PERSPECTIVE article
Front. Psychiatry
Sec. Autism
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2025.1664507
This article is part of the Research TopicResearch by Autistic Researchers: An “Insider’s View” into AutismView all 3 articles
Research by Autistic Researchers: An "Insider's View" into Autism. The Autistic way of Being
Provisionally accepted
- Curtin University, Perth, Australia
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This paper introduces us to an increasingly popular understanding of autism, but as understood and experienced by Autistic people: the descriptive theory of Monotropism. Initially this paper sets out the background to monotropism as the author briefly mentions various autism theories and highlights some reasons why such theories didn't resonate with Autistic people. Uncovering how monotropism explains autism and Autistic experience takes the reader into the very heart of Autistic experience in ways not previously shown. As well as discussing attention, interest and connections to the Autistic sensory experiences (external and internal) the author highlights the experience of Object Permanence (OP) and its impact upon Autistic lives. Current research is beginning to demonstrate that OP is experienced differently in Autistic lives to non-autistic lives (Lawson and Dombrosky, 2015:2017). Initially though Autistic people were thought to relate to OP in similar ways to non-autistic people (e.g. Adrien, et, al. 1993), although there were hints that aspects of OP in Autistic people were experienced differently. The reasons for why monotropism has grown in popularity and how this theory explains the Autistic experience are set out below.
Keywords: adaptive functioning, Autism Spectrum, inclusion, neurodiversity, Neurodivergence, social cognition
Received: 12 Jul 2025; Accepted: 29 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Lawson. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Wenn Lawson, wenbe2@outlook.com
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