How an autistic boy connected through Disney and our stories link us

Photo credit: Mike Grenville (Creative Commons)

Human beings are story-tellers, whether gathered around a fire in skins millennia ago or sitting at the Thanksgiving table while spearing another piece of turkey.

We sometimes forget or never realize the power of story for linking us to each other.

Some stories are about something that happened to one person or family. They can be hysterically funny, quirky or sad.

Our family and individual stories can get passed down over the years and define a family.

I’ve heard about my Polish maternal great-grandfather who made my grandfather quit school at age twelve to help support the family, and how my father saved up and bought a book series, the Harvard Classics, and brought them home on his bicycle.

These, in their own ways, are about work and about learning. In one case, these went together. In the other, they didn’t. But both young men wanted to learn, and so these stories taught me this was a passion my forebears pursued. (My grandfather did not support my mother’s pursuit of an education, but that is another story.)

You must surely have your own powerful family and individual stories.

And then there are our collective tales, the ones shared across families. 

We can connect and grow through those. At the same time, who we are changes as we hear those repeated time and again.

Walt Disney started an enterprise that created many memorable characters.

Not surprisingly, one of my favorites is Belle from the animated Disney film Beauty and the Beast. She reads a lot and loves to learn. She dislikes the popular Gaston, a bully, vulgar, ill-learned fellow who pursues her only because of what she looks like. And she is able to see the intelligence and gentleness within the Beast. When he is attacked out of fear and derided for being different, she defends him and ultimately changes him.

Journalist Ron Suskind tells how his autistic son learned to connect through Disney

When Owen Suskind was three, he suddenly regressed and his ability to communicate nearly disappeared. Owen became autistic.

But ultimately Disney stories and characters gave him a line to connect again.

As Owen’s father reports:





We don’t say anything at first and then don’t stop talking for the next four hours, peeling apart, layer by layer, what just happened. Beyond the language, it’s interpretive thinking that he’s not supposed to be able to do: that someone crying on his birthday may not want to grow up. Not only would such an insight be improbable for a typical 6-year-old; it was an elegant connection that Cornelia and I overlooked.


Owen is now 20, still autistic but far better connected to others. And Disney stories provide a key context and mode of communication. He has a special affinity to the sidekicks who help the heroes and protagonists.

When I read about Owen, I thought about a situation, this one fictional, of how communication is dependent on myth and tale. This one is from Star Trek: The Next Generation, in an episode called Darmok. It takes place on a planet where Captain Picard tries to communicate with a Tamarian. These humanoids do not use language in the same way as others and the universal translator doesn’t work to convey meaning. It is only when Picard realizes that the Tamarians tell stories to express what they are thinking and want that he can connect and understand.

Both Owen’s situation and the Star Trek are extreme cases, as, our stories aren’t typically as critical to communication.

But they do matter – even as we change and grow.

We live our lives and often repeat much day to day and season to season. Yet things also change, as children are born and grow, people go off and come back, we learn and forget, get healthy and get sick.

As that happens, our stories take on different meaning. Our experiences deepen what we take from the stories.

Recently Harold Ramis died. Ramis was, among much else, the producer, writer and director of Groundhog Day, a movie about a self-centered jerk of a man who lived the same day over and over again but eventually learned to care and connect. By doing so, he was able to move beyond that one day.

The movie has become a classic, and here Ramis explained how different religions praised it as delivering a message about our stories and our growth.


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Amy Fried

About Amy Fried
