My first test of Substack’s Recording Studio—a little rough at the start, but useful. A quick preview of Interior Architecture: reading the DSM not as deficit inventory, but as a record of gestalt traces hidden in plain sight.
From Asperger’s to Architecture: Rethinking Language, Severity, and Self. (A reflection on diagnosis, gestalt processing, and the limits of psychiatric description)
This was my first experiment with Substack’s new Recording Studio—a quick solo check-in, a little field test before the real work begins. I discovered almost immediately that it has one mildly maddening flaw: there is no visible countdown timer, so there is not really a clear way to know exactly when the recording starts. As a result, the very beginning of what I said was clipped. A fittingly chaotic little introduction, perhaps, for a piece about systems that never quite tell you when the real thing has already begun.
Still, there was something useful in the roughness of it. This was not Sunday Mornings with Jaime & Cathy, nor a polished audio companion, nor one of my more deliberately staged readings. It was simply me, in the cold wilds of the California mountains, trying out a new bit of tech and using that small opening to sketch the shape of what is coming next. Sometimes that is enough. Sometimes the preview is its own kind of text.
What emerged, in that brief unscripted window, was less a formal argument than a declaration of intent. I wanted to mark the beginning of a new series—Interior Architecture—and to say plainly what I think I am doing there. I am not moving away from autism. I am moving inward through it. Not toward behaviour, but toward structure. Not toward the surface description of what autistic people do, but toward the architecture of how meaning forms.
At the heart of the video is a distinction I have been circling for some time, and now want to make more explicit. The DSM describes behaviour. It catalogues observable traits, communication differences, repetitive actions, social impacts, and all the externally legible things a system can count. But it does not tell us how meaning is built. It does not describe the architecture of language. It does not tell us what kind of cognitive terrain might produce those patterns. Gestalt processing, by contrast, offers not merely a language theory but a deeper model of organisation—whole to part, pattern before fragment, meaning before analysis. That is the seam I want to pry open.
The video also makes clear that this series is, in part, a shift in stance. I note that I have previously described myself as self-identified as a gestalt processor, but I now want to press further than that. My argument here is not simply autobiographical intuition. It is that the diagnostic record itself may already contain the traces. The system has been gathering the evidence all along, but reading it through the wrong lens. What gets filed under “repetition,” “literalness,” or “communication deficit” may in fact be evidence of a different language architecture entirely. In that sense, this new series becomes a kind of forensic reading—an attempt to show that what was marked as symptom may also be trace.
That is where the project becomes especially interesting to me. In the video, I sketch examples that many autistic readers will recognise immediately: echolalia, often treated in clinical writing as mere repetition, and so-called “literal thinking,” often treated as a failure of inference. Read through a gestalt lens, both begin to look different. Echolalia becomes stored meaning—language carrying context, emotion, and memory. Literal interpretation becomes not deficiency but developmental position: a system still building the bridges between lived experience and flexible abstraction. The same data are there. The question is whether we are willing to read them differently.
I also wanted the video to name something political, though only briefly. My reflections begin from the recent churn in autistic spaces around behaviourism and calls to ban ABA outright. I remain deeply critical of behaviourism, and of its treatment of language as behaviour. That has not changed. But I also note that listening to families has complicated the field in ways slogans do not. Some people are navigating impossible conditions, including the brutal realities of American policing and public life, and their choices emerge inside that coercive terrain. So the series is not interested in easy purity. It is interested in what becomes visible when we stop flattening the question.
And perhaps most importantly, the video situates this whole project inside the larger one that has been quietly approaching for some time: the field guide. I say, more than once, that titles come last for me—that naming too early can foreclose direction. That feels true here. The book is still becoming. The outline exists, the terrain is opening, and as ever I suspect the thing may grow beyond its supposed borders. But Interior Architecture feels like the right threshold text: a way of entering the diagnostic archive not as passive subject, but as interpreter. The DSM says this. I say—wait. Read it again.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit autside.substack.com/subscribe
Ireland