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the concept of autism in altering theories of social development in children. Early twentieth century evolutionary models of society generated a unique version of child development that was authenticated via social science, anthropology and political rhetoric. Theories of the ‘social instinct’ in infants and children developed alongside theories of intellectual development
changes in the meaning of autism began to trickle through into psychological theory and make radical changes to our understanding of children’s social, emotional and intellectual development. It is only by viewing these changes in context that one can fully appreciate the major alteration in descriptions of child development that occurred and their relevance to how differently we now think about children
the condition, arguing that the primary problem was one concerned with emotions and affects rather than just intellectual defect. However, as discussed earlier, the relationship between intellectual development and social and emotional development was only just beginning to be mapped out in individual and statistical studies of child development. Kanner’s work presented the
hallucination concerning the body and bodily functions. Now the social world was created in the very material of statistical and epidemiological studies, in the logic of collecting and collating. Detailed observations of infants shifting their eyes, reaching for toys and moving objects around were no longer just of interest to psychologists studying intellectual development or psychoanalysts studying human
intellectual development. 57 Discipline and agency Several historians have underlined the disciplinary or moralising aspects of health exhibitions. Inspired by the Foucauldian notion of ‘biopolitics’, they have argued that these exhibitions were meant to discipline the visitor’s gaze, body or behaviour. When discussing the ‘strategies’ of
rather sought to challenge theories of intellectual development that did not pay enough attention to the role that sense perception played in the formation of cognitive structures. In fact, Hermelin and O’Connor’s work on subnormality had already tried to problematise and expand discussions on what human ‘intelligence’ really was by demonstrating that, if the specific sensory
Yudkin’s other work also drew further attention to the fact that poverty, a social determinant, was linked to poor nutrition in the mother’s pregnancy and in early childhood, and that these factors were associated with perinatal mortality, growth and intellectual development. 70 In the early 1960s, Rudolf Schaffer, a former colleague of Bowlby’s, and Peggy Emerson had begun
Baron-Cohen had begun to construct the basis of a way to define and measure social development as opposed to intellectual development in children, it was the ultimate social science and statistical entrepreneur, Rutter, who first designed an extremely successful international instrument for measuring autism. Following the changes that were made in DSM-III-R, Rutter quickly began to work on a new