Psychopathography

The same rose-colored impulse has driven an Aspie wave of revisionist psychopathography, in which such diverse historical figures as Thomas Jefferson, Orson Welles, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, Andy Warhol, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart are supposed to have been residents of the spectrum.

In the case of both the living and the dead, psychopathography is used to describe extraordinary traits and enable an explanation for (what we consider) unusual behaviour that enables us to ‘come to terms’ with the actions. Historical review achieves thus, what Haridas refers to as a ‘hagiography’ or idealisation of the historical character. For Pol Pot or Hitler, retrospective diagnosis of a mental disorder allows us to come to terms with atrocity by explaining intent as an aberration of the mind.

The way in which a psychopathography translates psychotic phenomena into linguistic structures determines, in turn, the exten to which such a borderline situation can be conveyed, and even experienced, in the reading process.