According to cognitive theory, the symptoms of autism are determined by an inability to make correct inferences concerning the thoughts of others. Without denying the existence of this so-called mindblindness, Turnheim doubts that this is an isolated phenomenon. Instead, he advances the thesis that autistic individuals experience as strange what normal individuals experience as their own. He wants to understand how the elimination of the strange within oneself comes about in normal persons, since these processes seem to fail in the development of autistic personalities.