Autism and the Empathy Epidemic

by Janet Harbord, Stuart Murray (Editor), Corinne Saunders (Editor), Sowon Park (Editor), Angela Woods (Editor)

Overview

Threading an enquiry through debates in neurodiversity scholarship and disability studies as well as film theory, this open access book challenges the widespread idea that autism is an epidemic characterised predominantly by a deficit of empathy, arguing that the reverse is true: we are living through an empathy epidemic in which autism is the outcast.

In 1908, the British psychologist, Edward Titchener, translated the German term Einfühlung into the English language as 'empathy', around the same time that Eugen Bleuler coined the term 'autism' for a group of symptoms subset to an emerging classification of schizophrenia. Empathy became a useful tool to describe relations between people in a clinical context, but in the process of its incorporation into psychology, it shed its rich sensory meaning from Einfühlung as 'feeling-into' weather systems, architectural forms, and artworks. A remarkable reversal takes place in the first part of the twentieth century whereby empathy becomes an intra-human ethical act, and autism emerges as its inverse. Digging up and examining the buried relation between autism with an earlier form of 'empathy', this book argues that autism, like cinema, models an ethical apprehension of the more-than-human world.

The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by The Wellcome Trust.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781350345058
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	10/30/2025
Series:	Critical Interventions in the Medical and Health Humanities
Pages:	136
Product dimensions:	5.43(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Janet Harbord is Professor of Film Studies at Queen Mary, University of London, UK. She is the author of several books on film and philosophies of the moving image, including Chris Marker: La Jetée (2009), The Evolution of Film (2006) and Film Cultures (2002). She is the recipient of grants from the AHRC, EPSRC and the Leverhulme Trust.

Stuart Murray is Professor of Contemporary Literatures and Film and Director of Leeds Centre for Medical Humanities at the University of Leeds, UK. He is also the current Chair of the Wellcome Trust's Medical Humanities Expert Review Group. Stuart is the author of Disability and the Posthuman: Bodies, Technology and Cultural Futures and Autism as well as co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Disability.

Corinne Saunders is Professor of English and Co-Director of the Institute for Medical Humanities at Durham University, UK. She specialises in medieval literature and the history of ideas and is Co-Investigator on the Hearing the Voice project and Collaborator on the Life of Breath project, both funded by the Wellcome Trust.

Sowon Park is Assistant Professor of English at UC Santa Barbara. She is the Principal Investigator of the Unconscious Memory Project funded by NEH and Co-PI of the AHRC-funded Prismatic Translation project. She specializes in neurocognitive literary criticism and Global Modernism. She is co-editor of the Global Asias series.

Angela Woods is Associate Professor of Medical Humanities and Co-Director of the Institute for Medical Humanities at Durham University, UK. She is Co-Investigator on the Hearing the Voice project, funded by the Wellcome Trust, and co-editor of The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. Autism and the Double Empathy Problem

2. From Empathy to Einfühlung

3. Cinema: Einfühlung Machine

Bibliography and Filmography

Editorial Reviews

Beginning with an autistic perspective, Harbord refuses normative notions of the social, proposing forms and forces of sociality that are radically expanded through autistic life. This work will be very important to the growing milieu of critical autism studies.” —Erin Manning, University Research Chair in Relational Art and Philosophy in the Faculty of Fine Arts, Concordia University, Canada

“This is an excellent book, representing a new and vital intervention in autism studies. It is timely in its focus and addresses a gap in the current scholarly literature.” —Julia Miele Rodas, Professor of English, Bronx Community College & the Graduate Center, City University of New York, USA

From the Publisher