Autism and the Empathy Epidemic

By: Janet Harbord

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Paperback | 30 October 2025

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144 Pages

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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 Einf¼hlung into the English language as âempathyâ, around the same time that Eugen Bleuler coined the term âautismâ 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 Einf¼hlung as âfeeling-intoâ 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 âempathyâ, 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.

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