Phenomenological-anthropological preconditions and method of the investigation
pp. 51-57
in: , Infantile autism, Berlin, Springer, 1970Abstract
To start with, we would like to return to Minkowski's criticism of the one-sided view of autism as a turning inwards to an inner life, and we also want to go back to the analogy between "inside" and "outside" and the "inside" and "outside" of the body. In particular, it is important for the investigation of early-infantile autism that Minkowski's consistently worked-out theory of the disturbance of the "contact vital avec la réalité" juxtaposes an active, energetic, relatively unimaginative type with the "passive, wildly imaginative autistic type" to whom until then most attention had been paid. Taking the degree of imagination as a standard, he talks of an "autisme riche" and an "autisme pauvre". This "autisme pauvre", which is characterized by an object-centred activity directed to goals in the outside world, is termed autistic despite the "being-in-the-world" of the activity, for it is directed to only one goal, as if the person in question were blinkered and looked neither right nor left; the pattern of connections, in which such activity would normally be a link, is clearly missing.