Cognitive Deficits and Magical Thinking

Magical thinking is a kind of cognitive deficit, Joan Didion suggests in The Year of Magical Thinking (2005). It takes eleven months for Didion to receive the autopsy report and the emergency room records for her husband John Gregory Dunne’s death on December 30, 2003, in part because she writes down the wrong address on the hospital request form: Rather than writing down the address for the apartment she has lived at for sixteen years, she puts down that for “where John and I had lived for the five months immediately following our wedding in 1964” (p. 199):

A doctor to whom I mentioned this shrugged, as if I had told him a familiar story.

Either he said that such “cognitive deficits” could be associated with stress or he said that such cognitive deficits could be associated with grief.

It was a mark of those cognitive deficits that within seconds after he said it I had no idea which he had said. (p 200)

Magical thinking is to believe, as children do, that we can make something merely by willing it, by thinking it. Didion’s book charts how she fell into this kind of thinking in the year after her husband’s death, and her daughter Quintana’s serious illnesses. Magical thinking is Didion thinking, eight months after her husband’s death, that he would still come back, that she could change the outcome of that day in December and “run the film backward” (p. 184).

The parents of autistic child are more than prone to this kind of magical thinking: So do so many parents describe their “endless” research into how their child became autistic and into how they can treat their child’s autism, make them better, turn back the clock, take back the normal child they had once and have no more. Karyn Seroussi in Unraveling the Mystery of Autism and Pervasive Developmental Disorders: A Mother’s Story of Recovery and Research ends her account of recovering her son from autism through dietary and other biomedical interventions by quoting a passage from Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky”: Autism is, she implies, like the fabled Jabberwocky, a mysterious monster to be conquered and slain. All across the internet and the digital shelves of Amazon.com you can find parents’ accounts of how a “perfectly normal child” slipped into strange behaviors only to be diagnosed with autism.

A parent’s hesitance, reluctance, aversion, to accepting their child being autistic, and “different” and “disabled” for their lifetime, can be seen as an extended period of mourning, of grief, of a delay in one’s understanding about what really is; as magical thinking. Perhaps the parents of autistic children undergo their own “developmental delay” in their thinking and understanding, and lag a few, or several, paces behind what and where the child they love is. And this delay, while posing some obstacles, is something—like grief—-that a person can only work through, as Didion chronicles herself doing in The Year of Magical Thinking—not that one wants to.