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Article ID: CBB562371011

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

Janet Harbord (Author)

History of the Human Sciences
Volume: 37
Issue: 2
Pages: 117-137

DOI: 10.1177/09526951241238650

URI: https://doi.org/10.1177/09526951241238650

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Psychoanalysis Children Psychiatric clinics Science and film Autism 20th century, late London (England) Maudsley Hospital (England)

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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