The present volume develops the thesis that neurodivergent development cannot be adequately understood as long as research asks only which biological, neural, or cognitive elements differ. What may be decisive instead is that development changes the relational order within which the same elements can become effective at all. A gene can remain the same gene, a stimulus the same stimulus, a behaviour outwardly the same behaviour — and yet, within a differently formed developmental order, mean something different, be weighted differently, and enable different continuations.
What is meant by this, however, is not merely more complex causality. Displacement, distortion, and deformation are understood here not only as additional influences upon an otherwise unchanged development. Rather, form that has already emerged changes the relational conditions under which further differences can become effective. Development therefore not only leaves behind results, but changes the space of further development. Autism would then not necessarily be what causes a divergent development, nor an isolable object that arises at the end of this development. It could instead become visible as a boundary phenomenon of relational displacement.
The first contribution, Autism as an Operatoric Boundary Phenomenon, develops for this purpose a morphogenetic and operatoric model of autistic development. Different developmental orders can produce highly similar human forms without converging on the same internal developmental structure or the same world-relation. What is therefore decisive is not only that similar diagnostic surfaces can emerge from different generative structures. The unity of this surface could itself partly arise only where differently formed world-relations encounter the same dominant Raster and become non-coincident in similar ways at its boundary. Autism thus appears not primarily as a common internal object, but as a possible operatoric boundary phenomenon. From this perspective, monotropism, Double Empathy, incommensurability, and masking can be re-examined as different relational consequences of such non-coincidence.
The second contribution, AuDHD as a Boundary Case of Non-Stabilizable Cognition, extends this relational question to the level of scientific categories. AuDHD is not understood as another stable hybrid category, but as a boundary case at which it becomes visible that categorical models may become unstable precisely where they attempt to translate open relational dynamics into fixed diagnostic objects. The difficulty of classification is thus treated not only as a taxonomic problem, but as a possible finding concerning the limits of the underlying models of cognition and neurodivergence.
The third contribution, Neurodivergence and the Geometry of Masking, develops a three-dimensional spatial field model of masking. Masking is no longer understood primarily as a property, strategy, or burden of an individual person, but as a position within a relational field. The model distinguishes three dimensions: structural distance or possible incommensurability, asymmetry of the necessary Compatibility Work, and operative viability or resonance. As a result, outwardly similar forms of masking can occupy different positions within the field and have different causes. The model thus opens the possibility of investigating masking not only through intensity or exhaustion, but through its spatial-relational structure.
Unmasking also changes its meaning within this model. A reduction in masking does not necessarily have to mean the uncovering of an original self beneath a social mask. It can equally arise from a change in the field geometry: expectations change, translation work is distributed differently, different temporal and relational conditions are permitted, normative Raster are opened. Unmasking can thereby be understood as a Redistribution of Compatibility Work and Morphogenetic Pressure.
Together, the three contributions develop a coherent research movement: differently formed developmental orders can enter into relational non-coincidence with one another; at scientific and diagnostic boundaries, this can become visible as categorical non-stabilizability, while in social fields it can generate Compatibility Work and Morphogenetic Pressure. The volume thereby connects developmental biology, autism theory, cognitive and diagnostic research, and relational social theory on a common level, without presupposing a homogeneous neurodivergent structure.
Its central research contribution therefore does not lie in a new definition of autism, AuDHD, or masking. It lies in the proposal to investigate three problems that have so far often been treated separately — developmental heterogeneity, categorical instability, and the social distribution of compatibility work — as different manifestations of a common relational problem.
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