Autismology
What is Autismology?
Autismology is a field of study and teaching devoted to autism as such, and to the relationships between autism and non-autism. It seeks to better understand autistic nature, its different expressions, and what happens when it meets environments mainly organized according to non-autistic modes of functioning.
Autismology is not presented here as an already established academic discipline, nor as a replacement for medicine, psychology or neuroscience. It is a framework for research, understanding and transmission that can use their contributions while also examining questions they do not always ask in the same way.
Studying autism itself
A first characteristic is not to define autism only through difficulties, clinical manifestations or the diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder. Autismology seeks to distinguish autistic nature, characteristics that may follow from it, possible autism-specific disorders, co-occurring conditions, adaptations and the consequences of interaction with the environment.
This distinction helps avoid confusing what an autistic person is with what happens to that person, what causes suffering, or what a diagnostic system is able to observe.
Also studying non-autism and interaction
Autism never exists outside a social world. Many difficulties arise in the encounter between different modes of functioning. Autismology therefore also studies non-autism: social conventions, usual ways of interpreting, categorizing, communicating and organizing institutions.
The aim is not to pathologize non-autistic people. It is to avoid automatically treating majority functioning as a neutral reference point, and to analyze mechanisms that may produce misunderstandings, attitudinal barriers or socially generated harms.
Connecting understanding with real life
The objective is not only theoretical. Better understanding should help improve accessibility, communication, education, public services, justice, work, family relations and other everyday situations.
Autismology seeks in particular to trace causal chains: what actually happened, what the person perceived, what incompatibility or harm may have occurred, and how the environment can be changed so that the problem is not reproduced.
Teaching without assimilation
Teaching is an essential component. It can help autistic people understand the codes, implicit rules and mechanisms of non-autistic society in order to navigate it with greater autonomy, without requiring them to renounce their nature or imitate non-autistic functioning constantly.
Conversely, it should help non-autistic people, families, professionals and institutions understand autistic functioning, suspend automatic interpretations and create more accessible environments.
An open and testable field
Autismology should remain open. It can begin with observation, autistic experience, logical analysis and comparisons between situations, and then confront its hypotheses with available scientific knowledge. It should distinguish what is observed, what is interpreted, what is proposed as a hypothesis and what is sufficiently established.
Concepts developed within this framework should therefore not become dogmas. They must be open to clarification, discussion, testing, correction or abandonment when the facts require it.
Autismology therefore aims to build a more complete understanding of autism and its interactions with the non-autistic world, in order to produce knowledge and teaching useful for mutual understanding, accessibility, autonomy and more harmonious coexistence.