Parent and professional associations that support the search for a cure usually refuse to acknowledge the very existence of an identity issue. For them, autism is simply a disease. Children are not autistic, they have autism. As Kit Weintraub (2005), the mother of two autistic children and a board member of Families for Early Autism Treatment, wrote in response to the autistic self-advocate Michelle Dawson’s (2004) critique of the “autism-ABA industry,” I love my children, but I do not love autism. My children are not part of a select group of superior beings named “autistics.” They have autism, a neurological impairment devastating in its implications for their lives, if left untreated.... it is no more normal to be autistic than it is to have spina bifida. (Weintraub 2005).
Inspired by the homonymous book by Fernando Vidal and Francisco Ortega, this timespace presents the authors' genealogy of the cerebral subject and the influence of the neurological discourse in human sciences, mental health and culture.
