Interdisciplinary lecture by Valeria Bizzari: The link between Diagnosis and Collective Emotions The case of Asperger’s Syndrome

The aim of my talk is to offer a critical and historical interpretation of Asperger’s syndrome diagnosis. In the first part, I will show how diagnosis can become a device for socio-political control and, at the same time, how the socio-political idea of conformity can influence the creation of diagnostic criteria, rebuilding the history of some diagnosis and their influence on the society in which they were raised. In particular, I will focus on the genesis of the diagnosis of “Asperger’s syndrome” (Sheffer, 2018; Czech, 2018), arguing for a close link between the diagnostic process and collective, social emotions. In fact, it seems that the political and social identity of the Nazi State played a key role in the definition of the syndrome, to such an extent that we can argue that, without the influence of this political identity, the diagnosis of AS would have probably been focused on different features, emphasizing the affective differences over the social withdrawal.

In the second part, I will present the thought of George Frankl, a Jewish psychiatrist who worked both with Asperger and Kanner but has never been considered within the discussion on autism. Nonetheless, his unpublished manuscript “The Autistic Child. An Attempt of Analysis” offers an account of autism that is focused on language and affective abilities and, in my view, is more inclusive than the ones that ruled the clinical debate.

Valeria Bizzari is a postdoctoral researcher at the Husserl Archives, KU Leuven. Before, she worked at the Clinic University of Heidelberg, section Phenomenological Psychopathology and Psychotherapy, and at the University of Pisa. Her research areas involve limit-phenomena, phenomenological psychopathology and intersubjective disorders, with a special focus on autism spectrum disorder.

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