Autism, bonding, patterns and reflection
Donna Williams
April 22, 2010
LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:
My name is Luc-Laurent Salvador, I am a psychologist from France and I would like to know if I may ask about some theoretical and practical aspects of autism. I am working on an hypothesis to which your book, "Nobody Nowhere" has been a great source of inspiration and particularly this passage :
" I remember my first dream —or at least, the first that I can recall. I was moving through white, with no objects, just white. Bright spots of fluffy color surrounded me everywhere. I passed through them, and they passed through me. It was the sort of thing that made me laugh. This dream came before any others with shit or people or monsters in them, and certainly before I noticed the difference between the three."
May I ask you a few questions about this dream ? I think that what you said is of tremendous importance for the understanding of autism.
DONNA WILLIAMS:
Yes.
LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:
Has your picture with sparkles (in the front page of your website) any connection with this dream ?
DONNA WILLIAMS:
Yes :-)
It´s me moving through the fluffy colored spots.
I do a musical called Footsteps of a Nobody.
The opening to it is:
"1963 and a faceblind kid had bonded with the colored wallpaper on the wall".
That pretty much says what happened, that I got attached to patterns and textures and rythms because visuals had no meaning. Had people joined me more through music, textures, movement, I´d have gained a stronger sense of being in the right world. I had visual, verbal and body agnosias and people were trying to connect on channels that weren´t online.
LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:
I am glad that you gave me such an insight. I see here a confirmation of a very bizarre idea I got when I saw this picture with the fluffy colored spots. I immediately remembered your dream and I wondered if you had not been attached to these spots as if it was your first family.
DONNA WILLIAMS:
Yes, very much so.
LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:
I thought of some kind of imprinting phenomenon that occurs with the newborns of some species like, say, goose. Did you ever heard about that ?
DONNA WILLIAMS:
Yes, but mine was with Noddy Wallpaper (indistinct fragmented rainbows against white)… see the picture… like this over and over on the whiteness but I didn´t see figures, just fragmented rainbows… later in a photo, I saw it was Noddy.
LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:
Concerning imprinting, I join the picture that came to my mind when I saw yours with the fluffy colored spots. It´s the ethologist Konrad Lorenz followed by the young geese that came to be attached to him because he was the first thing they saw at birth. The geese are following him like it seems, the fluffy colored spots are following you. In my perspective, both pictures are expressing the ´bond´ dimension. The main difference is in the direction of bonding.
DONNA WILLIAMS:
That´s why I felt the wallpaper had mothered me because we were one so I found comfort in getting back to that that it went to the ability to make it from rubbing my eyes, to bonding with wallpaper books, the wallpaper in the next house, to fabric… and that´s how I made patchwork and got taught to be a machinist in my teens.
LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:
Do you think that the time you spent gazing at yourself in a mirror helped somehow in this process of knowledge building?
DONNA WILLIAMS:
I was whole in the mirror and the reflected world was more whole.
LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:
In your first book, you said you have been spending a lot of time gazing at yourself in the mirror. Was it just the contemplative enjoyment of "self wholeness" that kept you watching at yourself ?
DONNA WILLIAMS:
´She´ was cohesive AND familiar
LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:
I guess that you knew that ´she´ was you, didn´t you ?
DONNA WILLIAMS:
No, there was no conscious sense of ´I´ for some time. Everything was other, my body, my feelings, my mind. By late childhood I began to understand ´I´. I was fascinated with ´her´. The world was full of other, but ´she´ was familiar. I understood her, she looked at me with a look I could understand and which appeared to understand me.
LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:
The cohesion was satisfying because…:
DONNA WILLIAMS:
Because she felt like the only real, familiar human in the world.
LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:
It was your own cohesion you could see?
DONNA WILLIAMS:
No, because I´d processed my own movements already but didn´t know that until I saw them and felt them as familiar, still I thought they were ´hers´… we were ´twinned´.
LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:
It was new to you because you had no inward perception of such a cohesion?
DONNA WILLIAMS:
That is true.
LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:
The ´familiar´ feeling was coming from the previous direct visual perception you had from your own body parts. You were able to recognize these body parts, but now in a very satisfying coherent whole.
DONNA WILLIAMS:
The familiarity but of a twin, not of self.
LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:
I understand this as the consequence of the new ´control´ you had on your self image through the mirror.
DONNA WILLIAMS:
Staring through her, engaging with her was the visual-emotional equivalent of eating a good cake
LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:
I define control as the mere matching between anticipation (or expectation) and perception. All our satisfactions, i.e., positive feelings come from such matchings. First and foremost, it gives us security. And, as I understand, that´s precisely what you have been looking for in patterns.
DONNA WILLIAMS:
Yes, that is what familiarity is
LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:
Or weren´t you at the same time actively exploring your own shape and somehow building a more coherent representation of the human body ?
DONNA WILLIAMS:
Of the shape of a living girl, yes, and then just as fascinated with statues and sitting on them, curving into them, same with trees, to know THEM by feeling their form but putting my body into their form, even the billiard balls, staring and staring until I could feel my body resonate with THEIR form, to KNOW their entity, what it was to feel like I was them, to be familiar. Most visuals alone left me utterly flat… it didn´t compute. Being shown things was off putting because unless they spun or were moved to and fro, I had to stare through them to FEEL them or they stopped computing. Otherwise put them in my mouth.
Later, when my parents mirrored the whole bathroom, the whole living room wall, the whole bedroom wall – late childhood, age 9-11, I would move about with ´her´, broaden how I interacted with ´her´.
LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:
How did your parents came to this idea of mirroring all your living space ?
DONNA WILLIAMS:
I would only eat with ´her´, pee with ´her´, chatter to ´her´, touch ´her´ so they felt I´d move more in space if it was a whole wall… my whole life by then I´d tap reflection even walking down the street past shops, keep checking for ´her´ and when I found her I felt WE existed and in that WE was I but only whilst twinned, as a twin.
LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:
And what did you do exactly when ´actively exploring your own shape´ in front of these mirrors ?
DONNA WILLIAMS:
Touched faces, shared breathing, dared see each other´s souls, make noises, giggle, I started kissing her when I was about 10.
I loved her enormously, she was my twin, my sister, but my connection to her became a bridge not an obstacle. Without her I´d not have sought real life physical twins… one´s with warm, shaped bodies and smells, not cold flatness which made me crave to get her out of the mirror or me into it.
LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:
In other words, weren´t you gaining control over what was first to you an incredibly weird form: the human shape ?
DONNA WILLIAMS:
´Hers´… in my 20s I explored the difference between a visual sense of body and a felt physical one and that´s when ´she´ became ´I´. I could also experience having a body through reflection as I couldn´t process it physically without movement.
LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:
I´m not sure to understand what you mean by "I couldn´t process it physically without movement". Do you mean you had to move in front of the mirror in order to experience "having a body" ?
DONNA WILLIAMS:
Yes, because the body feedback didn´t register unless I could see it. I loaned the visual to process the physical
LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:
I would hypothesize that the matching between the two different modalities (visual and kinesthetic) validated the ´physical´ (which could then be ´registred´) and hence gave you that very feeling of enjoyable control and security.
DONNA WILLIAMS:
Yes.
LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:
It looks like what I had in mind when suggesting that you could have been "actively exploring your own shape and somehow building a more coherent representation of the human body". It seems that it is exactly what you did, does it ?
DONNA WILLIAMS:
Eventually, but first I wanted to feel connected to another human, that was her… she was a step up from wallpaper and patterns.
The same with jumping, spinning, hanging, rocking were so important… I could process those.
LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:
I hear something different here. Do you mean that jumping, spinning, hanging, rocking helped you to ´process the physical´ anytime, that is, even in the absence of a mirror ?
DONNA WILLIAMS:
Yes, because it was repetitive, rhythmic, more extreme, more about gravity and inertia.
Donna Williams, Dip Ed, BA Hons.
Author, artist, singer-songwriter, screenwriter.
Autism consultant and public speaker.
http://www.myspace.com/nobodynowherethefilm
http://www.donnawilliams.net
http://www.aspinauts.com
Print
Email
