Autism and Neurotypicality E-Book

Ingrid Manogg

• Herausgeber: BoD - Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 473

Beschreibung

As humans, we connect. What role do inner images and emotions play in this? Which sensory systems do we use, are we hostile to thinking? What seems beautiful to us, what do we perceive as a reward? What are favourite children, what is the significance of feelings such as envy, what functions do pride and shame have? What are the differences between autistic people and neurotypes in all this? We ask about deep structures and conditions of origin and look at how the neurotypical patterns interact with our social system A psycho-logical analysis with new approaches

Leseprobe

About this book

As humans, we connect. How do we imagine our connections? What role do inner images and emotions play in this? Which sensory systems do we use, are we hostile to thinking? What seems beautiful to us? What do we perceive as a reward – is it the same for all people? What are favourite children, what is the significance of feelings such as envy, what do ancestors stand for, what functions do pride and shame have? What are the differences between neurotypicals and autistic people in all this?

Autism is not simply an innate cluster of deficits. We analyse deeper structures and possible conditions of formation. Neurotypicality does not serve as a standard for the 'normal', we do not take it for granted. Here, too, we ask about deep structures and conditions of origin and look at how the neurotypical patterns interact with our social system.

About the author

Ingrid Manogg, born 1962, Graduate Psychologist

Table of contents

Introduction

Connection – the base of felt being

Connection to the inside and outside

Rhythmic and dynamic

Letting go of connections

Inner images, constancy of person, Schrödinger's cat

Reward

Sense and senses

Primary, secondary and tertiary systems

The sense of thought is a mediator

Hostility to thought

How we evaluate sensory impressions

The despised feet

Beauty, attraction and identification

Basis for ideas of beauty

Differentiation of beauty criteria in children

Basic beauty criteria for women and men

Friends, likeness, and smell

Neurodiversity / Autistic spectrum

Diagnosis – innovations, questionnaires

Diagnosis / differential diagnosis – comment

Why therapies don't work

False allegations

Reading facial expressions: 'This is not a pipe'

Interpretations – noble gas and carbon

Empathy

Mirror neurons

Interoception – embodiment

Origin of autism

Resonance, incompatibility, disconnection, independence –

t

he RIDI theory

After birth

Trauma and assault

Neurotypical idea of connection

Neurotypicality and the emergence of lies

Half-solutions

Longing and striving

Wrong rhythm and inappropriate pedagogy

Music box

Afraid of ghosts

Emotional blackmail – the example of feeding

Small talk, 'elaboration' and rituals for adults

Take possession of it

Manipulation with metaphors

Hurt feelings

Paradise, primal fear and primal scream

The sibling envy lie

The favourite child lie

The role of the ancestors

Shame and pride

Neurotypicality and autism at a glance

Neurotypical patterns

Autistic patterns

Neurotypicality and capitalism

Berries, bears and shortages

The process of civilisation

Basis for capitalist thinking

Epilogue

Eutopia

Literature / References

Introduction

This book is an attempt to understand human experience and behaviour on a deeper level. Most psychological writers limit themselves to a superficial account of neurotypical experience and behaviour, and authors who describe autism or neurodiversity tend to stay at the symptom level. Neurotypical standards and the associated social organisation are hardly questioned. However, people are already individually different in terms of their basic needs for connection, reward and beauty – not only autism, but also neurotypicality is a spectrum.

In the first chapters the differences between neurotypical and autistic people are not yet in the foreground. It is about the more general meaning of feelings of connection, about the understanding of the so-called object constancy, about rewards and about our sensory systems. I also count the thinking system among the sensory systems. Only in the further chapters is it about the underlying differences and about the specific emergence and pattern formation of autism and neurotypicality.

Some of my theses and trains of thought are new, insofar as something can be new; other theses are newly combined or supplemented from already known theses. My approach follows psycho-logic, not so-called psychology, and should also be understandable for laymen. Of course, even the best psycho-logic cannot capture everything; any logic can lead to wrong conclusions. There are different types of logic and no logic is right for everything. As in physics, most assumptions only apply in certain contexts and under certain conditions. Gravity does exist both on Earth and on the Moon, however, an apple on the Moon would not fall to the ground the same way.

If you are only interested in certain topics, i.e. want to jump, I recommend reading the chapters Inner children, person constancy, Schrödinger’s cat as well as the RIDI theory in advance.

The aim of this book is to encourage the reader to think along and think further, but above all to gain a greater understanding of the different experiences and behaviour of people – whether 'typical' or 'diverse'. May this broaden individual and social spaces of thought and freedom, so that good visions can flourish in their niches and one day unite.

Connection – the base of felt being

We are 'Planet Man' – we are made up of different organs and billions of microorganisms. Therefore, we have a need for perceived unity and for a superordinate 'administrative authority'. There are different ways to make connections and break connections. In this chapter, we describe the basic characteristics of connections and the principle of action of mirror therapy. We touch on the 'true' story of Narcissus and explore our pain centre.

Connection to the inside and outside

We can connect to almost anything. We are even able to perceive inanimate or animate things that do not belong to our body as belonging. Blind people feel with their cane as if it were an extended arm or finger. And everyone can learn to feel a rubber arm as if it were their own. This has been sufficiently tested in experiments.

We put an arm on a table. The arm is gently stroked by someone else. Then a rubber arm is placed close to our real arm. It is stroked at the same time in the same way as our real arm. After a while, our real arm is covered – we can no longer see it. If the rubber arm is stroked, we react to it in the same way as before to stroking our real arm. We feel connected to the rubber arm.

We can also connect with mentally imagined body parts. There is an ancient exercise in which we learn to visualise and feel a mental arm in addition to our real arm.

Place your arm on a table or on your thigh. The palm is open and facing up. Slowly raise the arm. Centimetre by centimetre, bend it while constantly feeling and observing until you touch the equilateral shoulder with your hand. Then bring the arm back to the starting position just as slowly. After a few rounds, you imagine a mental arm rising from your real arm and performing the same movements, while your real arm remains on your thigh or the table. Finally, you move the mental arm and the real arm simultaneously in an opposite motion, the real arm rises, the mental arm lowers. The moment the arms meet, pass through each other, there is a kind of flash, a moment of trance. Finally, let your mental arm sink back into the real arm. If you could concentrate well, you had two arms on one shoulder for a moment.

Even before we form a bond with people and feel a sense of belonging to them, our brain is looking for connections. We have all experienced as embryos that one grows out of the other and unfolds at the same time as our sense of self and body. We went in many ways in connection with everything that we encountered in terms of stimuli from our inner self and from the environment, the mother's womb.

We 'know' that we ourselves are a 'unity' composed of many parts. We are Planet Man. We consist not only of billions of microorganisms, e.g. bacteria, but also of more or less autonomously working organs, sensory systems, fascia and others. We also consist of different self-conceptions that overlap and develop together building on each other. Scientists claim that life on Earth evolved in submarine black volcanic chimneys made of sulphur-eating, heat-resistant single-celled bacteria. These single-celled organisms also began to feed on each other, they took each other in. As a result, they became more complex, differentiated, and new combinations emerged. The new, more complex beings also reacted and then acted as a whole, as a unit.

Our brain is also composite. In the beginning there was only the brainstem, then it grew, new parts differentiated, up to the prefrontal cortex. So, we are a network and function together with all our parts and particles. What constitutes our core or soul is controversial. There is no doubt that we are looking for a unifying principle, for a uniform definition of 'us and our particles', for a higher authority, for something that directs.

The way in which we define ourselves as a unit, what our individual ideas of our embodiment, our brain, and the hierarchy of our systems look like, is of course co-shaped or reshaped by our socialisation, learning systems such as school and media, and by the narratives that belong to the prevailing ideologies.

Regardless of this, we as individuals need to define ourselves as a unit. It would not make sense for our survival if we did not 'understand' sensory systems such as eyes and ears or our arms, legs and hands as belonging to us in the long term or if we indiscriminately connected to objects foreign to the body. If we could receive no or only wrong feedback from our body or mind, nothing would be left of us very quickly. Physiologically and culturally, we have a different relationship to our body parts and sensory systems. Hands are closer to us than feet, eyes seem more important to most people than noses or ears.

As a perceived wholeness, we want to fit into a unity with other units, dock onto others or partially mix. We look for fits, just like bacteria and viruses do. If something fits, it rewards us.

Our first connections between our inside and the outside take place in a closed room, in the womb, still without eye contact with people or human touch. We build connective sensations through stimuli such as intestinal sounds, heartbeat, umbilical cord, placental taste and smell; later also via auditory stimuli such as the mother's voice, about touching or pressure in her abdomen, and about rocking when she moves or walks. Our visual system only becomes dominant at a later point in time, but then it becomes the most important basis of connections for most people. The so-called mirror therapy uses this.

Some people who have lost a limb, such as an arm, suffer from phantom limb pain. The arm that is no longer there hurts. The brain obviously cannot comprehend the loss of the arm, perhaps it happened too suddenly. The brain tries to re-establish the connection to something which should be still there, as in the memorised body image, but in which an acute pain has been stored in the end. The failure is ambivalent, on the one hand the brain wants to avoid reliving the last pain, on the other hand the chronic 'unfinished business' torments it, it absorbs all other sensations. As early as the 1970s, Richard Bandler advised doctors not to inject painkillers into the real arm in the case of phantom limb pain, but into the missing arm, because it is the missing arm that hurts. But even if the painkiller, injected into the missing arm, revives the former arm in the imagination of the person, the connection idea does not necessarily remain.

In mirror therapy, the attempt is made to re-establish the connection between the brain and the lost arm through visualisation. The patient sits relaxed at a table with a mirror on it. His existing arm lies on the tabletop and is caught by the mirror. The other half of the body and the arm base of the missing arm are covered. In the mirror, the patient sees himself mirror-inverted, i.e. he sees himself, now with his non-existent arm. The brain is familiar with the image, it remembers. It takes the lost arm for real, without pain, and reactivates the original connection (appropriate suggestions are needed for support). Gradually, in several passes, the brain can let go of the 'wrong' arm, understand the separation and accept that this arm is no longer on the body. The physical pain is gone, the business is 'finished'. For the mental pain, the mental rupture, supplementary psychotherapy is still needed.

As you see, we can connect in different ways. We can expand and change our body image, we can 'merge' with others or others temporarily or more permanently in our imagination. However, even mirror therapy only has a success rate of up to 70%. This means that it does not work for at least 30%. What could be the reason?

Many autistic or neurotypical people who have been traumatised by humans cannot or cannot go well into a reflection, into an idea of themselves, into a film or into a photo. The image remains outside of them. On the one hand, they can be bothered by the fact that foreign things are mixed into the picture via the mirror upside down, the mirrored background or a restrictive mirror frame. On the other hand, they can be uncomfortable with being close to other living beings or people, namely if they associate closeness with encroachment. Then even one's own reflection is not perceived as physically substantial (which in fact is not). In its frontality and through the captured background image, it triggers the idea of other people, of foreign views.

How can we be ourselves and someone else at the same time? A mirror image, a film character or an avatar is embodied if it is to appear alive. It is filled with fictitious body heat and emotion. Neurotypicals go into a mirror image, a film character, a game character or an avatar as if they were wrapping themselves in a coat. The outer façade is enough for them to feel like someone else, they feel mainly from the outside in. However, autistic people, certain traumatised people and also some neurotypicals have to reject the external image in such a situation, because they tend to perceive from the inside out. If they are to absorb something from the outside, the forced 'closeness' is experienced as an assault or as an overwhelm.

People who look for themselves in the reflection are called narcissists according to ancient Greek legend. But no one is just looking for themselves in the mirror. If we look at ourselves in the mirror, someone else is still watching. We remember early foreign glances, and we are always wrongly reflected in the mirror, at least reversed. Our reflection doesn't really match the body's sense of self, it's outside of us.

Narcissus was a handsome youth, perhaps just the only young man who lived on a certain riverbank with his nymph mother. He was a rooster in the basket. Many young nymphs courted him, wanted to be noticed and looked at by him. They began to hate him because he took no notice of them, but instead looked into the river, day in and day out. When they looked at what Narcissus was looking at, they saw the reflection of Narcissus and thought he was absorbed in his own sight. When he jumped into the river, dived and disappeared, they thought he had wanted to grab his reflection out of sheer infatuation with himself. But Narcissus was looking for something else. He didn't know his father. The only information he had was he was a river god and had raped his mother so that she never spoke about him.

At puberty at the latest, the question of origin, the nature of the producers, and affiliation becomes important. It can become more important than anything else. If it is not answered, there is no room for connections of a different kind, because we do not feel like a complete self. First the void has to be filled, the phantom pain soothed. Thus, many neurotypicals reflect their own void and hope that another face may come along, perceive their own face benevolently, and thus affirm their being and suchness.

The existential basic needs such as food, water, air, warmth, a safe place, etc. interact with the basic needs of connection and belonging at the beginning of our lives. Only in extreme situations can these existential basic needs become more important than felt connection and / or belonging. If adults abandon a small child, it cannot survive. Exclusion from the group therefore meant certain death, at least in earlier times. This borderline experience sits deep within us. That's why bullying is so devastating, that's why adults can also die if they are banished from their group via voodoo rituals and put under a killing curse.

The feeling of belonging arises from a connection that is perceived by both sides, sometimes also from one-sidedly fantasised connections. It develops through the so-called bond that young children build with their caregivers. The way we form bonds depends on the way we have built connections with ourselves and our environment. This is different for autistic people from the beginning than for neurotypicals.

A baby combines its different sensations through simultaneity. It studies the image, the face of a caregiver, then it reaches for it and now 'grasps' it through two sensory systems. If it also hears the voice of the caregiver, the auditory system is also connected. In this way, the caregiver becomes an overall figure with whom the baby builds a relationship.

Once we have built up our first bonds as small children, secure or insecure, we learn to form connections with other living beings on the basis of this basic pattern. In a good, secure connection, we feel noticed, noticed and recognised in our needs. Ideally, we are also in touch with ourselves, so that we can also perceive others without taking away their space or losing our space ourselves.

Although we don't want to be tied down, possessed, or improperly connected, this happens all the time. Because many have already learned as children to understand belonging not as listening to each other, but as belonging to each other or even listening and following. Then those affected have to look for more and more evidence of their belonging, because the connection is not really coherent and therefore cannot be felt.

Many people with insecure attachment believe that they will lose a connection if they do not constantly feel, see, hear or think about the being or object in question. They are looking for a static connection, for absolute security and belonging. Static security must be tangible for them, just as physical contact with the mother is for a baby. (Smartphones serve this need, which is why many people are so attached to them.) However, no baby constantly clings to the primary caregiver, but learns to move in and out of interaction with the caregiver. If humans were to find a static security, they would have to break out of it immediately, because we are dynamic like all living things. What does not move, we consider dead.

Even if we don't connect with other people, our brains and bodies are constantly working to connect things. What does one sensory stimulus have to do with another sensory stimulus? What was before, what was after? How is one related to the other, are there causalities? Is there something new in the familiar, or are there deviations? Our brain, both in the waking and sleeping states, tries to place everything into the right original filing system and compress it there to make room for new experiences. In this way, we are always free to learn. Our filing system can also be expanded and offer scope for new categories or expanded perspectives.

Rhythmic and dynamic

All connection options have one thing in common. They are rhythmic or at least dynamic. They are never static, even if people strive for static for their sense of security and lose their connection again precisely because of this. Gaps or syncopation shape us just as much as present sensory stimuli. We can only perceive during the break. A continuous tone, a continuous background noise must be faded out, otherwise we have trouble absorbing other stimuli, classifying them or processing them. So, we get used to constant stimuli and no longer react to them. This is called habituation.

Our brain only reacts to deviations from what we are used to. Through distraction, by switching to other sensory systems, we can block out continuous signals for a short time. But this only works to a limited extent. If a continuous tone does not stop sounding, it is decoupled from perception. Embryos that are constantly exposed to sound that are too loud can become deaf to the corresponding frequency, and body-temperature bath water is not felt. A too regular heartbeat of the mother, without syncope, would insufficiently prepare the resonating heart of the unborn person for adaptation to different states of excitement.

Our sensory systems, just like our organs, clock in different rhythms. Our sense of smell switches off the reception of a new smell after about seven minutes. Only after another seven minutes can we smell the same olfactory stimulus again.

Our pain system also clocks in this way, as long as the pain is not too vehement. We can suppress pain, distract ourselves from it, but it keeps coming back until the cause is healed. This applies to physical pain as well as to mental pain. Our brain itself is insensitive to pain, so it is responsible for reporting and processing pain.

Our pain centre in the brain is responsible for both types of pain, mental and physical – like a city consisting of two districts. In the case of young children and some adults, the districts are indistinguishable from each other. They then usually react psychosomatically, i.e. mentally, emotionally and physically at the same time.

Depending on the culture and socialisation, the pain districts are separated in the course of growing up, sometimes even connecting roads and bridges are blocked. Then we only somatise and no longer perceive our mental pain, or, conversely, we only perceive the mental pain and ignore the physical pain. However, a blockade in one part of the city can also lead to a blockade in the other part of the city.

Neuroscientists can identify a so-called pain signature. They have found that chronic, physically strong pain can cause the system to 'jump', it then fires signals increasingly in the emotional area. In the same way, chronic mental pain can turn into physical pain. People for whom the entire city of pain is blocked usually do not live long.

Some people claim that they cannot develop feelings if they do not also feel their body. But people also feel with their minds or brains, even when the body is numb. Of course, feelings can be perceived more intensely if body sensations are perceived at the same time, and of course the range of feelings expands when we include the body. We then absorb more sensory stimuli, but above all we have more words for them. We can hardly consciously classify feelings without labels. When it comes to self-knowledge and self-anchoring, feeling and inhabiting our body is very important, otherwise we can feel cut off. When we feel something, it is similar to when we taste something. On the intrinsic taste of feelings, the inhabitation and feeling of the body acts like spices. If we remove the spices, everything tastes like nothing at first. However, we can mentally spice things up through stored memories.

We are in constant connection with what surrounds us from the very beginning by resonating with them. What we resonate with in detail, varies from person to person. But resonating with something or someone is always characterised by dynamics, i.e. deviations. We can't resonate with a flatline. We tune in to our fellow human beings, we mirror their tone, their movements, their energy. We clock with the times of day, with the seasons, with the upheaval of the earth, with the lighting conditions, with the activities of our organs (biorhythm). The seasonally recurring colours in fashion pick up on this mechanism, we also want to adapt to the conditions on the outside.

Coherent sequences of notes, i.e. music, are often described as the connecting medium between people, peoples and nations. When we go into connection with a rhythm, neurotypicals fantasise about a connection to the people who move to the same rhythm and resonate in it – synchronicity as a criterion for connection or even oneness.

Riding triggers a similar mechanism. Even before birth, we are carried rocking by the footsteps of the mother. Later, as toddlers, we would naturally sit on the mother's hip as carriers and wrap our legs around her body. If a horse moves below us and we can swing along, we therefore feel accepted by it. We believe that we are in contact – without having to pay attention to the supporting being. This can contribute to the success of riding therapies, but unfortunately also to misjudgements of the horse's condition.

Because we need gaps or syncopation for our perception to function, our perception is always filled, but never complete. Our visual perception also does not show us everything, although we live in the illusion of seeing everything. We blink about twenty times a minute, and with every blink of an eye we create a visual perception gap. We bridge them with expectation images, which we link with the last seen images, the afterimages. At the same time, we link the expectation images with images from our memory, especially when earlier experiences are triggered. This ability to create expectation images that fill in the gaps in perception and suggest that our seeing shows us a coherent film is a basic prerequisite for imagining the future on the one hand, eventually for all imagination.

Especially in the state of 'blinkless' perception (trance, meditation, third eye), people believe that they perceive everything and believe therefore everything to be true. They find it difficult to think or fantasise in this state or can think and fantasise only in a different way. There is then no gap for processing, there is no cognitive dissonance, no contradictions. In this state, people feel safe and timeless. They believe that they are free of beliefs or subjective patterns of interpretation. But a fly also has excellent mosaic eyes, and yet it does not recognise the spider's web or the glass panes of our windows.

By the way, e.g. snakes also blink – all living things live in rhythms. Snakes blink with their most important sensory organ, the tongue: they flick. Every time a snake withdraws its tongue so that it does not dry out or stick and so that it can absorb new stimuli again. It has a perception gap. Just like people, it has to bridge this gap with ideas. As a snake, it probably does this with expectation-smell patterns.

Man is certainly not the only creature with ideas about the future and the past. Nor is he the only being who can recognise himself in the mirror. Humans define a mirror only as the visual mirror, but not the olfactory mirror of dogs or the tactile-sense mirror of cats or blind people. For a long time, man believed that only he could feel, think, recognise himself in the mirror, fantasise, remember… All illusion. After all, some scientists are now willing to acknowledge other sensory systems or other structures of the brain. Birds and octopuses do not have a cortex, and yet they are also very intelligent by human definition. Many claim that fish are dumb and deaf, but every fisherman knows that this is not the case. But only when it is 'scientifically proven' do people correct their false assumptions.

Letting go of connections

We cannot be static or permanent in the same way in the same connection. Not with people, not with ideas, not with the environment, not with ourselves. Because neither we nor anything else is static and unchangeable. Connections are also subject to rhythms and need syncopation.

Not even the idea of eternal love lasts forever. We can only conjure it up once in a while, and it changes every time. We have to let go again and again, mentally, emotionally and physiologically. If we don't keep breaking connections, we no longer feel them, and we don't create space for something new. If we don't breathe out, we can't breathe in. If we don't excrete, we can't absorb new energy. Let us not forget, we cannot unlearn and learn new things.

We can let go of connections of any kind, mental, emotional or physical, better if it happens in a process, if there are enough other supporting connections or if new connections arise at the same time. No one will try to exhale underwater if they can't resurface right away – we'd rather hold our breath.

People connect with each other in different ways, depending on the phase of development, imagination and how a connection is predominantly experienced – physically, mentally, emotionally or in a combination. Letting go of an externally light linear connection feels different from letting go of an internally felt one. Many people visualise connections similar to outstretched arms touching another. They embody their imagination and consider it to be linear in some respects. Others fantasise about connection as round, similar to hugs, or like small children who want to be clasped and held. Still others imagine connection as a unit, then they 'stick' or merge. If an outstretched arm is not grasped or even suddenly released, or if you are dropped, the perceived connection is broken or cut off.

It makes a difference whether we voluntarily leave a connection, whether we are let go or even abandoned. It also makes a difference whether someone leaves our side or from our hearts, whether someone stood by our side like a support, whether someone stood behind us and thus gave us backing, or whether we felt enveloped by someone.

We can put people who are important to us in a family constellation and see where in the room they have their place. We can do this in our imagination as well. Then we place other people in our inner 'Social Panorama' (the term comes from Lukas Derks, 'Social Panoramas').

Where a person locates in our imagination plays a decisive role in where the perceived tear or gap arises when someone leaves, and how visible or noticeable the absence is. Everyone can check in their imagination where 'their' people are located: front, back, left, right, side, near, farther away, bigger, smaller, brighter…

Do people always stand reliably in the same position, do they change their location, are they clearly recognisable? Where do they look, how do I look at them, to whom do I feel a connection, and if so, in what way?

The more important a connection is, the more likely it is that letting go of it will lead to a grieving process. Processes take time, but in our culture, letting go should also happen quickly. If you have lost something, buy a replacement, something new, something better. Standing still is a step backwards, the cogs must continue to turn, no one must disturb the common rhythm that suggests a basic connection between our togetherness. Employees are e.g. entitled to a maximum of three days off after the loss of a close relative (in Germany). Anyone who grieves for more than two weeks should see a doctor or therapist and then receive the diagnosis of depression. Gaps that have arisen should be filled with 'good' pictures as quickly as possible.

Of course, a successful grieving process always ends with conciliatory images. The gap is then at least diffuse or softly filled, so that it no longer hurts acutely. Another place is found for the person who has passed, maybe in heaven, and other images of man move to the foreground or closer to the gap, which is thus narrowed. But this cannot be achieved under pressure or in a given period of time.

In addition, changing the images and visually closing the gap is only one aspect of the grieving process. The people who left were not only associated with images, but also with certain bodies, with beliefs, memories and certainties, perhaps also with feelings of guilt. Every person has his or her own individual basic pattern. Some gaps cannot be filled or can only be filled insufficiently (broken heart syndrome), and some gaps should be considered for a while. Perhaps an image behind it appears, which was previously covered and is otherwise suppressed again, an image that the mourner should deal with. Because perhaps he suffers not only from the current loss, but also from underlying losses experienced in earlier times or experiences that could not yet be dealt with.

Since the location in the inner family system, in the social panorama, and the quality of the connections can be so different, the official five phases of grief do not suit every person, neither in terms of content nor in the given order (denial, anger, despair, resignation and acceptance). Children grieve differently than adults anyway, they do not feel obligated and are not able to think of anyone 24 hours a day. They go into grief and out again into life, they switch back and forth and therefore rarely freeze completely. If they did, they would no longer be able to grow internally and externally, they would cut off all connections to life. Many adults, who even forbid a smile to appear in them while they are in mourning, do not understand this and consciously or unconsciously reproach their children. But children live more in the here and now, like autistic people.

Women who lose an unborn child are also rarely understood in this visual world. Their grief is dismissed with sayings like 'The child wasn't even really present yet', or 'You can have a new one'. In fact, pregnant women have never seen their child. Their grief is internal and physical, they have only diffuse visual ideas. It helps most of them if their children are beautifully photographed. Then they can make a visual connection with them, externalise the connection through it, create a place on the outside and let go a little. And they have 'proof' that they are grieving for something real so that others can grieve with them.

Depending on the individual preference of certain sensory systems, we need different things in the process of letting go, usually several at the same time. Some need to express themselves, some want to write or paint, some want to move. For the visual system, we need good images, the more disturbing the last images were, the more of them. For the nameless, incomprehensible thing about the disappearance of a being, we need good names, words. And for the vanished physical-substantiality we need a place, too, both on the outside, e.g. in a cemetery, and in our imagination.

It is bad for people when loved ones have died somewhere far away and they do not know exactly how and where this happened. During the Second World War, when German soldiers were fighting in Russia, many of their little sons put flags on a map that marked the course of the front. They waited for their father's return, were with him in their thoughts, accompanied him in a very large, distant country. If the father did not return, the associations with him remained connected to the distant country. Even as adults, the children hoped for a sign from the country that 'accommodates' their father, they were looking for a sign. Even when some fathers returned, they were changed. Something of them had remained in the distance, like the children's longing for the lost, fatherless years.

This location of fathers in the distance in combination with diffuse feelings of guilt on the part of the children at the time – the fathers were among the losers and who knows what misdeeds they committed – may help explain the servitude of some German politicians to Russian rulers. The longing for the father is shifted to male representatives of the distant country; the need to be close to the father, to support him or to justify him clouds the mind. Such shifted longings can be passed on unconsciously, just like any traumas.

Unfortunately, there is less and less space for the dead as well as for the living, everything is increasingly shifted into the infinite, visual imagination space. But on the internet and in the metaverse, people are building the same cities that they know in the base reality, and they are also making the same rules. Everything is doubled, so that people feel like they are in a (more beautiful?) mirrors to what is familiar to them, even if not with all their senses. A deceptive sense of security arises, which can end abruptly when the data world collapses. Then everything is gone.

Letting go too suddenly, disconnecting too quickly or cutting off the connection can lead to shock trauma and phantom limb pain. Then it takes a lot more to let go. Some people therefore consider it a solution not to connect in the first place in order to avoid separation pain prophylactically.

Buddhists try to release all attachments to the earthly. According to their idea, suffering arises from emotions, desire, striving, and ultimately from additional movements. Only in the purely mental space of imagination is everything safe, true and free. However, Buddhists also live in associations and are attached, because no one cannot not attach. Buddhists are attached among other things to their homeland, to their rituals, to their beliefs, to stats, to their abbot or highest representative; they usually live in the same monastery all their lives, always with the same brothers or sisters from childhood. They always get up at the same time, have a hierarchy and only a certain perceptual perspective. They eat what is put in front of them, but the smell of the incense sticks is not arbitrary. They are also in no particular hurry to enter their nirvana. Some consider themselves to be a bodhisattva, an enlightened or awakened one, who is charged with passing on his knowledge. However, if the captain is the last to leave the ship, it means that he is attached to his ship or to his duty. Buddhists therefore understand attachment only as a selection of possible connections.

We can also confuse letting go with forgetting, devaluing or throwing away. We have all learned to abruptly cut off the connection to something that is still current, valuable or interesting, because in certain situations we have to abruptly turn our attention to something else, e.g. in case of danger. We cannot pay attention to all around us, we cannot feel connection to everything in all sense systems at the same time. When people claim to be in contact with 'everything', they are only in connection with their idea of 'everything'.

Small children practice dropping and picking up again, both are equally important to them. Later, they learn from their caregivers to throw away carelessly. Perhaps the turrets or doll line-ups they built were no longer worth anything as soon as they had to clean up or the vacuum cleaner roared through the room. Maybe they didn't count for anything even in certain situations. Just a moment ago someone was smiling at them, then the cell phone rang.

In earlier times, if a person hunted a flight animal, he sought the connection to it via the track, the trajectory of a spear or arrow. Once the animal had been killed, the connection to the living creature, which was now dead, was broken. Humans then only cared about the usability of the prey.

We see, there are many very different ways of connecting and breaking connections. Nevertheless, most people assume that everyone else seeks connection and is connected in the same way as they do, which can be a problem, especially for autistic people.

People don't just connect with other people. They develop ideas about people, inner images, and enter into contact with them. They place their inner images on the outside, they project – often they are more in contact with their images than with the real people. Some don't even compare their pictures with the people behind them, but want to adapt people to their pictures.

Inner images, person constancy and Schrödinger's cat

Central to human abilities, to the whole of human culture, is our imagination. It develops through the desire for connection, usually for connection with our first caregiver. Through the so-called object constancy or the constancy of persons, we build up our inner social panorama. By solving the mystery of Schrödinger's quantum cat, we find an important difference between neurotypicals and autistic people.

Even the most caring parents cannot be with their children in a good way all the time, either physically or mentally. In addition, no child can limit himself to just looking at his parents or feeling them physically all the time. It also needs room for other things. Human children therefore develop the so-called object constancy.

In 'modern' psychology, there is currently confusion about the terms object constancy and object permanence. I won't go into that. In the following, I will work with the concept of object constancy and also introduce the concept of person constancy. This means object constancy in relation to people. Or is a mother, usually the first caregiver, an object? The term constancy of persons already existed, e.g. by Gottfried Fischer, who refers to Piaget ('The Relationship of the Child to the Objective and Personal World', 1986).

Other creatures also develop object and ‘person’ constancy. However, it goes much faster with them. In apes, our closest relatives, it is completed after three months at the latest.

The fact that the process takes longer in humans is due to his premature birth. Straightening up to bipedalism, walking upright, once led to narrower pelvises and these led to earlier births. Due to the premature birth, the child needed reliable support for a longer period of time, and the window of social learning became larger. At the same time, the development of object and person constancy became more susceptible to interference or, to put it positively, it left more room for variants.

Object constancy means the inner certainty that an object is still there, that it exists – even if it is no longer perceptible on the outside. If a child has developed an enduring idea of e.g. a ball, it has developed an object of constancy for it. The idea of the ball has detached itself from the object.

During the development of object constancy, the perception of a concrete ball is thus supplemented by the idea of a ball: the ball has rolled under a cabinet and is no longer visible, but it is still there. The idea of the ball is stored as a memory and can be retrieved in the present. So, there is now a concrete ball and an abstract ball, the ball itself. This idea of the ball is not just an image, but a more or less complex shape. It can also be composed of form, sound, smell and feeling. The ball presentation is now representative of all balls (only later is a distinction made between tennis ball, water polo, basketball, football). Of course, blind and deaf people also develop object constancy as a matter. The more sensory systems are linked to an idea, the more intense it is. However, it is difficult to develop strong ideas only through images. The image of a pizza in a picture book creates only a faint idea in children. If, on the other hand, they bake a pizza with other children or adults and then eat it, the performance becomes 'juicy'.

If we have a word for a stored object of imagination, a kind of picture frame is added. In this way, we can contain and banish images or inner films by naming them. Deaf children capture or frame differently, perhaps with colours and shapes. Blind children can contour with sounds, rhythms, shapes and haptics.

Parallel to the object constancy, a child develops a constancy of person – an enduring idea of its first caregiver. This idea is essential for survival. Someone is there for me, someone outside of me exists, even if I don't see, feel, smell, or hear anyone.

The physicist Erwin Schrödinger developed a quantum theoretical paradox that arose from a somewhat sadistic idea: a fictitious cat is locked in a cage. If an atomic nucleus that is also in it decays, the cat dies. (The decaying atomic nucleus triggers either the release of poison gas or the mechanism of a pistol that shoots the cat). From the outside, it is not visible whether the atomic nucleus decays and whether the cat dies or lives. Is the cat there or is it not there? Or is it there and not there at the same time?

The problem cannot be solved in this way. But if we bring it in analogy to the development of the constancy of person, it seems logical. The Schrödinger fantasy then corresponds to a condensation of the experience of small children in the phase in which the constancy of person is built up: the child repeatedly deals with the question of whether the caregiver is there, whether he or she exists, even if he or she can no longer be seen, heard, smelled and touched.

Does the image of the caregiver disintegrate when he or she is not present, and does the idea of him or her also disintegrate? Then the child gets into a state that feels existentially threatening, because it cannot survive on its own. In neurotypicals, the image of the caregiver is associated with a physical and mental sense of security. Only if the idea of the caregiver, the image of him/her, is positive and stable, does it work. Then it helps to bridge a certain time without the presence of the mother, then she is somehow there through the intense imagination.

The constancy of person thus stands for a central internal security. It becomes a guarantor for the existence of caregivers – regardless of their presence.

The object and the constancy of persons fulfil other functions as well. They are elementary prerequisites for imagination and abstraction, they stand for the human ability to tell stories. We wouldn't be able to talk about balls if we hadn't developed ideas of balls. Without object constancy, we would not be able to talk about techniques or ideas, we would have no common metaphors, no common narratives, no common imagination. And without constancy of person, we would find it difficult to talk about people, living beings and feelings. We find pictures, photos and films fascinating because they form a bridge between our imaginations and socalled reality. The boundaries between person constancy and object constancy are of course fluid, and they are different for neurotypicals and autistic people.

In my opinion Autistic people develop their constancy of objects and persons in a slightly different way than neurotypicals. The object, the ball remains, but Schrödinger's cat disintegrates (more or less, depending on the severity of autism). The caregiver does not build up into an emotionally embodied figure. The potentially created template for the constancy of persons is filled differently. It can contain light, like the light we supposedly see last before we die, but it doesn't contain a person. Images do not stick to it. The neurotypical, identificatory way of constancy of persons cannot be learned even after. It appears to autistic people as a lie. The social panorama that develops around the first caregiver in neurotypicals is correspondingly more diffuse in autistic people, and faces remain vague. I will describe the possible reasons for this later.

The constancy of person also stands for the feeling of lasting connection. Someone is always there. As a result, many neurotypical people rate their inner consistent images as more important and valuable than real people. Real people are then easily seen as unreliable or even despised. On the other hand, the idea becomes sacred. Only the idea is reliably and it supposedly remains forever. Accordingly, 'modern' psychologists speak of object permanence. However, this is a suggestion, because nothing is permanent or indestructible. Neither feelings nor images nor ideas nor the rule of gods or dictators.

Object and person constancy develop approximately in the first year and a half of life. Neurotypical mothers play the so-called peek-a-boo game across all cultures. Sometimes the mothers show their faces, sometimes they cover it e.g. with a cloth. The child becomes very excited when the mother's face disappears, and it shines when the face reappears. Through the peek-a-boo game, however, mothers do not train the constancy of person. Rather, they emotionalise the children, they stimulate them. If the children don't like the game, or if the timing is not right, it disturbs the children and has the opposite effect.

It's like tickling. If the tickler misses the moment when it is enough for the child, the tickling turns into assault. The children are already laughing in agony, but the tickler still thinks it's funny and demands that the children continue to play along. Many parents overdo it when they themselves are caught up in emotion and action. They are then not receptive to finer signals.

Many parents, out of impatience or for other reasons, want to shorten the development of person constancy. Maybe they long for more time for themselves. Or they believe that even small children need their own room where they can sleep through the night on their own. But accelerating this process has consequences, just like when we want to accelerate brain maturation or growth, and it stresses both child and parent. If the child does not experience enough real, good presence of the caregivers qualitatively and quantitatively, it will accordingly not develop reliable person consistency. It then grows up in doubt and in a lie and will couple its connection impulses differently or to something else. It can develop tilted images of the good or the bad mother: Sometimes one appears, sometimes the other, sometimes no one appears. These tilted images are later found in corresponding images of the world or God.

Gradually, the child's imagination expands, the basic pattern for the belief in the enduring existence of objects and living beings is established. The first caregiver is joined by other caregivers, and the inner social panorama emerges and expands. We can imagine the inner social panorama as an unconscious family constellation in our heads, more on this in later chapters. In the course of life, more and more figures in different contexts are added to the nuclear family. The first basic patterns for images of people are also transferred to other people, we project them. So, we can easily represent relationship situations in systemic constellations, in a real room with real people acting as representatives for our unconscious inner shapes.

The images of constancy are condensed. Such condensed images, which in the case of blind people maybe tend to be condensed melodies, rhythms or forms, we arrange in our mental imagination according to their meanings. The condensed images can stand like icons or symbols on a fictitious mental screen. If they are clicked or triggered, they open. With the activation of the film or melody, the emotional reaction is also activated. The more strongly the film or melody is associated with physicality, the stronger a physical reaction will be.

The first formative images and ideas remain strong triggers even in later life. They are a prerequisite for neurotypically defined love. The original images are of course supplemented or superimposed over time, creating parallel images and parallel files. Some new files are placed near the original file, others further away. The sense of sight permeates our entire brain, so there are countless connections to other brain departments and various ways of filing and remembering. But all newly added images of people are related to the first person constancy file. The development of the so-called superego, the ideas of Big Brother and the dear God, who is always there and sees everything, but unfortunately goes his own, unfathomable ways, is also connected to the first file and builds on it. However, the phenomenon of constancy of persons is not proof that there is no God. Believers could object that God has given man the ability to develop the constancy of person in order to recognise the divine.