Article ID: CBB562371011

The visualization of autism: Filming children at the Maudsley Hospital, London, 1957–8 (2024)

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This article examines three films made during the 1950s by Elwyn James Anthony at the psychotic clinic for children at the Maudsley Hospital that marked an important transition in the purpose and practice of visual documentation in a clinical setting: film as a research tool was transitioning from the recording of external signs as indicators of internal subjective states, to the capture of the visual flow of communication between subjects. It is a shift that had a particular impact on the emergent classification of autism, a modality not yet properly separated from the broader term of psychosis, as a non-relational condition whose visual capture demonstrated a void of inter-human communicational exchange. Film was significant not only as a recording apparatus, but as a method of cutting and crafting sequences of movements into brief repetitive motifs. The filmed behaviour of children remained opaque to interpretation, a ‘finding’ that facilitated the modelling of an emergent autism as subjects who were isolated, alienated and automaton-like, inhabiting a separate temporality. The article situates this ‘second’, affectless autism, within a broader context of post-war research into gestures as a language of the body, developed largely through an intellectual network of German émigré psychoanalysts who had fled to the US and UK in the 1930s.

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Article Bonnie Evans; Janet Harbord (2024) Film, observation and the mind. History of the Human Sciences (pp. 3-11). unapi

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https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB562371011/

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Authors & Contributors
Evans, Bonnie
Jones, Edgar
Brock, Claire
Feinstein, Noah Weeth
Genter, Robert
Hess, Volker
Journals
History of the Human Sciences
History of Psychiatry
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences
British Journal for the History of Science
Canadian Review of American Studies
Journal of Medical Biography
Publishers
Cambridge University
Karnac Books
Manchester University Press
Palgrave
Arizona State University
University of Cambridge (United Kingdom)
Concepts
Children
Psychoanalysis
Science and film
Psychiatry
Public health
Hospitals and clinics
People
Bowlby, John
Hildegard Von Bingen, Saint
Hitchcock, Alfred
Kennedy, Hansi
Mazzetti, Lorenza
Robertson, E. Graeme
Time Periods
20th century, late
20th century, early
20th century
12th century
18th century
19th century
Places
London (England)
Great Britain
United States
Paris (France)
Europe
France
Institutions
Maudsley Hospital (England)
World Health Organization (WHO)
Heidelberg Universität
National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery
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