Ancestors

Written by Alex C has moved on 2024-08-27 at 12:42

I wonder what’s going to happen when a critical mass of #actuallyautistic activists realizes that “autism” was coined as a derogatory and infantilizing term based on the premise that nonverbal autistic children were psychotically self-absorbed.

I expect we will see a flurry of silly neologisms, then a slew of influencers being confidently incorrect at each other about their preferred new euphemism, then a full-on meme war, including threats of ostracism and accusations of ableism against people who innocently keep calling themselves autistic, and finally a return to the status quo. I can’t wait! 😜

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3757918/

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Toot

Written by Alex C has moved on 2024-08-27 at 12:48

“The concept of autism was coined in 1911 by the German psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler to describe a symptom of the most severe cases of schizophrenia, a concept he had also created. According to Bleuler, autistic thinking was characterized by infantile wishes to avoid unsatisfying realities and replace them with fantasies and hallucinations… From the mid-1960s onwards, child psychologists used the word ‘autism’ to describe the exact opposite of what it had meant up until that time. Whereas ‘autism’ in the 1950s referred to excessive hallucinations and fantasy in infants, ‘autism’ in the 1970s referred to a complete lack of an unconscious symbolic life.”

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3757918/

So Bleuler coined not just one, but two very misleading psychological condition terms! Schizophrenia is not a splitting of the mind, and autism is not a pathological self-regard.

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Descendants

Written by Alex C has moved on 2024-08-27 at 13:05

When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.

[#]ActuallyHumptyDumpty

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