Nobel to Doris Lessing

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Doris Lessing received the Nobel for literature. Among his novels is a very diquieting and disturbing one The Fifth Child. We quote part of a paper, which you can find in its entirety on the web, by Ingby Tantam, relating this Lessing's particular piece of fiction to the Asperger Syndrome. This poses some questions that we would prefer to avoid or abscond about the relationship between autism and some forms of malicious behaviour. There is certainly a more general problem of the link between genetic structures and good and bad bad behavior (or if you want to use this jargon, deviancy). We probably should face this problem, non so much to shed a shadow on autism or Asperger, as to reexamine the whole fundamentals of penal "justice".


"Doris Lessing, in her novel, The Fifth Child (Lessing, 1989), describes the impact on a family, previously loving and stable, of having a fifth child. This child in his intransigence and his propensity for outrageous and hurtful behaviour, challenged all their liberal pre-conceptions and brought the family to the brink of dissolution. This kind of maliciousness is not something that is normally associated with Asperger Syndrome: too many sufferers seem too innocent, too law abiding, and too unaware of their own self interest to be described as malicious. Yet this is the best translation of the word that Asperger used for several of the children that he described in his classic paper of 1944 (Asperger, 1944), see (Frith, 1991) for translation. In this paper I shall consider whether children and adults with pervasive developmental disorder can sometimes be rightly described as being malicious; how can this be recognised; and some ideas about management." from Digby Tantam, Malice and Asperger Syndrome

Sounds interesting and I cant rebut his theories without reading it but I do have a basic question.How does the maliciousness have anything to do with AS(other then having AS makes someone more likely to be abused and bullied) and not and "additional" co-morbid mental health issue?Just because I have AS doesnt mean I cant also be diabetic but the AS does not create my diabetes.Just because I have AS doesnt mean I may not also have the a psychopathology...does it?The black and white thinking,abuses,a dose of ADD impulssiveness,hyper-sensitivity may make someone more likely to act violently but not malaciously,<------a question more than a statement.

We are a mixture of motivations, some strong, some weaker. And we have inhibitions, normally for example we abohr to kill or harm someone of our species, an animal of different species, some one hesitates to fell down a tree or would oppose felling down a tree (tree huggers). All these motivations are rooted in our DNA. If something in the DNA is wrong (a mistake, like mistakes in softwares of a PC) you will find yourself deprived of empathy, of inhibitions and will have no internal brakes to harm and kill. There was a time when a deviant career was attributed to the personal history of the agent. A loveless family, humiliations in childhood or adolescence, a culture of violence (like that in military schools). This has some truth and may be a partial explanation of behavior. But now we know that much stronger explanations are to be found in the genetic heritage. Ripley, Patricia Highsmith's character is wholly immoral. We know that, though Patricia did not commit any crime, Ripley was Patricia. Patricia was autistic, but she grew up in an environment where she could commit her crimes in fantasy, writing novels. Many have not this choice available.

I think maliciousness is a misconception of what can happen. In order to be malicious you have to be aware of the true impact of your actions, be able to relate to that personally and have the intention of carry out under this premise.

I think aggression in ASD can come from 'shadow problems' in the environment that are not obvious to most. When someone is coming out of trauma, they can often initially act violently towards the paramedics because the brain is locked into a fight or flight response and cannot interpret the situation for what it is. Meltdowns in autistic people are like that.

I remember once I was in a school assembly and was fixing my collar. Unexpectedly somebody touched my neck. My initial reaction was to punch whoever was behind me. It turned out to be a prefect trying to fix my collar for me. I could not explain my actions because I would not have wanted to do that whoever it was and there was no question that I did 'choose' to given the evidence. When I was around 8-9 in school again, I was playing with toy cap guns in the wood with this other boy. I told him that the spark coming from my plastic cap gun would be enough to light the petrol tank of the lawn mover near this shed. He didn’t believe me. So I unscrewed the top and lit it. Of course I did not think it through. I didn’t think how dangerous it was for us. There was nothing malicious about it. It was just pure curiosity. We couldn’t put it out, we tried smothering it with an old swimming float of all things, luckily we did not try too hard to put it out or there could have been an explosion. But at the same time I just wanted this unfortunate incident to go away so told him not to talk about it and left. The smoke was noticed by some teacher’s and they put it out. I never owned up to it. I don’t think there is much point now, and I don’t think that dwelling on things like that is any helpful. It never was a malicious act, that is the point.

Also nothing rules out a malicious Aspie. Personality is separate. If you’re talking about the frontal lobe a minute biological difference probably could make a huge social difference.

Doris Lessing is an interesting person because she taught herself from the age of 15.

I agree about that, but still there are sadisms, where intention to harm is deliberate, and rooted in a distorted instinctual apparatus. Behavior in bullying among children may play havoc more that a beating among adult people. It is taking pleasure (sometimes overtly sexual pleasure) in causing pain, physical or psychic, to others.

Apparently lack of theory of mind , and the associated lack of empathy is one of the most common traits amongst the so called "criminally insane". A friend who works as a clinical-psychologist for a unit for criminally-mentally-ill considers it one of the most important factors in whether they will re-offend, whether they can be taught theory of mind before being released.
And ASD sufferers supposedly are also "lacking" in this mental/cognitive skill. Therefore it is theoretically possible that asd sufferers could have greater tendency to behave in a hurtful or harmful way.
But I would hesitate to say it was deliberate.
Mainly because I can remember times that according to my parents I was selfish or was being cruel in some way to my sister ( 1 year younger than me) and yet I don't .......
.....yes I do. I remember extracting pleasure ( a sort of satisfaction, like an experiment working ) from being able to con my sister , ( prob ASD to some extent also, it turns out ! !)into swallowing a revolting mixture of salt and stuff ,when I was about 6 ,by telling her it was delicious. ( A bit like parents regularly do with their children!! !!) Yes,remembering now how actually I teased and bullied and mistreated my sister for most of our childhood. My only excuse is that she always seemed to be in favour and so "gooood" and I was so often out of favour and definitely "baaaaad".( selfish, lazy, stubborn, etc which she never got called !)
She is probably the person I have most mistreated in my life from a deliberate spirit of "teasing/hassling/torturing". Oh yes and there's verbal digging at my co-parent ,( who I think I probably still resent for not allowing me to have my son adopted at birth when I realised how totally unsuited I was to motherhood), and a friend at grammar school aged 12-13, and there's , and ... , and .......... And some kittens, and a cat.
B***** hell.
I'm in a bit of shock because, I realise, I have been carefully not remembering the full scope of this; by just thinking of particular incidents in certain contexts , all separated up.)This looks horrible all together at once like that.
OucH!
Ok, and I remember that I KNEW, I still KNOW. I know how to do it. I know exactly how to wind people up , how to make them feel awful, to turn and turn the screw till they are , ..well in one case ready to hitch all the way home on their own from the South of France with no money even tho' they were terrified of hitching alone. I did what felt like one of the hardest and most painful things of my entire life in begging their pardon and ASKING them to not to leave me , because I was afraid of sleeping rough on my own. ( We had no money at all) .
Afterwards I put that awful behaviour down to the unusually large amount of bread, and little else , that I had been eating , ( asking for "old" bread in bakers etc) which had exacerbated my gluten-intolerance-related anxiety , aggression and alienation from people.
YES! Plead guilty to malicious.
Plead guilty to bullying.
Plead guilty to unkind manipulation. With gloats.
Another reason for me to stop eating gluten forever. I care sooo much less about other people when I am on gluten!
It's like playing with toys. To put it in the most horrific way.
I like several of Daphne de Mauriers books, one in particular ,called " The Scapegoat"; which have these sort of characters in, and how the hero deals with them; the interesting aspect being how like kin they seem to the hero/heroine.

But it's not exactly fun; I'm thinking of the france episode and I can remember how it just seemed to flow from my own tearing internal pain , like a screaming sort of whining noise that wouldn't stop. It wouldn't stop.
(Is it what I do rather than harming myself? I'm thinking of the people who cut themselves for instance.)

Last edited by ouinon on 12 Oct 2007, 3:23 am, edited 3 times in total.

The question of malice emerges in discussion when it is related to penal, and criminal behavior. But people may be cruel and sadistic in relationships which will never be penally relevant, particularly when power roles are involved, also as simple as those between father and child, between brothers and sisters. This is one more reason to consider the whole machinery of police and judiciary repression, cloacked as it is in terms of guilt, evil and "retribution", as a sad, cruel circus.

But then I've been thinking, and saying, for a few days now on here how dubious i find this painting of ASD sufferers as some kind of particularly nice human; gentle and passive and truthful and trusting and so on.
I think there are at least a few reasons to think that perhaps many ASD sufferers are capable , and guilty of, pretty grim behaviour towards other humans.
And the kind which goes almost unnoticed!
And unpunished as you say , whatever punishment means.

James was a wordy writer , and wrote about mental, emotional, verbal sadism.... ?
I didn't know that Highsmith was autistic. That is interesting.

I agree: they certainly suffer, but if they are entrusted with power they may be capable of efferate actions. The problem, I think, is that there is not a clear cut status of autistic. Certainly a DX is not a criterion to establish who is autistic and who is "normal". Like among musicians there are poor, interesting and superb musicians, handling moral relationship may be situated along a ladder of morally blind, decent, and good and responsible level. Moreover an autistic person usually lacks the self assurance and aggressivness to violate norms and commit evildoing. Meekness is not always goodness. (The idiot of Dostoevski is messing up everything).

That goes beyond Asperger's and I don't think that Asperger's is more susceptible to this. I don't believe in this myth, it is a convenient scapegoat. There are many different possibilities: Simply as a learned behaviour from ones social interactions and environment. Or and psychiatric illness caused by physical and/or metal injury. Or a personality change caused by physical change or injury. Or an inherent mental illness or personality. Or combinations of all of these. There are many more emotionally disturbed, manic, psychotic, and distinct personalities than there are autism related ‘social problems’. I think people misidentify sociopaths, narcissists, and many other conditions with autism.

This is why I don't call myself Asperger's anymore. Asperger's is merely a historical term of Hans Asperger's efforts. We are not one dimensional, I associate myself with the autistic spectrum, which is multi dimensional and we also have personalities in our own right.

It is true what you say of our instinct and by extension development as societal beings that live in vast populations in a very different way from our genetic cousins. Delusions are part of the formula. We define a narcissist only by someone who is overtly narcissistic. All humans have some narcissist, sociopath, sadist and so on in us.

I believe that even ASD can make valid observations into human nature, whether it is acknowledged or not. Being almost separate can have its advantages.

There are some that think those that are most ‘stable’ and assured are also in fact delusional in a respect, and those that are ill their delusions are merely unravelling and the ‘truth’ is not pretty. It is not rocket science. Empathy for example is a good example of a delusion. You cannot in fact put yourself in other people’s shoes, peer through their eyes, and experience their mind fully. But belief that you can have it advantages in a society, it means you feel you can connect with such people better, it give you a sense of insight. It also puts you on a higher plane much like pity, sympathy, etc. Plus you can hold people to account or grade them on their ‘correct’ display of empathy. These are not selfless beliefs, nor are they entirely selfish, they are survivalist. I also think that there is no true stability merely a series of constant relatively rapid adjustment in low level primal behaviours in order to generally fit this societal mode, which makes up the complexities of what we call our behaviour.

I think the unsolved crimes unit might have something to say about that!

Having slept on it I see what you mean. That the crimes punished in law courts are visible concrete solid physical things, measurable in fact, whereas those committed by mind against mind could be of equal and greater magnitude but would not count.
Which is another reason for people on the Autistic spectrum , learning literally, to fail to understand that it is wrong to treat people like that. Especially as children are at the receiving ends of many mental cruelties that are socially accepted, in fact considered perfectly "normal" , from their parents.

Verbal and mental cruelty have begun to count in law in the case of justification for people killing their wives or husbands. As genuine self-defence, against the mental cruelty which IS recognised in that case as real attack.

I was not aware that Aspergers original descriptions of certain children on the Autistic spectrum had specifically referred to maliciousness as a characteristic.( Did Kanner in his study of the Autistic spectrum in general?) Thank you very much for that information. It certainly fits for me. I must read more about it.

Last edited by ouinon on 12 Oct 2007, 3:25 am, edited 6 times in total.

I don't think empathy is entirely delusional. You certainly cannot put yourself entirely in other people's shoes. But in many cases you identfy with other persons istinctively and totaly, as when you see someone drowning and you try to rescue him/her risking your own life. In less dramatic situations people are capable of generosity without this being a "display", but quite out of spontaneity.In a sense this has a survival value, but rather for the species (and even across species, when you feed a hungry cat) than for the individual. Altruism is "wired" at some extent in many of us (like territorial behavior, sex, adventure, curiosity etc.), for the continuation of life beyond the single unit.

So would that mean that religious laws like The Ten Commandments, and their extension to inner mental activity by Jesus' teaching , (!) are like graftings on to the existing genetic impulse to behave well towards others( in your close kin group anyway ) ? And which (arguably) increase our chances of survival ( so that we overrun the planet ).
Or like a prosthetic device invented to control/compensate for the ( possibly gluten-induced ! I continue to believe this is involved somehow!)) alienated/non-empathetic behaviours of people on the Autistic spectrum ! !??
( Laws possibly invented by ASDers to make up for what they did not automatically understand about "correct" human behaviour?)

Yes, I would say that, more or less. Religious commandments, like later penal laws, are primarily formalizations of behavioral norms which were born in us or innately and somehow tend to fade o get lost in the confusion of complex societies. When you need a commandment to force you not to kill, or not to steal, that means that the natural selfregulating adjustments of primeval social aggregations, tend to be weakened and are in need of some sort of rekindling. But in religious commandments this "natural" norms tend to be mixed with new rules which have nothing to do with a natural morality. Suffice for this to give a look to the baroque and intricate regulations contained in the Leviticon. Does the prohibition to mix meat and milk (which forces olrthodox jews to have two fridges) has anything to do with a spontaneous morality?

As for what concerns the physicality of what is considered a penal violation, you can imagine a dystopian society where each one who hates somebody else can kill him by pushing a button with the certainty not to be caught. Can you imagine what would happen? This is farfetched, but Stangl (commandant at Birkenau), Eichmann, Tippit (the man who dropped the first A-bomb)?

I have just read some of the article, by Digby Tantam,( google under name and "malice") and am unpleasantly surprised by how similar many of my own malicious acts were to those described in the paper.
And to see that a common "excuse/explanation/motivation" for the behaviour is exactly the same as I had written/proposed before I had read the article : Experimentation.
This was the main "reason" given for their acts by several/many of the germans "working" in concentration camps .
Am going back to read more of article and find out more.
Thank you very much for the thread.

I have now read the whole of the article and am feeling rather freaked out. That is a very scary description to find of oneself.

Started thread in General Discussion to see how many others are on here who understand this.

Did so! And discovered that for me is Faustian!!
At teeny infancy stage I found body language so incomprehensible , so exhausting to try and follow that I think that I made some kind of decision to not consider other people anymore. This "disguised" my ASD ( pretty much) for about 25 years , after which hell started to get a grip,in the form of manic-depression , until at 29 years old I "got" compassion and then my ASD became visible.
I think that altruism ( empathy and including other people in calculations )must have seemed too expensive to me ,( ASD seems to often mean difficulty imagining a future good to weigh against current discomfort) .

So it ( malice in the autistic) IS individual responsibility , but if persistently "naughty, nasty, cruel" children were given some help with cognitive development it would probably help a lot to prevent people like me ( and some very dangerous others ) from taking the faustian bargain!


.............

Last edited by ouinon on 12 Oct 2007, 9:49 am, edited 4 times in total.