Standpunten en kanttekeningen

Autisme: affectieve stoornis, cognitieve stoornis of enigma?

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Abstract

Autism : affective disorder, cognitive disorder or enigma ? - Although social deviance has been considered the core deficit of autism ever since the initial description of the syndrome, the nature of autism and of its social impairments has yet to be clearly understood. Over the past 50 years there have been considerable efforts to determine what aspects of the syndrome are basic or primary. Since the beginning of the eighties, two important competing theories on the primary problem in autism have received a lot of attention. The affective theory suggested that children with autism suffer from an innate lack of empathic responsiveness to others, which may lead to impairments in conceptual development. A second theory emphasized a primary cognitive deficit and provided evidence for an impaired understanding of the mental world (lade erf ’theory of mind’) in children with autism, which might account for their social and communicative deficits. The emotional primacy hypothesis can certainly not be firmly rejected, but recent empirical findings have weakened it; the result of these criticisms seems to be that the affective hypothesis is no longer the main contender. It is too early to say whether the cognitive theory will provide an answer to the riddle of autism because it remains unclear whether ’theory of mind’ deficits are best conceptualized as cause or as correlates of autistic social dysfunctioning and also because it offers no explanation for the non-social symptoms. In the process of debating notions of the social impairment in autism, we have perhaps lost sight of other features of the syndrome.

How to Cite:

Roeyers, H., (1995) “Autisme: affectieve stoornis, cognitieve stoornis of enigma?”, Tijdschrift voor Sociale Wetenschappen 40(3), 316–322. doi: https://doi.org/10.21825/tvsw.95209