Autism doesn’t have to be inevitable. And it makes sense for everyone to understand the difficulties specific to autistic children and their parents. That is the key concept of this essay written by a mother bucking the trend of an era that has given up on the idea of treating psychological difficulties, preferring to pigeonhole individuals at a very young age. Yet all sorts of possibilities exist.
Jacqueline Berger, journalist at the French daily Libération, examines the reasons for this paradigm shift. She shows us how and why the biological discourse has become the dominant one, and she speaks out forcibly against the abandonment of children who aren’t put together like others. The shortage of places for them is glaring, the lack of care even more so.
This situation, she declares, is the sign of a society that is sinking into intolerance, despite giving lip service to the idea of compassion. Our society, obsessed as it is with speed, profitability, power and pleasure, is developing its own form of autism, as it becomes unable to see or hear what might distract it from its course, incapable of coping with the Other.
'Breaking Out of Autism' is everybody’s business, because the autistic are both the sign and the product of the disintegration of our ties to the Other. A mirror that reflects and enlarges our own suffering, they may also be our last chance to broaden our horizons. This book is a manifesto calling for struggle against various forms of autism, so that they don’t become the malady of our century, as some believe is already happening.
More than 100,000 people in France are affected by autism. Thousands of children still don’t have any practical solutions. Jacqueline Berger raises her voice against this situation and calls for a Copernican revolution of the gaze that we bring to bear on these Others and on ourselves.