Chloe Silverman
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691150468
- eISBN:
- 9781400840397
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691150468.003.0004
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Social and Cultural Anthropology
This chapter focuses on parents emerging from the experience of wide-ranging psychogenic theorizing about autism during the 1950s and 1960s, of which Bruno Bettelheim's work was but one well-known ...
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This chapter focuses on parents emerging from the experience of wide-ranging psychogenic theorizing about autism during the 1950s and 1960s, of which Bruno Bettelheim's work was but one well-known example. Parents' accounts of their work during a period when the diagnostic category of autism was in flux highlight their unique authority as caregivers and “amateur” therapists. These accounts of parents' treatment activities make clear that expert knowledge and private life have continually intersected in the families of autistic children. The chapter examines how love, through parental efforts to help their children by training themselves in treatment practices, has functioned as a form of practice or technique in interventions to address the syndrome of autism. In both the case of the Orthogenic School's milieu therapy and parental work in behavior modification techniques, the affective involvement of “semiprofessionals” was key to what was experienced as the success of the interventions.Less
This chapter focuses on parents emerging from the experience of wide-ranging psychogenic theorizing about autism during the 1950s and 1960s, of which Bruno Bettelheim's work was but one well-known example. Parents' accounts of their work during a period when the diagnostic category of autism was in flux highlight their unique authority as caregivers and “amateur” therapists. These accounts of parents' treatment activities make clear that expert knowledge and private life have continually intersected in the families of autistic children. The chapter examines how love, through parental efforts to help their children by training themselves in treatment practices, has functioned as a form of practice or technique in interventions to address the syndrome of autism. In both the case of the Orthogenic School's milieu therapy and parental work in behavior modification techniques, the affective involvement of “semiprofessionals” was key to what was experienced as the success of the interventions.
Bernadette Wegenstein
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- August 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780262232678
- eISBN:
- 9780262301114
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
- DOI:
- 10.7551/mitpress/9780262232678.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
If the gaze can be understood to mark the disjuncture between how we see ourselves and how we want to be seen by others, the cosmetic gaze—in this book’s formulation—is one through which the act of ...
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If the gaze can be understood to mark the disjuncture between how we see ourselves and how we want to be seen by others, the cosmetic gaze—in this book’s formulation—is one through which the act of looking at our bodies and the bodies of others is already informed by the techniques, expectations, and strategies (often surgical) of bodily modification. It is, the author says, also a moralizing gaze, a way of looking at bodies as awaiting both physical and spiritual improvement. The book charts this synthesis of outer and inner transformation. It shows how the cosmetic gaze underlies the “rebirth” celebrated in today’s makeover culture and how it builds upon a body concept which has collapsed into its mediality. In today’s beauty discourse—on reality TV and websites that collect “bad plastic surgery”—we yearn to experience a bettered self which has been reborn from its own flesh and is now itself, like a digitally remastered character in a classic Hollywood movie, immortal. The author traces the cosmetic gaze from eighteenth-century ideas about physiognomy through television makeover shows and facial-recognition software to cinema—which, like our other screens, never ceases to show us our bodies as they could be, drawing life from the very cosmetic gaze it transmits.Less
If the gaze can be understood to mark the disjuncture between how we see ourselves and how we want to be seen by others, the cosmetic gaze—in this book’s formulation—is one through which the act of looking at our bodies and the bodies of others is already informed by the techniques, expectations, and strategies (often surgical) of bodily modification. It is, the author says, also a moralizing gaze, a way of looking at bodies as awaiting both physical and spiritual improvement. The book charts this synthesis of outer and inner transformation. It shows how the cosmetic gaze underlies the “rebirth” celebrated in today’s makeover culture and how it builds upon a body concept which has collapsed into its mediality. In today’s beauty discourse—on reality TV and websites that collect “bad plastic surgery”—we yearn to experience a bettered self which has been reborn from its own flesh and is now itself, like a digitally remastered character in a classic Hollywood movie, immortal. The author traces the cosmetic gaze from eighteenth-century ideas about physiognomy through television makeover shows and facial-recognition software to cinema—which, like our other screens, never ceases to show us our bodies as they could be, drawing life from the very cosmetic gaze it transmits.
