PhronesisThe mother's 'hygiene' function is not merely literal cleanliness — it is the civilizing, normalizing, socializing function by which the neurotypical child is shaped into social conformity across four registers: sensory hygiene, behavioral hygiene, communicative hygiene, and affective hygiene. Neurotypical development involves gradual internalization of maternal normativity; the child accepts the displacing pressure and reorganizes their attractor landscape toward S0_neurotypical.
Autism is characterized by constitutional resistance to this reorganization: the autistic ground state S0_autistic maintains its integrity under normalizing pressure not through willfulness but through structural difference in the attractor landscape itself. We apply the Displacement Framework to formalize this analysis. Nine formal propositions cover: S0_autistic as coherent non-deficit attractor — monotropic attention, proprioceptive idiosyncrasy, direct communication (P1); the mother as first hygiene agent operating across four normalization registers (P2); neurotypical development as smooth attractor migration to S0_neurotypical (P3); autism as constitutional displacement resistance — the autistic basin is deep and self-maintaining (P4); the double-rejection structure formalized from Milton's double empathy problem — bidirectional mismatch between autistic and neurotypical attractor landscapes (P5); masking as costly non-equilibrium sustained displacement with burnout as the thermodynamic cost (P6); the Bettelheim refrigerator mother hypothesis as structural inversion — blaming maternal hygiene failure for a constitutional attractor difference (P7); cumulative Phi_hygiene decomposed across sensory, behavioral, identity, and relational domains (P8); and return paths through hygiene-pressure reduction, neurodiversity-affirming therapy, autistic community as same-attractor holding environment, and masking reduction (P9).