(iPoster) The Wild Girl of Stockholm: A Feral Child’s Critique of Development as Disorder

• In Event: Poster Session: Foundations of Political Theory 3 (Critical); Education Politics and Policy; & Political Science Education
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Foundations of Political Theory 3 (Critical)

Abstract

This essay is part of a manuscript titled 'The Political Spectrum: Autistic Difference and Social Disorder,' in which I propose that autism be understood as a properly social disorder – that is, a historically specific set of difficulties that emerge between individuals, rather than a transhistorical pathology found in the psychology of specific individuals. Such a framing, I contend, would not only help us better understand and ameliorate the challenges associated with autism; it would also free us to derive from the existing science of autism alternative ways of imagining social relations and of conceiving of social disorders more broadly construed.

In this essay, I examine the framing of autism as a developmental disorder as it was first proposed by Leo Kanner (1943) and Hans Asperger (1944). In a tradition dating back to J.-J. Rousseau’s Émile and J.M.G. Itard’s study of Victor, the Wild Boy of Aveyron, Kanner and Asperger sought to capture the unique difficulties of the children they observed. No less significantly, however, their studies also made sense of the specific frustration and hopelessness felt by the adults in these children’s lives. For these parents and teachers, despairing at the children’s lack of progress, a diagnosis of an “affective disorder of affective contact” or a “fundamental disturbance of contact” may have provided hope that intervention was possible. But we know the optimism of developmental psychology to be of the cruel sort, binding us to a narrative of progress that inevitably disappoints. And so I ask: are there alternatives?

Let us consider what it is that makes autistic children so distinctive as to lead their parents to despair. On Kanner’s and Asperger’s account, these are children who chronically refuse to obey, are “indifferent to the authority of adults,” do not make eye contact and, perhaps most significantly, do not “assume an anticipatory posture” when their mother approaches. Borrowing from Louis Althusser, it would seem these are children who cannot be interpellated, with what consequences one can imagine.

On this reading, I propose, what autism names is really an anomalous relation between children and adults – between children and their parents, specifically, in which the children are seen as refusing to be educated, shaped, or properly “developed.” As such a framing reminds us, development is a cultural process as much as it is a natural one and is thus conditioned by a distinct set of power relations. As we also know, thankfully, these relations are not beyond the reach of contestation, and it turns out the very children described by Kanner and Asperger suggest alternative ways that our relations might be configured.

Take the case of Kanner’s 5-year old patient, Donald T. One day, as he was trying to teach him the proper use of “yes” and “no,” his father offered to put him on his shoulder: “If you want me to, say ‘Yes’; if you don’t want me to, say ‘No.’” “Don said ‘yes’,” Kanner writes, “but thereafter ‘yes’ came to mean that he desired to be put up on his father’s shoulder.”

This anecdote – in which many parents since have surely recognized something of their own child – was presumably meant by Kanner to illustrate the difficulties of autistic children in properly acquiring language. But there are other ways of telling the story. Donald’s father evidently understood how his child was using the term ‘yes,’ and it seems he went along with his idiosyncratic usage. Instead of casting the child as a recalcitrant student, then, one could see him as a gifted pedagogue or even a revolutionary – one who upsets the father-son hierarchy and ends up re-signifying important terms in the language of the household.

Consider now the case of Greta Thunberg. Soon after first hearing about climate change, then 11-year old Greta stopped eating. Alarmed, her parents sought help from psychiatrists, who first considered anorexia but settled on a diagnosis of autism. In the months that followed Greta’s condition improved significantly, but the global warming that had caused her anguish did not. Greta stopped eating once again: only this time, Greta was clearly not anorexic; she was on a hunger strike. She knew that refusing to eat was a threat to her development, but it was her way of taking on the very idea of development, of challenging a capitalist ideology so committed to growth as to imperil life itself.

In the end, the effectiveness of Thunberg’s activism is a surely matter of dispute, and her autism may not be the superpower she claims it is; but the fact that she persuaded her parents – among others – to give up on air travel is proof that she, too, could upend the conventional relation between generations. And in so doing, she also revealed that one can conceive of development in ways that do not require us to either hope or despair. As Greta’s mother put it, “Greta has a diagnosis, but it doesn’t rule out the fact that she’s right and the rest of us have got it all wrong.”

Author

• Ivan Andre Ascher, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee