ABSTRACT
Patricia Stacey is a memoirist who attributes her son’s recovery from the threat of autism to “fl oor time,” an intensive program of early behavioral intervention. One of the many explanatory narratives that circulate in parent and research communities devoted to the autism spectrum disorders proposes that seemingly unaffected parents exhibit, in milder form, the behaviors and sensitivities of their children. So when Stacey describes how a therapist’s passing comment about her tendency to “space out” during sessions with her son led her to recognize her own sensory intolerances and defensiveness, she is speaking to a community that will make rapid sense of the genetic claims that ground her observation. Her son’s therapist made her recognize that “[s]ometimes the children we are working with are just exaggerated versions of their parents” (Stacey 2003: 254). For Stacey, this meant that the “developmental, individual-difference, relationship-based model,” a program of “interactive play” (Wieder and Greenspan 2003) that fosters the ability to sustain interpersonal interactions that is often absent in children diagnosed with autism, simultaneously healed her son and altered her perception of herself. Treating her son changed her understanding of her own fragile sensory tolerances, so that when she sought to shape her son’s development, she did so from the perspective of a semi-insider, one who also felt assaulted by the barrage of sights and sounds in her environment.
