Understanding cause and effect

• “My mind was filled with mad thoughts: I really believed that inside me there was a personal world of my own shining with psychic energy that I had to bring out into the practical world to show its talent. I even asked to work to prove it. For example, when I was about thirteen, I asked my mother to put some books on the floor and cover them with a blanket. When she asked me why, I answered that I was going to raise them with the force of my mind. Mother was the true connection with the real world: she allowed me to carry out my disastrous experiments and then denuded each of my surreal behaviors. She did what I asked for and when nothing happened she didn’t comment on it. She complied with my request for several days until I gave up.”

• Alberto Frugone, Autism and the Myth of the Person Alone, p. 187