"Malice and Asperger Syndrome"

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Yeah, I noticed. It's all posted in quick succession, I was likely composing my response while you posted yours.



I actually got the impression that maliciousness is in the eyes of the beholder and what appears as malice is the result of AS-motivations and 'stress-coping' which are not expected or recognized by the observers who are not aware of AS.

The combination of high intelligence, obsession, lack of empathy, and frustration at an incomprehensible world could very well be terrifying.

Yes. And in Russian, it is still a valid term for any personality disorder (by far not only the antisocial/sociopathic one).

It's odd to see how many people, including people on here, have stumbled over Hans Asperger's use of this word without trying to find out what his intended meaning was. Yes, I know, I'm being much too picky about this - must be a professional thing.

I'm really looking forward to hearing from someone who is prepared to admit their own maliciousness/malice ! It continues to seem unlikely to me that people with Autistic spectrum disorders should be so good and nice compared to the rest of the population.

I was wondering whether the malice associated with this kind of autistic spectrum condition might explain the amount of "clever"/skilful wind-up/trolling that goes on (and the conflict between people saying that other people don't need to get upset about it and those saying it's malicious!)etc! Just a thought.

If " persistently naughty" and "nasty" and "cruel" children could be viewed as needing essential cognitive /therapytraining/help automatically, rather than telling them off all the time which is no help at all , it would be a significant step in social development!!

I wonder whether i may have at a very early age found the whole business of understanding body language etc ( other people basically!!) so incomprehensible and so impossible and possibly so exhausting ( because of my ASD ) that when I found a "short cut" ( "NOT considering people anymore"!) that seemed to dispose of the whole problem I took it without realising/not knowing ( at 6 months or whatever; actually think it was earlier cos a couple of years ago had a kind of memory of myself , pre-sitting-independently-age , making some sort of choice which seemed to distance my body from my Self!) that by cutting myself off in this way I would pay for it by becoming "bad"/"immoral".
OMG , why am I suddenly reminded of Faust ; one of C G Jungs favourite obsessions , which seemed to Jung to hold the key to his own dilemma?

Ok! Got it ! !
Thank you " thread-space" on WP ! !!

Last edited by ouinon on 12 Oct 2007, 9:32 am, edited 3 times in total.

i'm a pretty malicefull guy. once when i was little at the baby sistters a baby was on the bed and i jumped on it so the baby would fall off. i also pushed my sister down the stairs, used to swing cats by the tails cut all there hair off and superglued it back on and put tape on there feet

Maybe malice in people with autistic spectrum disorder is the result of an early "decision" ( forgotten about /buried/never conscious,) to not take other people into consideration, in order to survive . As Paolo was saying on his Doris Lessing thread ; the opposite of altruism.( Selfishness indeed!) But perhaps altruism seems too expensive for people with severe ASD, without help at an early stage .
And it is known that people with ASD have difficulty weighing up longterm benefits against short term discomfort.
Far rather that I burn in hell at some time in distant future than be crippled by my disabilities now!!
Hmm!
As ever hell arrived sooner than expected!! !

richardbenson: Thank you for sharing that , as they say . Similar stuff,I have thrown kittens across a room one afternoon 17 years ago now!, and half suffocated a cat,used to do similar thing to sister with a pillow etc etc etc , and have verbally tortured on a regular basis over at least a few weeks/months even at least 4 people in my life, and other things .
I would no longer do most of those or other malicious things.Though I still have a tendency to skilful verbal manipulation and wind-up, which is worst when I'm eating gluten as people def seem less "present"/real next to me then.
Do you think it was kind of blindness to there being real feeling going on in those bodies , a kind of "unreality" about them , which allowed you to do that? Which has now changed!!?
And when and how ?, cos I don't know how I'd replicate my own illumination!! Suddenly i understood emotional pain/hurt located in a body , or something.

Last edited by ouinon on 12 Oct 2007, 11:15 am, edited 1 time in total.

I think most everyone has done something wrong out of sheer frustration and hurt at one time or another or has been careless or insensitive to others. I wouldn't call such transient lapses in judgment malice, however. I can understand how an individual with Asperger's syndrome may get sick of various negative factors in his or her life that are by and large the product of the condition that may lead him or her to handle this frustration immaturely.

Have you read the article?

Why are you looking for the bad in people?

ouinon, yesno, your thread is fascinating. My mother disliked only one of her grandchildren, which was a nephew of mine with aspergers who had turned up the heat in her house to 90 degrees (to a person raised in the depression and ever conscious of costs a definate sin as well as uncomfortable) and then was overheard telling his sister that he liked to (hurt? bother? bug?) people. As my mother was kind to all, even him, that was monstrous to her. He is no longer like that as far as I know.
The gluten connection is fascinating. And that moment of grace.... wow. Would that we could know what happened. I'm glad it did happen for you.
We can all agree that Ted Kyzinski is malicious.

Thank you, Ouinon, for that very thought provoking paper by Digby Tantem. I find myself "emotionally disturbed" by it. I have been interested in the depth of meaning in that term as it might apply to me and others for some time, however, I had intended to say "emotionally aroused" so it was/is quite an interesting slip. The two are certainly closely linked. I think actually, that the term, "disturbed" is quite a good, or, let me say, appropriate term, when discussing malicious thought or behavior. If one is disturbed by one's lack of emotion or inability to feel, one might act in a way intended to arouse feeling in others in an effort to see, if in fact, it existed in one's self to the same degree. By creating a situation that would elicit an emotional response in others, one could then investigate or measure by degree, how much of that emotion was present or lacking in one's self. A kind of reality check.

And then there is also the possibility of boredom being a factor in behavior that is viewed by others as malicious, when really it is an attempt to stimulate the mind, by "disturbing" the environment. If a brilliant, inquisitive mind is stuck, or imprisoned in an environment that is stale and limiting, it might act in its own best interest by "disturbing" the waters it finds itself in. This was taken to the extreme by actor George Sanders whose suicide note attributed boredom to his desire to end his life. George Sanders

As a child, I acted in ways that were perceived as malicious when there was no intent of malice on my part. Curiosity, as in, "I wonder what would happen if I did such and such" was always the case. I never acted in a way intended to hurt anyone. I never physically hurt anyone or caused any bodily harm except for once when I was about 6 years old and playing doctor with the neighborhood children, I used thorns from a "sticker bush" to give them their necessary immunizations. I did enjoy that quite a bit and they all seemed to take it like little troopers.

Mostly, my attempts to set the world scurrying about me so I could observe the common emotional and physical behavior of others, and also to entertain myself at times, were set into motion by the use of story telling. I told a lot of whoppers. Sometimes I got into, or caused trouble for others. I felt misunderstood and couldn't understand why they didn't find my stories and their reactions as interesting and amusing as I did. I told my 5th grade class that I had witnessed one of our classmates, a boy who I was very much attracted to and who was viewed as a "delinquent", beat up our art teacher, a very old and frail lady, on the street corner where I held my Safety post. I think I was fed up with this art teacher because she never let me express myself the way I wanted to in art class. Couldn't use color as I chose to, or draw objects the way I saw them. When our primary teacher heard my story she pulled me roughly by the arm up to the front of the class and angrily told the class what a terrible thing I had done and that should be ashamed of myself and get down on my knees and ask God to forgive me. The "delinquent" boy seemed a little amused and since he was already known to be delinquent I hadn't really ruined his reputation, and Miss Love, the art teacher was safe and sound, so I didn't think that I had done anything so terribly wrong and was confused as to why the teacher was so hell bent on me being repentant.

Remember that this is a spectrum disorder. There are some who are this serious. However, I do not see myself or my children on the spectrum acting in such a manner. And can it truly me called Malice? This implies that it was deliberate. It obviously was not meant to deliberately harm anyone. As in the issue with the infant, I thought it irresponsible to leave a young autistic in charge of the infant in the first place!! ! My teen years, I was not capable of properly caring for a child because my idea of what was logical was not always in the best interest of a child. I have, through a lot of studying and work, learned what is best for children. Malice is the wrong word. They wanted to "see what happened". Very autistic/aspergian.

Digby Tantum: Clinical Professor of Psychotherapy and co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Conflict and
Reconciliation at the University of Sheffield. His qualifications include degrees in physiology,
mathematics and philosophy, medicine, and public health. Also head of the Sheffield Asperger Syndrome Service. Not so much "anyone with a beef" methinks. I dont neccesarily agree with his conclusions, but he is very experienced in the field, and highy qualified to boot. Also as an extra note, LadyMacbeth is due to see him at the beginning of next year, so maybe I'll see if hes up for answering a few queries whilst we are there.

I only had the experience of bullying done to me late in life and that was when I was cloaking constantly in order to do customer service and I was observing the whole time. I can say that before opening my mouth, certain people had it in for me because of a perceived weakness from my cloaking. I could see it in their face and especially women who didn't even know me were emitting a strong signal of resentment. My beatings by my mother I already explained the source of them to my father before my mother ever began to beat me - she would be scapegoating me for her unhappiness and anger and because it wouldn't be "safe" for her to do it to anyone but me and that family privacy was important. But that in no way excuses her. In practice, that malice article was more similar to my mother's unmaternal and disloyal betrayals than to my early behavior. I can tell you that it was conscious choice for me to do what I did and I can see my mother making a choice as well since she switches when the detection by third parties is likely. Encouraging her to believe that detection is iminent has been instrumental in persuading her to MAKE herself reign it in and that to me is why there is no excuse for an adult woman to harm others. She can stop. This also reminds me of my observing a deeply malicious and unhappy NT who guided another woman to physically attack my mother. She blandly continued a conversation with us as her friend moved in with an umbrella aimed at my mother's face. Only when I pointed out calmly that the woman was her companion and that there was a relationship between the two of them and that she was being documented as standing by (with a dead face) while her friend was about to strike my mother - did this NT coldly place her manicured hand on her friend's arm and they both switched off and shortly walked away. I think it is good for the article to expand the body of knowledge to include how the aspie can switch but the autism does not pardon the malice just as malice from NTs is not excusable not even/especially if the target is an aspie.

lets see...I never deliberately hurt anyone as a child....I have been the victim of malicious bullying though. My (NT) sister was sorta viscious so there might have been times when I did stuff out of self-defence or something....

I did obsessive-compulsively shoplift for a number of years...but I never stole from people....maybe it came from being poor....but it got to be a really bad habit...I was never caught by the stores....and the few times I was ever accused of stealing were when I hadn't stolen anything...

Also, when I was very young...really too young to be running around on my own....I would trespass alot.
Also i made up rediculous stories...I couldn't help myself...they would just pop out of my mouth....I don't think I ever lied much about real life things...because I didn't feel very connected to real-life.....It was silly crap like hearing on the news they had invented prosthetic legs for chickens so that people could have drumsticks without killing the chickens...stuff like that....
or
I would, for instance, see a museum exhibit and in describing the exhibit to my parents or something, I would add fantastical details to what i saw.

This type of story-telling really mainly harmed me more than anyone else. It hurt my potential friendships and whatnot.
As far as the shoplifting goes, for some reeason I was not connected to the fact that what I was doing was "wrong"...it was almost a form of stimming. Perhaps if I had been caught and punished, I woulda learned...but it seemed very detached from any concept of right and wrong.

I don't do it anymore...(shoplifting or storytelling)

Last edited by poopylungstuffing on 12 Oct 2007, 12:30 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Quoting jjstar:

Yep, I would agree with this. Individuality, life circumstances, (family, health, neurology, intellect, finances, opportunity or lack of), we could go on and on, and yet we take the best from what is available to us and try to make our way in the world. We take turns being fd up or totally "together", rational and irrational. I think it's a balancing act, some days we are well balanced, some days we are not, and this goes for all of us in the human race.

Quoting Poopylungstuffings:


Now that is a brilliant idea. Unless you prefer white meat.