Autism and sin

As I have been exploring the history of the concept of autism, my theological antennae have started quivering.

In 1910–11, Eugen Bleuler coined the word autismus (autism) to describe a symptom he observed among adult psychiatric patients, namely a pathological withdrawal from reality into an inner world of fantasy. The Greek root of the term (autos) points to self-absorption and detachment from external reality as the defining feature of autism. Later, in the early 1940s, Hans Asperger and Leo Kanner described autistic patterns in children, which Kanner termed ‘early infantile autism’ (more recently known as classic autism). Their work led to autism being thought of as a neurodevelopmental issue rather than a symptom of an adult psychopathology. But the core defining feature – self-absorption and detachment from reality – remained unchanged.

The reason for my quivering theological antennae is that the defining feature of autism as originally introduced to psychiatry bears an disturbing resemblance to Protestant and Catholic understandings of sin. In fact, Martin Luther’s classic definition of sin as a state of being incurvatus in se – of being ‘curved in upon oneself’. In other words, sin is a condition in which the heart turns away from God and neighbour to rely on its own resources and satisfy its own desires. There is a clear structural parallel between autism as originally understood and Western theology’s understanding of sin. In both frameworks, the fundamental error/pathology is the rejection of the external (Reality/God) in favour of the internal (Self).

We can push this a bit further because Bleuler did not restrict his use of ‘autism’ to his patients. He also wrote about ‘autistic thinking’ in normal people, namely his fellow doctors (see his Autistic and Undisciplined Thinking in Medicine, and How to Overcome It [1919]), describing it as logic driven by wishes, desires, and fantasies rather than hard reality. In this usage, ‘autism’ functions similarly to the theological concept of idolatry or concupiscence: it is a defect of the will where the subject prefers a comfortable lie (inner wish) over a demanding truth (external reality). By framing ‘wishful thinking’ as a primitive or pathological trait, he was effectively medicalizing the old religious warning against following the ‘desires of the flesh’ and the ‘imaginations of the heart’.

An unfortunate coincidence? I think not. Bleuler was not personally religious, but he grew up in Zurich where the ‘grammar’ of human interiority was written by the Reformation. Sin was understood as social withdrawal and self-obsession. While health/salvation was understood as turning outward toward the community and objective truth. When he sought to describe the ultimate pathology of the mind, he reached for a concept that looked just like the ultimate pathology of the soul he would have heard about in the catechism of his youth.

In view of all this, I don’t think it is unreasonable to see the classic understanding of autism as a secularization of the Western Christian view of sin: it has simply taken the structure of the sinner curved inward and transformed it into the patient withdrawn inward.