Dinah Murray Archive update

Fergus Murray

I posted about recent additions to The Dinah Murray Archive on this site a few weeks ago. At the time, I was drawing a blank on where to find her 1992 and 1993 Durham conference papers, where she first introduced and elaborated on the concept of monotropism.

Finally, an old friend pointed out that any of the UK’s ‘legal deposit libraries’ should keep a copy of anything published with an ISBN, which includes the Durham proceedings make clear that authors retained copyright, which has now passed to Dinah’s inheritors, I was able to scan them in and reproduce them on this site:

• Attention Tunnelling and Autism (1992) is the paper that first introduced the concept of monotropism to the world, so it’s particularly unfortunate that it had never made it onto to the internet until now!
• Autism: a Mind-Body Problem (1993) incorporates feedback she received after the original talk, and aims to situate the theory within what autism researchers thought they knew in the early 1990s.

I have also made two other additions to the archive:

• Silent Speech Acts and their Cognitive Effects (1987) was Dinah’s contribution to the 1985 International Pragmatics Conference. She had previously uploaded a version of this to her ResearchGate profile as an incomplete PDF of photographs, but I have now made this text into a web page. This represents her thinking on the mind as an interest system, in the years before she turned her attention to autism. It is probably more accessible than her PhD thesis, finished around the same time.
• Whose Normal is it Anyway? (2008) was Dinah’s chapter for Wenn Lawson’s book Concepts of Normality. Here, she turns around some of the common things said about autistic people, and asks if the people saying them may not be every bit as ‘rigid’ and ‘unempathetic’ themselves.

Both of the Durham papers refer to ‘Talking, Thinking and Wanting‘ as being in press: this was the book she had planned to write, based on her PhD thesis, before she got “diverted by autism”. The 1992 paper specifically cites “Holy Fools”, which was going to be a chapter in the book, about autism. Its full title was actually “Holy Fools and Bullshit artists”, but perhaps she felt that was a little too vulgar to publish in conference proceedings. She had circulated drafts of this a year or two earlier, so the Monotropism story really starts around 1990.

There might still be copies of this somewhere; maybe one of these days it will turn up in an old box, or a forgotten drawer…