# The visualization of autism: Filming children at the Maudsley Hospital, London, 1957–8

## TL;DR

This paper explores how films from the 1950s at Maudsley Hospital helped shape the understanding of autism as a non-relational condition through visual documentation.

## Contribution

The paper reveals how film transitioned from capturing external signs to analyzing communication flow, influencing autism classification.

## Key findings

- Films were used to document children's behavior, highlighting a lack of inter-human communication in autism.
- The visual capture of repetitive movements helped model autism as an isolated, automaton-like condition.
- The study connects autism research to post-war theories on body language by German émigré psychoanalysts.

## Abstract

This article examines three films made during the 1950s by Elwyn James Anthony at the psychotic clinic for children at the Maudsley Hospital that marked an important transition in the purpose and practice of visual documentation in a clinical setting: film as a research tool was transitioning from the recording of external signs as indicators of internal subjective states, to the capture of the visual flow of communication between subjects. It is a shift that had a particular impact on the emergent classification of autism, a modality not yet properly separated from the broader term of psychosis, as a non-relational condition whose visual capture demonstrated a void of inter-human communicational exchange. Film was significant not only as a recording apparatus, but as a method of cutting and crafting sequences of movements into brief repetitive motifs. The filmed behaviour of children remained opaque to interpretation, a ‘finding’ that facilitated the modelling of an emergent autism as subjects who were isolated, alienated and automaton-like, inhabiting a separate temporality. The article situates this ‘second’, affectless autism, within a broader context of post-war research into gestures as a language of the body, developed largely through an intellectual network of German émigré psychoanalysts who had fled to the US and UK in the 1930s.