The Workflow as Evidence: How Blanc Published a Science the World Could Learn

On Workflow, Witnessing, and the Return of Evidence to the People.

Marge Blanc didn’t work outside science—she fulfilled it. She published a transparent, replicable workflow the world learned and repeated. The academy ignored it, but the evidence lives in us: published is published.

Introduction — Reclaiming the Meaning of Method

There is a sentence I wrote years ago—quietly, almost incidentally—that has now returned to me with the full weight of its implications. I offered it then as a definition of workflow, a technical description meant to guide forensic technicians through the labyrinth of digital evidence. But the longer I work in this field, the more I realise that it was never only a technical claim. It was an epistemological one. A political one. A reclamation waiting for its moment to be spoken.

“A workflow is a reliably repeatable pattern of activity enabled by a systematic organisation of resources that can be documented and learned”
(Hoerricks, 2008, p. 9).

At the time, I meant it literally: a workflow is only a workflow if someone else can follow it and arrive at the same result. But the sentence has expanded, the way good definitions do, revealing the bones of a much older argument buried beneath it. Reliability. Repeatability. Systematic organisation. Documentation. Learnability. Strip away the institutional choreography—the journal hierarchies, the prestige economy, the gatekeeping gloss—and this is what remains. This is the scientific method, rendered cleanly, without ornament or ownership.

Science, in its most honest form, is nothing more and nothing less than this pattern of disciplined transparency.

And once you see it that way, everything changes.

Because by this standard—the functional, defensible, legally coherent standard—Marge Blanc was not working in the margins of science. She was working squarely within it. She did everything the method requires. She published her workflow. The community learned it. The field repeated it. The pattern held across time, across children, across continents. It held not because an academic journal conferred legitimacy, but because reality did.

This is the pivot the academy refuses to make: that scientific validity is not bestowed by venue but earned through function.

Forensic science taught me this early. In a courtroom, publication is not a pedigree; it is a record. A way of showing your steps. What matters is whether your method is reliable, replicable, and transparent enough for others to follow. Anything that meets those criteria is admissible. Anything that fails them is noise.

Viewed through that lens, Blanc’s work is not an outlier—it is exemplary.

She documented a pattern. She organised the method. She made it public. Others learned it. Others reproduced it. Thousands of children have since walked the same developmental arc she mapped in the early 2000s. The workflow became a practice. The practice became a community. The community became a body of evidence that no search engine can suppress, no citation index can contain.

Blanc published a workflow.
The field learned it.
The method was replicated.
The pattern held.

That is science.

And the fact that this truth circulates outside the academy’s walls does not diminish its validity—it exposes the narrowness of the walls themselves.

The Five Pillars of a Scientific Workflow

If the introduction restores the meaning of method, this section names its architecture. A workflow is not a metaphor; it is a structure. A living, repeatable, traceable sequence of actions that reveals its own logic through use. In forensic science, in developmental linguistics, in any field that values truth over prestige, these pillars are non-negotiable. They are the backbone of reliability, the scaffolding of science stripped of ceremony.

Blanc’s work meets every one.

A. Reliability — The Pattern That Refuses to Disappear

Reliability is the quiet test—unflashy, unwavering, indifferent to opinion. A pattern must recur not once or twice, but across children, across observers, across settings where variables shift and still the underlying structure remains visible.

That is exactly what Blanc documented.

Across fifteen years, she observed eighty-five children move through the same developmental arcs: the whole-phrase gestalts that arrive fully formed; the partial echoes that soften and recombine; the mitigations that reveal internal structure; the eventual emergence of analytic phrases. This was not a fluke or a favourite case study—it was a recurrent developmental pattern witnessed across a diverse clinical population.

And then something even more telling happened: clinicians who had never met each other, never worked in her clinic, never read her data until years later, described the same progression. Their observations matched hers with uncanny precision.

Reliability is not rhetoric. It is recurrence.
And the pattern has been recurring for two decades.

B. Repeatability — The Pattern That Holds When Others Walk the Path

Repeatability is reliability’s twin: the ability of others, working independently, to apply the same method and arrive at comparable results. It is the heart of scientific integrity. If a method works only for its creator, it is art. If it works for the world, it is science.

The NLA stages have been repeated across:

• early intervention programs

• school-based speech therapy

• multilingual homes

• autistic adult language reclamation

• trauma-informed clinics

• community speech-language practices spanning multiple countries

Everywhere the workflow is applied with fidelity, the arc appears: gestalts → mitigations → single words → analytic combinations. Even researchers who do not cite Blanc replicate her findings inadvertently, because the children themselves keep producing the data.

A method that can be repeated is a method that is real.

C. Systematic Organisation — The Method Made Legible

A workflow is not intuition. It is the organisation of resources, principles, and practices into a coherent method that others can follow without guesswork. Blanc understood this long before her critics accused her of informality.

Her clinic operated with a systematic structure:

• Transcription protocols that captured utterances faithfully, without forcing them into analytic categories.

• Relational methods that foregrounded safety, attunement, and authenticity as prerequisites for linguistic unfolding.

• Stage-based interpretive frames that gave meaning to the progression, allowing practitioners to recognise where a child was developmentally and how to respond.

This organisation was not accidental. It was intentional, transparent, and replicable. It provided the scaffolding needed for reliability and repeatability to emerge—not through constraint, but through clarity.

Systematic organisation is the difference between a set of anecdotes and a body of evidence.
Blanc built the structure; the field walked through it.

D. Documentation — The Record That Withstands Forgetting

In science, if it is not documented, it does not exist.

Blanc documented everything.

She published:

• the four-part Autism–Asperger’s Digest series (2005), capturing the first longitudinal case study;

• Natural Language Acquisition on the Autism Spectrum (2012), known now as the Big Brown Book, laying out the full workflow with precision and clarity;

• decades of client records, transcriptions, and developmental mappings that trace the arc from gestalt to analytic language with meticulous care.

This documentation meets every evidentiary standard: transparent, traceable, reviewable, and rooted in lived practice. It forms a long, patient record that anyone can follow. And because she made it accessible—to parents, clinicians, educators—the data did not remain trapped in an ivory tower. It lived. It circulated. It informed practice.

Documentation is the spine of science.
Blanc gave the world a spine strong enough to bear decades of scrutiny.

E. Learnability — The Method the World Carried Forward

A workflow becomes scientific when it is not only documented but teachable—when others can learn it, adopt it, and integrate it into their own practice with fidelity.

This is where Blanc’s contribution becomes unmistakable.

The NLA framework spread the way effective methods always spread: through resonance, clarity, and the visible success of those who use it. Its learnability is evident in the global community that now practices it:

• hundreds of clinicians whose training pathways trace back to Blanc’s original publications;

• parents who recognise their child’s developmental arc in real time;

• autistic adults who use the framework to make sense of their own communication history;

• educators who finally understand that gestalt language processors were never “delayed”—they were simply unfolding differently.

The method is visible.
The method is teachable.
The method is reproducible.

A workflow that can be learned is a workflow that survives.
A workflow that survives becomes a scientific lineage.

Blanc’s work does not merely satisfy these pillars—it exemplifies them. Each one reinforces the next, until the structure becomes undeniable: a scientific method lived out in real time, in real rooms, with real children. A method documented, replicated, and carried forward by the very people the academy overlooked.

This is what science looks like when it is freed from its gatekeepers. This is what evidence becomes when it is allowed to breathe.

Blanc’s Workflow as Published Science

If the pillars establish what a scientific workflow is, this section turns to what Blanc actually did. And when we place her work against the criteria—not aspirationally but functionally—the result is unmistakable. She did not operate in pre-scientific intuition. She operated in method. She published a workflow so clearly, so transparently, and so accessibly that the field absorbed it almost by osmosis.

This is what published science looks like when it is written for the people who need it, not for the people who police it.

A. She Shared the Method — Public, Plainspoken, Precise

Blanc did something the academy rarely respects but practitioners immediately understand: she wrote plainly. She wrote for parents. For clinicians. For the people who needed the knowledge in order to act on it, not for reviewers who needed it siphoned into jargon to avoid contamination by care.

In those early Autism–Asperger’s Digest articles, she:

• defined the stages of gestalt language development with clarity and humility;

• traced their emergence through real examples, not abstracted curves;

• offered clinicians tools for identifying where a child was situated in the developmental arc;

• explained how meaning lived inside gestalts long before analytic syntax emerged.

In doing so, she bypassed the academic gate entirely. She placed the method in the hands of the community—openly, intentionally, and without pretense.

She did what scientists used to do before science became a performance: she shared the method so others could follow it.

B. The World Learned It — Not as Theory, but as Practice

What happened next is telling. The method did not spread the way ideological fads spread—with slogans, brand identities, or institutional marketing. It spread because it worked.

SLPs and SLTs learned it in:

• conference sessions

• hands-on workshops

• webinars that circled the globe in real time

• parent communities desperate for meaning

• clinical trainings where new practitioners recognised the children in front of them in the pages of her book

The learning was not aspirational; it was applied. Clinicians didn’t have to “believe in” NLA. They only had to try it, and watch the pattern unfold. And once they saw it, they couldn’t unsee it.

Real science teaches itself through effect.
Blanc’s method taught itself through children.

C. The World Repeated It — The Pattern Reappears Everywhere

The ultimate test of a workflow is repetition by independent hands. And this is where NLA becomes irrefutable.

The developmental stages have been replicated in:

• NICU follow-up clinics, where pre-verbal trajectories often reveal early gestalt patterns;

• early intervention programmes, where mitigations predict analytic breakthroughs with remarkable accuracy;

• autistic adult language reclamation, where adults recognise their own gestalts shaping memory and identity;

• multilingual and multicultural contexts, where the stages recur despite linguistic variation.

Everywhere the workflow is applied, the arc holds:
whole gestalts → mitigations → partial recombinations → analytic emergence.

This is not anecdote.
This is replication.

It is the same replication forensic science relies on when validating a method—independent observers applying the same workflow and obtaining comparable results.

The world repeated what Blanc recorded.
Not because she insisted on it, but because it was true.

D. The World Documented It — A Chorus of Evidence

A method’s scientific legitimacy deepens when others begin to keep the record.

Across the field, clinicians have documented:

• thousands of treatment notes detailing developmental progression;

• transcripts that mirror the arcs first described in 2005;

• reflective case studies produced across countries and clinical settings;

• emerging peer-reviewed articles that, even when studiously avoiding her name, replicate her conclusions with uncanny fidelity.

This phenomenon—replication without attribution—is itself a form of evidence. It reveals that the method is not dependent on ideology or allegiance; it is dependent only on observation.

When independent teams produce identical findings whilst pretending not to know the source, the result is still replication.

The children tell the truth, whether or not the citations do.

E. The Evidentiary Chain Is Closed — The Work Meets the Standard

This brings us to the forensic heart of it.

By the standards that govern expert evidence in US law—the most rigorous, defensible epistemic framework we have—the NLA workflow satisfies every criterion:

• Sufficient data: fifteen years of longitudinal documentation;

• Reliable principles and methods: recurrent developmental arcs confirmed globally;

• Reliable application: clinicians consistently applying the workflow with predictable outcomes;

• Transparency: publicly available documentation written for those who use it;

• General acceptance in the relevant community: the worldwide NLA community practising daily reality-based replication.

In forensic language, the chain of custody is intact.
The documentation is transparent.
The method is reproducible.
The evidence is admissible.

By Rule 702, by Daubert, by every meaningful measure of methodological integrity, Blanc’s workflow is not adjacent to science. It is science.

Science conducted in relationship.
Science documented with care.
Science published where the people who needed it could reach it.

And the world, recognising its truth, carried it forward.

The Forensic Frame — Why This Definition Matters

If I sound insistent about the meaning of “workflow,” it’s because I come from a world where definitions are not philosophical gestures—they are evidentiary thresholds. In forensic science, a workflow is not optional. It is the spine of admissibility, the difference between evidence that stands under cross-examination and evidence that crumbles the moment someone touches it. A workflow is how you show your work. It’s how you earn the court’s trust.

When I wrote my 2008 definition, I wasn’t thinking about gestalt language processing. I wasn’t thinking about Marge Blanc. I was thinking about chain of custody, image authentication, the brutal clarity of the courtroom where method—not prestige—determines what counts as truth. So when I look at Blanc’s work, I look through that lens. I look at NLA not as a debate in the academy, but as a method tested against the strongest epistemic standards I know: Frye, Daubert, and Rule 702.

And by those standards, her work stands.

A. The Legal Backbone — The Standards That Define Evidence

Frye taught us that specialised knowledge is admissible when it emerges from a community of practice. Not a university. Not a laboratory. A community of experts who know the terrain.

Daubert shifted the frame, reminding judges that “general acceptance” is not a prerequisite for scientific validity. What matters is reliability, methodological integrity, and relevance to the question at hand. A method can be new, unfamiliar, or institutionally inconvenient and still be admissible—if it works.

And then there is Rule 702, the backbone of expert testimony in the United States. It requires only three things:

1. Sufficient facts or data

2. Reliable principles and methods

3. Reliable application of those principles and methods to the case

Nothing here mandates peer review. Nothing elevates journal prestige. Nothing enshrines academic hierarchy. The courtroom cares only about whether the method is real, transparent, and reproducible.

It is, in many ways, a far more honest epistemology than the academy has managed to sustain.

B. Mapping Blanc’s Work Onto These Standards — A Method That Clears the Bar

When I apply these standards—the ones that shaped my own early career—to Blanc’s workflow, the alignment is exact.

Sufficient data?
Yes. Fifteen years of longitudinal records, spanning eighty-five children, with structural consistency across cases. That dataset is orders of magnitude richer than what many “high-impact” developmental studies claim as adequate.

Reliable principles and methods?
Yes. The progression Blanc describes mirrors the developmental pathways documented by Ann Peters (1977) and predicted by Barry Prizant (1983). Her method is not an invention; it is a continuation of an existing scientific lineage, extended with greater fidelity and greater attention to affective context.

Reliable application?
Yes. Thousands of practitioners—across countries, languages, cultures—have applied the same workflow and observed the same stages. The arc does not shift with ideology. It emerges because it is real.

From a forensic standpoint, the evidentiary chain is not only intact—it is exceptionally strong.

And this is precisely where the contrast becomes unavoidable: the so-called “evidence-based” behaviourist literature often collapses under these same standards. Much of ABA research fails ecological validity tests, cannot be replicated outside highly controlled settings, or relies on measures of “success” defined as compliance rather than linguistic or developmental growth. If Rule 702 were applied evenly, far more behaviourist work would fail admissibility than NLA ever would.

C. The Implication — NLA Would Be Admissible; Much of the Establishment Would Not

When I map Blanc’s workflow onto Frye, Daubert, and Rule 702, I don’t see ambiguity. I see a method that satisfies every requirement for evidentiary legitimacy. If I were asked to testify in court tomorrow regarding the reliability of NLA as a developmental framework, I could do so with confidence in the method, the data, and the international replication.

And I can say this with even more clarity because I have spent thirty years watching how courts treat evidence: they privilege transparency, reproducibility, and a clean audit trail. Blanc’s work meets all three. Behaviourist systems, by contrast, produce data that often function more like propaganda—quantified, yes, but conceptually hollow.

This is the irony the academy refuses to grapple with:
In the arena where evidence must withstand the strongest scrutiny, NLA stands taller than many of the methods used to critique it.

And here I need to note something crucial, because it sits at the heart of the current discourse:
Hutchins (2024) does not use scientific method to disprove NLA or GLP.
The paper does not present competing data, does not replicate the phenomenon, does not offer a longitudinal counter-analysis. Instead, it challenges terminology, epistemology, and claims of “evidence-based practice” from a critical standpoint—a legitimate endeavour, yes, but not empirical disconfirmation.

Hutchins does not overturn NLA.
Hutchins does not test NLA.
Hutchins does not produce contrary developmental trajectories.

It performs a conceptual critique, not a scientific refutation.

And conceptual critique has its place—but it cannot nullify twenty years of documented, replicated developmental evidence.

What this means, ultimately, is simple:
When we shift from institutional definitions of science to functional, forensic ones, the picture clarifies.
Blanc’s work is not “grey literature.” It is methodologically sound, evidentially grounded, and widely replicated. It meets the standards that matter—not the ones designed to exclude, but the ones designed to reveal truth.

The Politics of Gatekeeping — Why the Academy Refused to See the Workflow

The academy’s refusal to see Blanc’s workflow was never about the absence of evidence. It was about the politics of where that evidence lived. Venue became a proxy for validity, a way of drawing a boundary around who may speak and who must remain footnoted, peripheral, or invisible. The early NLA work appeared in Autism–Asperger’s Digest, a publication written for parents and practitioners—people whose proximity to autistic life is intimate, embodied, and therefore, in the academy’s logic, suspect. Her book was clinician-facing, written in accessible prose that prioritised understanding over performance. And perhaps most unforgivable of all, her method centred relationship—attunement, emotional safety, the child’s own meaning—rather than the externalised control that behaviourist traditions mistake for scientific neutrality. The academy cannot metabolise care without reading it as contamination.

That dynamic is amplified by the colonial logic of “grey literature,” a term that functions as an epistemic quarantine. The category was not created to safeguard rigour; it was created to preserve hierarchy. Under this system, knowledge counts as evidence only when it is produced, packaged, and blessed by institutional structures that long ago conflated authority with truth. Everything outside those walls—clinical reflections, practitioner manuals, relational case studies, parent-facing journals—is relegated to the shadows. Not because it lacks data, but because it circumvents the gatekeepers. The academy maintains its power by narrowing the definition of what counts as “published” until only its own voice echoes back.

This is why workflow itself becomes threatening. A relational, developmentally grounded method—one that makes the trajectory of gestalt language acquisition visible, repeatable, and reliably interpretable—undermines the behavioural paradigm at its foundation. If Blanc is right, then decades of diagnostic protocols and remediation systems have been operating with a fundamentally incorrect model of autistic communication. If NLA is valid, then the behaviourist literature’s central claims—about scripting, function, “language delay,” compliance-driven progress—collapse. A workflow that reveals the child’s inherent developmental logic exposes the bankruptcy of methods designed to extract behaviour rather than understand it. The threat is epistemic, not personal: NLA does not merely challenge ABA—it renders its interpretive frame obsolete.

This is why her work remained invisible to the very institutions that claim to safeguard evidence. The academy did not fail to see Blanc; it refused to. It could not acknowledge a workflow that met every scientific criterion yet lived outside its jurisdiction. To recognise her method would require admitting that the most rigorous developmental insights of the last two decades emerged not from universities but from a clinic grounded in relationship and respect. It would require admitting that practitioner science—care-based, transparent, and relentlessly reproducible—is not a threat to rigour, but a threat to the fiction that rigour belongs only to the institution.

And that is the real politics of gatekeeping: not the defence of science, but the defence of power.

Practitioner Science as Counter-Archive

What becomes clear, the longer I sit with this history, is that the real community of peers was never housed in the academy at all. It lived—and still lives—in the practitioners and families who recognised the truth of the workflow because they saw it unfolding daily in their clinics, their classrooms, their homes, their own autistic bodies. Parents who had been told for years that their child’s echolalia was meaningless read Blanc’s writing and recognised their child instantly. Speech-language pathologists and therapists, newly attuned to gestalt processing, found themselves tracing the same arcs she had documented decades earlier. Autistic adults—gestalt processors themselves—saw in her stages the developmental autobiography no diagnostic tool had ever been able to hold. These are the peers who matter: the ones who applied the method, replicated it, and built its evidentiary base not through institutional allegiance, but through lived encounter.

This is where participatory validity steps forward—not as a soft alternative to empirical rigour, but as its expansion. Evidence that grows through relationship, that tracks the child’s unfolding without coercion, that honours the communicative integrity of autistic life, is not weaker than the knowledge produced in laboratories; it is more faithful, more ethically grounded, and more ecologically valid. NLA is not a static method. It is a living longitudinal study, still accumulating data through every clinician, every family, every autistic person who recognises their developmental pathway in its stages. Its validity emerges through the same mechanisms that sustain all enduring scientific frameworks: replication across contexts, refinement through practice, and the self-correcting force of collective observation. Except here, the collective is not a gated academic circle—it is a global network of people who are listening.

This is why the notion of “grey literature” collapses so easily under scrutiny. The archive the academy designates as marginal is, in fact, where the knowledge lives. It holds the data they refused to index, the methods they refused to teach, the truths they refused to name. The academy’s own literature—tightly controlled, methodologically narrow, unmoored from the sensory, emotional, and relational realities of autistic life—is what appears grey from this vantage point: partial, bloodless, curated for legibility rather than accuracy. Its absence of lived context is not neutrality; it is erasure.

Practitioner science, by contrast, forms a counter-archive: a repository of truths generated through encounter, continuity, and care. It documents what institutions have ignored and what autistic communities have known all along. It is the record of language as it actually unfolds, the record of development as it actually appears, the record of children who were never broken—only misread.

Bringing the Workflow Back Home

When I speak about workflow with this kind of conviction, it’s because I come from a lineage where the stakes of method are not abstract. In forensic science, a workflow is the difference between evidence and inadmissible noise—between a truth that can withstand cross-examination and a truth that dissolves under scrutiny. Everything I learned in those early years revolved around three uncompromising demands: transparency, reproducibility, accountability. If you cannot show your steps, if another expert cannot follow them and reach the same result, if the chain of custody is anything less than clean, the evidence fails. It does not matter how confident you are. It does not matter how prestigious your institution is. The method itself must be able to stand alone.

That discipline shaped the way I read, think, and write. It shaped the way I approach gestalt language processing. It shaped the way I recognise patterns in autistic communication—not as magic, not as intuition, but as forensic literacy applied to developmental life. So when I encountered Marge Blanc’s work, I recognised it instantly. Not because it echoed my worldview, but because it followed the same epistemic architecture I had spent decades practising. Her method was transparent. Her documentation was meticulous. Her developmental stages were consistent. And her entire framework was accountable to the children whose voices she preserved with such fidelity. What she produced was not a theory; it was a workflow.

That is why I feel the convergence between our work so strongly. Her clinic and my forensic laboratory could not be more different, yet the principles are the same: relational ethics as methodological foundation, transparency as practice, repeatability as validation, and public accessibility as a form of accountability. She did in developmental linguistics what I did in forensic imaging—made the workflow visible so that anyone who needed it could follow it. Her work entered my life long before we ever spoke. It gave me a frame for my own autistic communication. It gave me a language for the way gestalts operate in my thinking, my writing, my teaching. And because of that, her method did not simply inform my books and articles—it underpinned them.

When I wrote Holistic Language Instruction (2024), her stages illuminated the linguistic histories of the children I worked with. When I wrote Decolonising Language Education (2025), her relational method stood in stark contrast to the extractive logics of behaviourism. When I wrote No Place for Autism? (2023), her workflow became part of the counter-archive I was building—proof of what we know when we centre autistic experience rather than distort it. Even in my more personal works, the influence is unmistakable: the understanding of gestalts as memory-units, the attunement to whole-pattern meaning, the recognition that language unfolds through relationship rather than correction. Her science repeated itself in me.

And that repetition is the point. It is the forensic proof. Blanc’s method reproduced itself in children across fifteen years; then it reproduced itself in clinicians across the world; and finally it reproduced itself in my own life, mind, and work. A workflow that holds across contexts, across communities, across continents is a workflow that is real. The fact that the academy refused to read it says nothing about the quality of the work and everything about the architecture of the system.

So this is the conclusion we move toward:
Blanc did what science demands. The field followed. The evidence stands. And the academy’s refusal to see it is not a failure of the method—it is a revelation of the system’s limits.

In bringing the workflow back home, I am simply naming what has been true all along. The method lives because it works. The archive endures because it was built in care. And the science persists, not in the journals that ignored it, but in the lives that continue to embody its truth.

Closing — A Science Returned to the People

What remains, after tracing the lineage of this work from clinic to conference to community, is the simplest truth of all: the science has already come home. The workflow is the proof—not in theory, but in practice, in pattern, in the way the stages unfold with such unwavering precision that even those who deny its legitimacy cannot escape its recurrence. The replication is the peer review, carried out not by anonymous gatekeepers but by clinicians whose hands have learned the method, by parents who recognise their child in its stages, by autistic GLPs who finally see their own developmental arc reflected without distortion. The community is the scientific body—not the academy, not the system of journals that overlooked the evidence, but the living network of people who apply the method and bear witness to its truth.

Published is published. It always has been. A method documented with care, shared openly, replicated widely, and refined through practice does not require institutional blessing to become real. It becomes real through use. Through fidelity. Through the undeniable force of repetition across lives and contexts. The academy’s silence is not an indictment of the work; it is an indictment of its own narrowness.

And so the truth walks ahead of us. It walks into classrooms where gestalt processors are finally heard rather than corrected. It walks into therapy rooms where mitigations are celebrated instead of suppressed. It walks into homes where parents understand that their child’s long, lyrical echoes are not symptoms but syntax—gestalts carrying the full weight of meaning long before the system is ready to recognise them. It walks, too, in every autistic adult who reads Blanc’s stages and feels a soft, unmistakable click of recognition in the body—the sense of finally being seen.

This is where the science has returned: to the people who keep it alive. To the children who show us the stages again and again. To the practitioners who honour the pattern. To the communities that refuse to let their knowledge be erased. The evidence is already here, breathing, speaking, recombining, growing. It needs no validation beyond the lives that reveal it. The truth has been walking among us all along—gestalt to analytic, emergence to expression—not through correction, but through recognition.