(no subject)

[bizamoogie.livejournal.com]

is it possible to have an autistic personality if you yourself are not autistic?

Comments

[sethrenn.livejournal.com]

yeah it is. I mean if you can have a blind personality when the core isn't blind, why not autistic?

The only times I've heard of this happening are through conversion reactions and toxicity reactions. I have a personal suspicion that a lot of cases of 'hysterical blindness' or 'hysterical deafness' earlier in this century and the last were actually due to mercury poisoning (mercury being, at the time, believed by many doctors to be a cure or even a preventative for syphilis), which is able to cause temporary impairment of some senses. We've certainly heard of people in systems who were blind or deaf in their own world, but that's not quite the same thing.

Still, though, I concur with what others have already said-- autism is really a spectrum; and there's a lot of people who consider themselves totally 'normal' who have some autistic-like thought patterns, functions or perceptions in one area of their life. I suspect such tendencies are capable of affecting system members to varying degrees; at least, that's what we've found with our own people.