pers 13, 169–177 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12682-015-0214-9

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