ABSTRACT
People respect talent even if they think you are weird. (Grandin, 1992, p. 122)
This quote comes from an article entitled ‘An insider’s view of autism’ written by a 44-year-old woman with an international career as a designer of livestock equipment. Temple Grandin explains how frustrating it was in her very early years to understand everything that was said to her, but to be unable to speak; she could only scream. She describes vividly her oversensitivity to noise and touch, and the extreme anxiety this caused her. For some years she took small doses of an antidepressant which helped her overcome her anxieties and also, she believes, improved her sociability, her speech, her ability to make eye contact with other people and her posture. Intelligence tests in childhood had shown that she fell into that rare group of autistic people who are of superior ability, and she herself knew that she was always especially gifted at forming visual representations in her mind. This gift she uses in her work and as a basis for remembering. Temple Grandin wrote: ‘I prefer factual, nonfictional reading materials. I have little interest in novels with complicated interpersonal relationships’ (p. 123); and ‘Almost all my social contacts are with livestock people or people interested in autism’ (p. 122). Here she is alluding to her restricted range of interests, and it is this obsessive preoccupation with a particular activity, or narrow range of activities, which characterizes some people with autism and also a proportion of people with schizoid personality characteristics. A very moving encounter with Temple Grandin has recently been described by Oliver Sacks (1995).
