Autism: an Historical Ontology

The authors are developing a broad spectrum research on autism’s history and its prehistory. Retracing its genesis allows us to contextualize, in a proper way, the interesting phenomenum of the amazing cultural exposure of this psychiatric category, raised in a few decades from the status of a rare condition to its current public overexposure. The diagnostic proliferation of autism has turned relational disability into a hype, around which etiologies have been developed, along with methodologies of intervention, different and at times opposite theoretical approaches, but also, in a broader sense, a proliferation in cultural productions. The starting point of the present research are Foucault’s genealogy and the history of psychiatric knowledge/power, and place itself in the trail of the researches on autism developed by Ian Hacking, who dedicated in 2004 a course at the Collège de France to autism, and many other works in the following years. One activity carried out in the elaboration process of an historical ontology of autism consisted in a research about the institutionalization of relational disabilities in the ex psychiatric hospital of Venice, in San Servolo’s island, around the turn of the 19th century. What was the autistic human kind prior to its psychiatric naming? On which explicit and implicit assumptions are structured the medical, educational and reparative interventions? Which expectations in the involved subjectivities (parents, professionals, autistics) do they meet? Beside the clinical aspects, our investigation addressed the cultural traces of relational disabilities in literature, cinema and in a broader sense in cultural productions at many levels. Autism is highlighted as an absolutely complex cultural object and subject to a swirling evolution. Our goal is to consider the object “autism” in its complexity, not aiming to frame it in an organic and definitive meaning, but to represent its redundancy and its dispersion, according to Foucault’s theories. In the paper we will propose our itineraries of mapping, analysis and contextualization of autism, Asperger’s Syndrome and relational disabilities.