My point is that illness is not a metaphor, and that the most truthful way of regarding illness -- and the healthiest way of being ill -- is one most purified of, most resistant, to metaphoric thinking. Yet it is hardly possible to take up one's residence in the kingdom of the ill unprejudiced by the lurid metaphors with which it has been landscaped.
-- Susan Sontag, Illness As Metaphor

DESPITE SONTAG'S WARNINGS, the habit of associating deviations from the norm with new social realities proves hard to break. The Internet qualifies as a new social circumstance, maybe even a foretaste of a new way of life, and the search is on for the metaphor that will stick. So it shouldn't surprise that so many commentators have reached for various mental disorders as shorthand figures for net culture: the flickering distractability of attention deficit disorder, for instance, or the multiple personalities hatched by our chat rooms and our layered windows. But there is another, deeper analogy waiting to be explored: the social displacement associated with autism.

Autism is marked by severely impaired social interaction, including difficulties with the spoken (as opposed to written) word, and is estimated to occur in approximately one out of a thousand individuals. In recent years, the Internet has served as more than a metaphor for autistics; many have found the new medium strangely hospitable and empowering. As one woman put it in a post to Independent Living (InLv), a listerv for autistics: "The level of communication possible via the Internet is changing our lives, ending our isolation, and giving us the strength to insist on the validity of our own experiences and observations." For many autistics, the Internet is not only a preferred medium but an emblem. "Wired," says another member of InLv, "is a word I often use to describe myself. My mother always said I was plugged into the electric socket."

UNTIL QUITE RECENTLY, autistics were not thought of as adults capable of speaking for themselves, but as children who had to be spoken for by caretakers and therapists. Of these authorities, the best known was undoubtedly Bruno Bettelheim. Autism was first diagnosed in 1943, simultaneously in Europe and the United States, and its causes remained unclear -- even more unclear than they are today -- when Bettelheim began his work. In the face of evidence that autism had biological roots and was associated with abnormal brain development, Bettelheim insisted on what he called the modern "pysychogenic" approach -- i.e. psychoanalysis. Today, Bettelheim's efforts to explain autism psychoanalytically seem as arcane as the reading of bird entrails. When mulling over the meaning electric light held for one autistic boy fascinated with electricity, Bettelheim concluded that light must have afflicted the child with thoughts of going blind, since it illuminated issues of sexuality better "kept hidden in darkness." This sort of deduction plays by the rules of high psychobabble, but only further mystifies the fact that many autistic experience a strange attraction to, and identification with, electricity.

In keeping with psychoanalytic doctrine, Bettelheim believed an ounce of childhood was worth a ton of adulthood. You are who you are because of what happened during the Big Bang of growing up, when your personal laws of physics were molded, and you survived events Freud called "unrememberable and unforgettable." Autism, then, was thought to derive from an upbringing that pointed back toward the villain of the theory: the resentful and withholding "refrigerator mom." As Bettelheim put it: "In general, our autistic children seem potentially very bright and very sensitive; this is why they react so strongly to emotions in their parents which they somehow comprehend as a threat to their existence."

The attempt to force autism into the psychoanalytic mold has kindled a rage among autistics, one that burns brightly in much online discussion. As one member of InLv put it in the review of Peter Breggin's "Toxic Psychiatry" she posted to Amazon.com: "In arguing that all psychiatric conditions are entirely psychogenic, the result of emotional trauma, he [Breggin] is led to the logical conclusion that autism must be also. Never mind the vast amounts of research which have conclusively and repeatedly disproved this vicious little myth... Never mind that in the 1950s such beliefs led to many autistic children being removed from their families and subjected to years of totally ineffective and ludicrous psychoanalytic interpretation instead of an education, while their parents went through years of guilt and grief... This is not only intellectually shoddy, it is irresponsible and cruel."

Writers like Temple Grandin and Donna Williams have paved the way for adult autistics to claim a voice of their own. But a group like InLv takes the process a step further, by confronting and finding a way around one of autism's defining characteristics, the inability to negotiate conventional social interaction. The Internet is the crucial prosthetic device for such groups. Email allows autistics to circumvent the difficulties nearly all of them experience in face-to-face encounters.

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