The transformation of social life and the transformation of autism in the 1960s

Abstract

The change in meaningThe establishment of child psychology in the early twentieth century enabled a stable theory of the development of children's subjectivity to settle by the 1950s. This model can be characterised as one in which early infantile hallucinatory wishes, dreams and thoughts slowly come to be replaced by reality, and realistic representations in the mind, via the infant's everyday experience and interaction with objects. It was only behaviourists that challenged this theory, but as they had no replacement model for the development of subjectivity, all they could offer were criticisms rather than an alternative. However, by the 1960s, shifts began to take place that encouraged the development of new theories of the development of subjectivity in infants and children. These new models built on Cyril Burt's idea to use statistical analyses of populations in order to generate scientific proof for the development of conceptual awareness in children. Just as in all earlier theories of child development, these new theories of subjective development had the concept of autism at their core.One important occurrence in the search for scientific proof for autism was the deconstruction of the concept; it was interrogated, probed and criticised to its limits so that by the end of the 1960s, the initial meaning of the word 'autism' was completely annihilated. In fact, the new 'autism' that was developed during the 1960s had the exact opposite meaning of that which had prevailed until the end of the 1950s. Whereas autism and its conceptual cousins -primary narcissism, autoerotism, etc. -had previously always referred to hallucinatory Bonnie Evans -9781526110015 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at