L'agorà delle menti: difficoltà nella comunicazione autistica

The verbal communication is a very powerful instrument because it lets us build our social relations. This form of interaction is the most used by human beings.
Like everything that loses its importance, if it is frequently used, also the verbal language is considered obvious and banal. But it isn’t so: when we use the language, we activate a series of complex cognitive mechanisms. The process of creation and comprehension of messages, that we send or receive, require abilities of coding and decoding, of formation and choice of hypothesis, of valuation of the pertinence of degree of the utterance, of involvement of suppositions and implications. All these mechanisms have a psychological nature. We don’t see them, we don’t feel them, we don’t know them but we can manage them. When our parents taught us to speak they haven’t told us how to codify a message, how and why we choose a hypothesis rather than another, how we can build a logical inference. Nothing of all this was explicitly taught to us and yet for everyone it isn’t difficult to understand or to create propositions. When we are on the same wavelength as others, that is, when we understand each other, we never ourselves: “Why did we understand each other?”: all is so simple and spontaneous. Only when there is a failure in the communication we think to what hasn’t worked out. People need to share something to understand each other. For this reason language is mainly defined as a means of communication, because it serves to put in common something: this something is the context. The context is a psychological building formed by all the information on the shared physical and psychological environment. It is also the building of hypothesis building on the world and the ability to create pertinences. The access to this contextual components isn’t difficult as it may seem, in fact it is what we do every time we establish a verbal contact with our interlocutor. Understanding each other is the rule, missing the communication is an exception. But not for everyone it’s like that. In fact, the autistics have big difficulties in the comprehension and so in the creation of sentences. What for others is a spontaneous work, for the autistics becomes a scientific research.
Through the study of autistic verbal communication, exemplified by the case of an autistic child, Thomas, I provide the necessary information for the access to the enunciation context. Without knowing the Thomas’s problem, we give a meaning to his words because it seems to be pertinent to the situation. Even if Thomas, actually, expresses himself using Italian perfectly, he doesn’t say anything because he has just repeated a sentence that he has heard by his mother. He doesn’t know the meaning of what he says.
Autistics’ mind is behaviouralistic: they do only what they learn mechanically by other people, without understanding the meaning. The most compromising thing is that in autistics there aren’t any central cohesive forces. This problem doesn’t allow them to put in relation the information in their minds, so putting in relation the information in their minds whit those in other people’s mind will be even more impossible. Another problem of autistics is the lack of a theory of mind (ToM). They can’t create sentences like: “A believes that B thinks x”, that is they haven’t the ability to create any metarepresentations. It’s clear how their social life is compromised.
Even if our lives are far from each other, sooner or later, thanks to social relations they’ll have to meet themselves in a common space, which is the context. Instead, autistics’ lives are parallel to each other, infact they never meet.
The gravity of the problem doesn’t legitimise the alienation of these people from the society in which they live. For their difficulties they need to be helped and followed. A profitable strategy is to give importance to those ability islets, which could be typical of single autistic beings, abilities such as perception and motor.