Systemic autism 2019
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My presentation from the Systemic Autism Conference held at the University of Bedford may be of interest to philosophy students as well as psychotherapists.
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Systemic autism 2019
- 1. Learning from Autism: Territory, Affect and Time in Systemic Practice by David Steare This presentation / workshop aims to discuss the critical ideas of Deleuze & Guattari in general and the social work of Fernand Deligny with autism to suggest a theoretical basis for systemic practice with autism. Central to Deligny’s work with children with autism was his mapping their geographical movements and territories. In Deleuze and Guattari’s writings their ideas about affect and time indicate provisional understandings and meanings. There is a widespread idea within the autism community: ‘When you have met one person with autism you’ve met ONE person with autism.’ There is another widespread idea within the systemic therapy community: ‘Not- knowing refers to the belief that one person cannot pre-know another person or his or her situation or what is best for them.’ Integrating these ideas can be challenging for systemic practitioners.
- 3. Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari The Rhizome “The rhizome…is the free, expansive movement of grass, constantly connecting random and infinite points. (Arboreal) root-tree structures stifle this movement, diminishing its expansiveness and potential. At the same time, underlying rhizomatic movement troubles such seemingly static structures.” Scott Lawley, 2005
- 4. Rhizome example: Turmeric For systemic practitioners see also: Vikki Reynolds (2014) A Solidarity Approach: The Rhizome & Messy Inquiry
- 5. Deleuze & Guattari What is a concept [such as ‘autism’]? “Concepts…are in themselves rhizomatic, that is to say they are constantly moving, mutating and connecting. The ‘concept’ is a ‘heterogenesis’ rather than a fixed entity. It is something to use and to be made to work, forever emerging in new configurations, terminologies and enunciations.” Scott Lawley, 2005
- 6. Deleuze & Guattari What is ‘Affect’? conceptions of dynamic and kinetic relations between bodies (often phrased as ‘speeds and slownesses’) a capacity for action and novelty (an affirmation of the necessity of chance, rather than a comprehension of necessary relations) affects are becomings: to every relation of movement and rest, speed and slowness…there corresponds a degree of power. To the relations composing, decomposing, or modifying an individual there correspond intensities that affect it, augmenting or diminishing its power to act… Affect is the active discharge of emotion, the counterattack, whereas feeling is a displaced, retarded, resisting emotion.
- 8. Deleuze and Guattari Time and Virtuality we are trapped in a linear sense of time (a stupid sense of cause and effect – ‘why did this happen to me?’) we have the insight to look backwards, but are equally trapped in the perspective of our current state of affairs (‘what if?’) a future (which does not yet have a sense) informs the sense of the past event, depersonalizing its sense in the present; the perspective of events taken by an actor where, because events do not happen to an individual, are ideal (rather than possible) and incessant (without beginning or end). Virtuality is the potential for connection at any one ephemeral moment, a point arrived at from past material actions. It is the ‘open field’ of potential which is ‘…produced along with and at the same time as the actual in the course of actualization.’ Carrier 1998/Lawley 2005
- 9. Fernand Deligny (1913-96) & Janmari 1973 *Fernand Deligny & Autism
- 10. Maps And Wander Lines - Fernand Deligny In 1968, Fernand Deligny created a network for autistic children at Monoblet, in the Cévennes region of France. Social workers were asked to transcribe the childrens movements and gestures, and for ten years, they traced maps of their own journeys and then, on tracing paper, the childrens wander lines were marked, circulating within these territories and gravitating towards activities, presences, objects, or nodes of life. Organised chronologically and by living area, this rather inscrutable book assembles nearly 200 maps of a world existing outside of language. Arranged like a notebook, the maps and their descriptions, based on interviews with their authors, are shown together.
- 11. Deligny suggested that adults draw maps on which they would trace the autistic child’s movements. It was discovered that the children did not venture outside of a certain territory, and that in that space, an ‘us’ cohered. If we exist in time, they exist in space, and the forms they see belong outside the linear progression of history: water, fire, elemental realities. “Deligny wondered at these children’s ineptitude at exploiting others. For those of us caught in usefulness, can we even conceive of an innocence that would extend to ineptitude, not to say welcome it?”
- 12. DELIGNY’S VISIONARY CONTEXT Capitalism, socialism and humanism all carry conflict along with them, which exists as soon as a border is created between something and something else Autistic children are provided with a radical freedom without any therapeutic, pedagogical or political project. There are no lacks, there is only existence. None of the children’s doings are considered as intentional acts in view of any functional purpose.
- 13. Deligny: Subject v Object Deligny “is especially attentive to the phonetic ambiguity, in French, between ‘that’ [CE] way of seeing and there is seeing the SELF or an OTHER [SE].” Leon Hilton, 2017 “The human-that-we-are is the product of a long process of domestication.” “Deligny asks …to imagine a mode of relation that would be ‘outside of function’ – one that would not bear the traces of a desire to make autistics and others… conform to the shape of the ‘thought-out-project’, the neurotypical subject, the human-that-we-are” Leon Hilton, 2017
- 14. The modern Bhutanese Practice of uselessness Sangay Rinchen is a useless guy. Of course, if you were to read his resume, you would never believe it. Farmer Sangay, as he prefers to be called, is a leader of Bhutan’s movement to be 100% organic by 2020. During the Global Wellbeing and GNH Lab in Bhutan, which he was helping to co-host, he was called away to meet with the Prime Minister. To Sangay, “uselessness” is a form of right action. Or better: right non-action. Sangay explains that in moments when he wants to intervene and fix something on his farm, he first steps back, does nothing, and reminds himself that he is just a humble, useless guy. Sometimes, it turns out nothing needs fixing – nature has its own solutions. With his practice of “uselessness”, Sangay calls our attention to a tendency, as change makers, to want to be in control. The humility inherent in the practice of uselessness is actually an important step in the cultivation of a positive mental attitude.
- 16. Lines in the Mind, Not in the World Donella Meadows (1941-2001) Lead author of ‘The Limits to Growth’ and author of ‘Thinking in Systems’ etc. The map is not the territory. Even between you and me, even there, the lines are only of our own making. The human mind arose in the universe needing lines, boundaries, distinctions. Here and not there. This and not that. Mine and not yours. Between me and not-me there is surely a line, a clear distinction, or so it seems. But, now that I look, where is that line? Between you and me, now there is a line. No other line feels more certain that that one. Sometimes it seems not a line but a canyon, a yawning empty space, across which I cannot reach. …when I do pay close attention, very close attention, when I open myself fully to your humanity, your complexity, your reality, then I find, always, under every other feeling and judgement and emotion, that I love you. Sustainability Institute 1987
Editor's Notes
- So here is a presentation based not on my current welfare rights advocacy work with SEND parents and carers but on my attending the New Directions Systemic Practices seminar at the Tavistock Clinic last November. There was in particular a presentation by the Argentinian psychotherapist Maria Esther Cavagnis that inspired me to research more about the work of Fernand Deligny in relation to autism.
- So to start the presentation the first phrase shows a famous quote that underpins much systemic practice. However, I would like to consider the phrase ‘semantic disturbance’. This phrase may be linked to semantic-pragmatic disorder most commonly associated with autism but I believe that ‘semantic disturbance’ is something that is mostly ignored within the talking therapies i.e. our talking can be disturbing rather than therapeutic.
- Deleuze was a philosopher who died in 1955 and Guattari was a psychoanalytically trained psychotherapist who died in 1992. Their collaboration was based on common radical left political beliefs. Guattari developed the concept of ‘Ecosophy’ or ecological philosophy that is apparent in the summary above. The main point of their use of the rhizome is to emphasis tracing multiplicities rather than creating grand philosophical theory or other unifying structures like a psychotherapy approach.
- So this picture show the kind of development of an organism so unlike other plant bulbs, corms, and tubers. Rhizomes tend to develop horizontally just under the soil’s surface rather than other plants who sink their roots deep into the soil. For systemic supervisors here, Vikki Reynold’s paper in Gail Simon’s edited book on Systemic Inquiry is a published example of how the rhizome can illustrate systemic ideas.
- So if a concept such as autism is rhizomatic, what about concepts such as ‘systemic’, ‘clinician’, ‘disability’, ‘expert’ or even ‘person’? Don’t such concepts evolve over time? One answer to such a question is to consider conceptual development as a cyclical/circular process such as 1. Thesis; 2. Application; 3. Promotion; 4. Adaptation; and 5. Repeat.
- Deleuze & Guattari’s consideration of affect begins with a quantum physics understanding of affect as energy, different energy frequencies can be considered as kinetic and dynamic relations. Life and living operates at different frequencies, each frequency has a power to manifest a reality that ebbs and flows depending on situation and context. They make an important suggestion that when anger and fear are not acted on, then emotion frequencies change into feeling frequencies, for good or for ill.
- Perhaps the most poignant expression of pain is the pain of childbirth, and I say this as an observer rather than as an agent! The evolution of a human usually takes 9 months and evolves from ecstacy and joy, through discomfort and expectation, to pain and joy. So affect isn’t one thing, just like any concept, it evolves, or perhaps the point Deleuze and Guattari were making, it should evolve.
- So having considered any concept as an evolution, we can apply this idea to time. Perhaps our experience of time as a linear process can lead us into illogical ‘why’ questions that fail to recognise causal complexities (complexity theory) and the apparent randomness of events (chaos theory). Alan Watts suggests the ideal rather than the individual position by asking ‘Do you do it or does it do you’ and Thich Nhat Hanh suggests virtuality in his saying ‘We have more possibilities available in each moment than we realise.’
- Beginning in the 1950s Deligny headed a series of collectively run residential programs for children and adolescents with autism and other disabilities who would have otherwise spent their lives institutionalized in psychiatric asylums. They developed novel methods for living and working with young people determined to be ‘outside of speech’. He was particularly influential on Deleuze & Guattari and even today remains apart from Western autism perspectives. The 2007 collection of 16 short essays from the late 1970s, is entitled ‘The Arachnean and Other Texts’. The book title illustrates Deligny’s systemic thinking: ‘…from my earliest years I have always had some network to weave’…and likening himself to a spider he asks ‘But can we say that the spider’s project is to weave its web? I don’t think so. We might as well say the web’s project is to be woven.’
- Published in 2013, six years later than the Arachnean this collection of maps and commentaries shows how Deligny and colleagues observed the young people in their care.
- There appear to me to be two things worth considering. Firstly, how we and others use space, especially in relation to the experience of having one’s ‘personal’ space ‘invaded’. Secondly, how we and others use lines. Perhaps Deligny’s most significant contribution to human understanding is the ‘wander line’ or ‘lines of drift’. These lines represent a disturbance in our assumptions about the primacy of speech in human relations and perhaps systemic therapy. But maybe the lines represent more. The philosopher Bertrand Ogilvie suggested that Deligny understood ‘it is not on the side of autism that one finds wildness, but rather in civilisation and in its most characteristic gestures’. Deligny contrasted history with nature and may have influenced Guattari’s ecosophy = nature’s harmony. This harmony he observed in relationships between the young people that appeared devoid of exploitation.
- The first statement appears to be linked to Deligny’s sense of lines, Deleuze & Guattari’s ‘lines of flight’ and from a family therapy perspective Douglas Flemon’s idea about boundaries that both separate and connect. The second statement describes my systemic position in working with autism. The third statement suggests that in a linear construction of lacks (e.g. of function) we overlook the potential of this process as a circularity that begins with an illusion that constructs us. The fourth statement offers an alternative to the conflict dynamics identified in the first statement.
- Apparently, Deligny uses the French language to create interesting links and understandings of which CE and SE are just one example. The first sentence draws attention to difficulties in assessment, echoing perhaps Francis Bacon’s Idols of the Mind e.g. what we now call confirmation bias. The second sentence may echo Freud’s ‘Civilization and its discontents’ and suggests that identity is culturally constructed and the person we believe we are may not be the person that we were born to be. The third idea seems to match my own experience of autism in that it may best be represented as a refusal to replace our sense of self by a culturally determined self (cf. Winnicott and Miller’s ‘false self’.
- So here is Sangay Rinchen, who it seems to me to be living according to the Tao principle of ‘Wu Wei’, a principle that can be understood as ‘not going against the principle of things; without meddlesome, combative or egotistical effort; no clever tampering; no Monkey-ing around’.
- I believe that systemic practitioners can start off with a neutral or curious mind, but then a not-knowing can get undermined by an approach, method or technique. It seems to me that the great difficulty in systemic practice for all of us is not that we need to remove our lenses, but that we need to refrain from putting them on in the first place. As Lynn Hoffman suggests, we can try to just be with people rather than seeing them, we can develop an art of withness.
- Any questions or comments?