ABSTRACT
Jake has never spoken a word, and is dependent on other people at a basic level. It is a big leap from that to suppose that Jake or any of the other young people mentioned at the beginning of the previous chapter, who feature under ‘autism with severe learning disability’, think more privately or live more within themselves than any of the rest of us. They all know how to communicate their presence. They let you know what they want of you, and what they don’t want of you. They know who likes them, who loves them, and who is frightened of them. They make sure to convey this knowledge to the rest of us. They are very easy to read, if you are prepared for the fact that they are reading you too, and very astutely; they all know instantly if you are not interested in them. Any ‘incidents’ with a professional carer are the result of this kind of failure, that it is to say, of the carer’s autism. Actually they all give some eye contact too, though that may be because they all happen to have grown up in unsegregated environments. Jake’s family accept the diagnosis of autism because of the social supports it brings with it, but they are still of the view as they always have been, after thirty-five years, that ‘whether he can’t speak or simply chooses not to’ remains an open question; and if it is so for them, so it should therefore be for everyone else. In the theory of autism, however, it tends to be a closed one.
