Sozinho no meu mundo? : uma abordagem fenomenológica de duas autobiografias de autistas.

Abstract

The present study aims to bring a redescription about what would be the "state of isolation", characteristic of subjects diagnosed with autism. It seeks the interrelated causes and implications that lead the autistic to be away from the presence of other subjects - of the conviviality or, as we will explore here by an own concept, of coexistence. The tools and method of this work were found in the Phenomenology, so that it is possible to guarantee understandings about this state and its associated phenomena that include the report of the investigated subjects themselves. At first, with the philosopher Merleau-Ponty, the work will present what is subjectivity, objectivity and the experience of being-in-the-world, primary concepts in this endeavor. In a second moment, from the autobiographical excerpts selected, the phenomenological method will appear to investigate the state of isolation. Two autobiographies were chosen: Tito Mukhopadhyay's Beyond the silence, and Fall down 7 times get up 8, by Naoki Higashida. The autobiographical analysis begins by clarifying the elements present in the perceptual field of the autistic when it apparently isolated himselve from a common existence, from which to build a phenomenological understanding. Throughout the investigative course was noticed that the absence of coexistence is not absolute, because somehow the autistic persons recognize that there is an intersubjective world that involves the subjects and that requests them all the time. They perceive the isolation. However, the social demand for common experience leads them to seek resources that either facilitate coexistence, or at least ease the anguish that the presence of the other can arouse - by the potential it carries to bring bad memories. The resources developed by them can be repetitive behaviors, extensive rationalization of experiences, avoidance of new environments and new people. The research concludes that the state of isolation is a prophylactic feature arising from the symptoms of autism, not a special psychopathological manifestation of the autistic persons.