Qualitative Psychology

Touch and the permeability of self and world: A phenomenology of tactile experience in autism.

Qualitative Psychology July 20, 2026 Sofie Boldsen

In this article, I investigate the relationship between touch and self-world boundaries in the phenomenology of autism.While tactile differences are increasingly recognized as fundamental to autistic experience, they are predominantly conceptualized within a quantitative framework that measures autistic sensing up against a putative norm of sensory processing.By contrast, first-person reports...