The Significance of Work

Therapeutic Environment

Autistic people have difficulty recognizing the sense and the significance of their activities, their actions, and their situation in life. This is why they often withdraw into the simple structure of their "autistic world" and fall back into stereotypes and rituals. What they need is a clearly structured environment whose processes they gradually get to know and whose sense they can clearly grasp. Such a structure is offered by a rural farm community. On a farm the natural order of events is visibly recognizable. These last for a longer length of time, but they are not a lifeless structure: they change periodically and in rhythms. In this context, rituals and stereotypical sequences of activities, common among all autistic adults, cannot develop so easily. This biological order of events has a rhythmic structure. It requires of everyone who works in it the ability to vary their actions and react to natural events and processes (which have not been prescribed by a therapist!).

Agricultural activities take place in the open air. For this reason they are well suited to the motor needs of autistic adults and promote certain motor processes that do not correspond to the stereotypes, compulsive behavioral patterns, and rituals peculiar to particular individuals. This becomes quite evident during work breaks and less structured leisure situations. During these periods, stereotypical, ritualistic behavior reappears in most farm residents. The need to orient oneself to the times of the day (e.g., opening up the stalls in the morning) and to the seasons of the year (planting time, harvest time) requires a different way of putting rhythm into farm life and the order of events there. This holds true not only for the residents, but also for the co-workers, who have to adapt to these given elements of life in their daily work as well.

Types of Work Offered

The typical types of work offered for the handicapped (occupational therapy, manufacture of parts or components for industry) lack certain important features:

• Meaningfulness
  
• Discernible relevance of the activity for the community
  
• Promotion of personality development
  
• A connection between the individual process and the end product

Normal people find their work satisfying if they can develop social contacts at the workplace, receive social recognition, and earn money. Autistic people as a rule have no relation to money and few opportunities to spend it for the satisfaction of their own needs. They also suffer from their social "contacts" at the workplace more than they enjoy them. Finally, social recognition is of no particular importance to them.

Identical (stereotypical) repetitions of simple work processes stabilize (undesired!) autistic behavior and prevent educational development through work (= rehabilitation). The concept of educational development through work implies, however, that

• the residents experience the meaning of their own activity through their activity (for example through repairing a fence, harvesting crops, or weaving)
  
• they themselves (their persons and what they achieve through their work) are needed by the community (for example, in feeding animals, preparing meals, or doing laundry)
  
• they can bring about changes (for example, when doing the haying, spinning wool, or cleaning out a stable)
  
• the work is directed toward processes of nature that are continually changing and require an ever new attitude or focus (vegetable seedlings are planted, kept free of weeds, and harvested)
  
• the work is real and its results are used in the community (in the kitchen, for example).

Work confronts the residents with reality. They have to go out of themselves in order to make something or change something. The endangered "I," the unstable concept of the self, can stabilize itself in work which can only be done by a team. Work becomes a medium: co-workers and autistic residents work in common at a task that has to be done because

• animals are hungry
  
• the noon meal has to be prepared
  
• the sheep have to be driven into the stall
  
• the hay has to brought into the barn before it rains...

Through the medium of work a relationship can gradually develop between the (autistic) workers and the non-autistic co-workers.

Work must not be "misused" for the purpose of therapy. Work itself is therapy and contributes to rehabilitation. The relationship between co-workers and residents can change: In a cooperative work relationship, in which co-workers and residents are working together at a common task that has to be finished by a certain time (unloading hay, for example), it is not necessary for the co-worker to act "therapeutically" in the narrow sense of the word, i.e., to direct his "therapeutic energy" toward the resident. The work itself is the challenge; its successful performance is the positive consequence. In addition, agricultural work makes the way from the raw material through the different stages of shaping it by hand to the end product that is actually used by someone, visible, even to the autistic residents. Its significance is evident.

Example

Potatoes are planted and fertilized. The rows are weeded. The new potatoes are dug out and put in the cellar. Later they are peeled and boiled. Finally they are eaten. All of these processes can be followed on the farm.

Autistic people -- especially the severely handicapped ones -- live in a kind of permanent present. They have trouble imagining what will happen later on. They lack the faculty of Imagination. When they work year after year in the natural rhythm of life, it is possible for them to learn, by looking and experiencing, how one potato that has been planted produces many others that can then be eaten. As the years go by, this work in the natural rhythms of life, the rhythms of the days and of the seasons, will lead to a stabilization of the inner life of the residents. Even the autistic who are more severely handicapped gradually come to see what will happen and can get ready for it. All the residents work 25-30 hours per week.

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