Greene is asking the reader to go along with this speculative Psychological Heredity idea with this example chart. It's fascinating the way she weaves in the family history and charts going back to this person's grandparents.

She has subsequently talked about how to much earth and a powerful Saturn could lead to a terror of chaos and a tendency to ritualise safety. Also how a trine heavy chart could lead to someone being unprepared to come out and join in this ghastly life, opting to remain comfortably unrelated. So grand earth trine(s) might be something to look for in cases of speculated 'psychological autism'.

Autism is still so contentious with multiple inter-related causes being postulated it would be hard to know exactly what is, and isn't, brain damage, environmental toxicity and childhood psychosis. Plus we have all the diagnostic issues. I once knew a Psychiatrist who felt everyone in this particular Long-stay institution was autistic. Technically we are all somewhere on the autistic spectrum.

The Sullivan example reads to me like an analysis without sufficient exposure to or understanding of the depth psychology linked to this condition. I found the comments on the unaspected Sun (ego not challenged to grow, difficult to define a role for yourself.....)the most stimulating here.

What surprised me aboput the Liz Greene 'case study' were the extraordinary statements about the individual involved having a Mercury square Saturn - if so, it has the widest orb I have ever seen. Liz Greene appeared to 'want' the individual to have an aspect that could be related to non-communicating.

I should think that many families now that have children with autism would be breathing fire at the assumptions made in this book - which all seem to be about devouring Plutonic mothers who want their children dead on a deep, dark subconscious level. And Bettelheim has since been discredited, and Greene quotes him - but to be fair, she did write this book before it before it was decided that in the main, autism is primarily an organic disorder.

What maybe was more interesting was the idea that the individual with autism is in fact bestowed - or cursed - with a great sensitivity, so that the child withdraws in horror at the demands it pereives will be made upon it and simply 'fails to incarnate.'

Have you ever read any of the books by Donna Williams, Billy? It is about a woman with autism who now advises parents of children with the condition, including asperger's.

In her book Nobody Nowhere, she talks in similar lines - that it felt simply too dangerous to present her 'self' full-on in any kind of situation that required the tiniest amount of emotional disclosure. So she created false 'personas' in order to cope with the world. It was a disturbing book and I got more than I bargained for in reading it - much of what she has to say about the state of her condition cold have come straught out of the pages of R D Laing's book, The Divided Self.

She actually did have a a neglecting and abusive mother. However - and this is a very important however - she makes it clear that she herself felt that [i]her autism had nothing to do with her moher whatsoever.[/i] In facrt, she was glad that she did not have a more smothering, concerned one - that, she explains, would have been infinitely more difficul to deal with. Her autism, had everything to do, she felt, with an inability to handle and process emotions, borne out of sever food allergies.

So there is Liz Greene's suggestion of an inborn sensitivity that made most human interractions impossible to handle.

The reader might also care to view the mother's purported hypochondria in a new light. The mother may not have expressed her chart in the way that Liz Greene felt she ought to have been, she may actually have been genuinely been unwell, and this is what was bequeathed to her daughter rather than any desire to wish her dead.

Liz Greene was interested in her subject's Virgo ascendant, but also was interested in the oppositions between Moon and Uranus in the natal chart - along with Mercury. She speculated that the Moon-Uranus opposition makes it hard for the subject who has them to feel really 'safe' and maybe she should have looked more to these latter two aspects for possible answers than to hypothetical Mercury-Saturn aspects to prove her case.

I did once have occasion to talk to Donna Williams. I don't want to divulge here unless I make a fuller article of what I have written here and talk to her again, but I felt when reading her autobiography that she surely had a very stresfully-aspected natal Moon, and in fact she does. However, that is not the case with all charts that belong to individuals with any kind of autism - there could indeed be many conditions that may be given different labels in the future, just as Laing's 'schizoid' patients might now have ended up being re-diagnosed as having autism instead.

Greene points out that Bettleheim's thoughts on autism being due to a mother wanting them dead is an extreme viewpoint.

The mer-sat square is interesting my software (kepler)puts Mer at 6' 30 so we have a 20' degree orb here. However she was putting as much, if not more, emphasis on Saturn being in the 3rd house and square Pluto. This autists natal chart was secondary to how the family had appeared unable to live out the more positive manifestations of the LEO/VIRGO until her sister appeared on the scene.

Also my software puts the moon at 17' Aq so a 15' orb if we allow an opposition to Uranus. It may have been just as well Greene said this was a very speculative exercise. I'd have thought the natal chart could tell you something about the behaviours linked to Autism, assuming you buy into the possibility of astrological effects. I've met hundreds of people with this diagnosis and they seem to have quite distinct personalities.

Donna Williams I am unfamiliar with. Wiki suggests her diagnosis is quite contentious.

Greene does point out that Bettelheim's view is extreme, but she still suggests that 'we do not have to look far to find the recipient (i.e. what she thought of as the soured dough and rage of all that Leo-Virgo gone wrong) of all that poison.'

For those who have doubts that autism can definitively been 'shown' in the natal chart - well, here is another. There are researchers who suggest that whatever 'causes' autism or Asperger's may take place [i]well before [/i]the child is actually born. The individual with autism may well still show the qualities of their natal chart, but if they were destined to be born with autism anyway, then no wonder these latter would not show up in the natal chart, and why these might override whtever tendencies and potentials the natal chart may show up.

That might have been true of one or two of the relatives of the 'case study' examined in Liz Greene's book, too. If the autistic spectrum can be seen to be that inclusive. Maybe, some of the relatives of the 'case study' did not live out the more strident sides of their charts, not because they had not wanted to individuate according to Greene's prescribed view of what a fully-realised individual should be, but because they were milder versions of the severe case of autism that Greene examined here.

As for Donna Williams, she has written several books on the subject and if she has worked as a consultant for parents of children with autism, she must have some first-hand understanding of the issue, otherwise there would be more than one voice in addition to the one on Wikipedia clamouring to discredit her as some kind of fraud.

But in the absence of any genetic feature, or protein, or brain anomoly, the trouble with autism is that in some ways, it is a lot like astrology, in that it can be difficult to 'prove' what is autism is, or what it is not. I do still think Donna William's book could go a long way to explain why what might seem to be psychosis, say, might actually be organic rather than functional.

As I understand it astrologers feel they can say quite a lot about the 'organic'. For example, 'look at his big eyes and roman nose, must be some Pisces and Scorpio there'. Aren't these physical attributes supposed to be of genetic origin?

I'm not to up to date on DNA and Autism. I understand there is a mixture of hard and soft evidence. I've recently read that bacterial infections might play a role in the development of these autistic traits/behaviours. Can we see this type of illness on a chart and the timing as to when infected, symptomatic and cured? What about Medical Astrology?

As to speculations that in this family we may have been seeing an autistic gene on one or both sides. The autist's sister gave Greene the character descriptions (passive, repressed and timid) not the usual overt disposition(s) of those who clearly merit this label in my experience.

I take your point, Billy, about the family members' not showng up 'mild' autism as we know it, but the passivity and the hypochondria may suggest that it was not just a question of these people not individuating in the way Greene felt they ought to have done.

I have heard that autism can be a result of a backfired injection - measles in the guts - though this has not been widely accepted by the medical community, or pooh-poohed. I do hope, in fact, we do get a little more input here from one or two people.

Tara wrote: Charts I have so far :
- Oct.13/47, 12:01 am, Toronto, Canada
- July 9/73, 10:00 am, Tuam, Ireland
- Dec.29/86, 9:12 am, Chicago, USA
- April 20/89, 3:03 pm, Manchester, England
- July 10/90, 11:20 pm, 00W06 / 50N50

Tara

Hello Tara,

thanks for offering us their birth data!

I analysed the nativities for my own interest and I believe to have found some noticeable structures. If you have made further objections, it would be nice if you threw them in.


1) Like many others already mentioned, I see some connection between the third house and the Moon: Three of five have the Moon in the 3rd. The one born in 1986 has the Moon as exaltation ruler of the 3rd. The third house is known as the joy of the Moon - a very good place for the Moon. It is the house of communication and speech. Aspergers are said to have astounding linguistic abilities and are also often of above-average intelligence, but something is unusual with their minds, it's not easy for them to get along with the "outer world".

2) Moon and Mercury don't behold each other by sign aspect (regarding the ptolemaic aspects conjunction, sextile, trine and antiscion) or if they behold each other, then either by square or by opposition, showing heavy conflicts. Lilly said in CA III, "the Native's wit and understanding", that a bad or no relation between Moon and Mercury in the chart shows mind disturbances. The ancient astrologers presumably knew about aspergers and autists, though never using these terms.
There is also an exception. The native born in 1986 has Moon and Mercury beholding each other by conjunction in the same sign, but Mercury is in the last degree void of course - the Moon can't catch up, so the exact aspect is frustrated. It seems it is required for a properly working mind that Moon and Mercury not only behold each other, but also that they had their exact aspect or that they will have their exact aspect without having left the signs they are in now, otherwise though beholding the connection between the "brain wits" (Moon) and the "outer world wits" (Mercury) can't be established.

3) In the given Asperger charts, Mercury and Moon are either peregrine, in fall or in detriment. According to Lilly it's an indication for rather low intelligence: this would fit autists, but not necessarily aspergers.


My reasoning is therefore, that the most intelligent, non-autistic and non-aspergian people on earth have Gemini rising and Moon in Cancer in the 3rd sextile Mercury in Virgo, whereas the dumbest have Aries rising and Moon in Capricorn in the 9th sextile Mercury in Pisces. Okay, just kidding!

Greets,
Edward