She traced the earliest portrayals of autistic people to Irish and Celtic legends and “the myth of changeling children, left in place of real human babies who had been stolen by fairies.” Interestingly, changelings are also early portrayals of doppelgangers. The legend goes like this: Fairies would snatch healthy human babies and young children from their beds and secret them away to the fairy realm. In their place would be the magical changelings, who were identical doubles of the kidnapped children, only with physical deformities or behavioral “trickster” challenges, like having a withdrawn,
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She (Lorna Wing) traced...
