"Autism, rare and little publicized twenty years ago, is now constantly in the news and is absorbing ever larger sums of public funding and concern. It has changed school classrooms and perhaps the very nature of childhood. This book is the best available sociological analysis of how this happened, linking recent events to those early in the twentieth century. It tells of the formidable labour of autism activists, their dreams and schisms, with generosity and insight. Institutions, the ideals of the family and its management, and child minding, all play their role. This is a reflective analysis of a pervasive event of our times, replacing clichés by new ideas." Ian Hacking, The Collège de France

Introduction: The Autism Matrix. Why focus on therapies? Between mental illness and mental retardation. Chapter 1: The Puzzle of US States and International Variation in Autism Rates. Diagnostic substitution. Supply-side and demand-side explanations for diagnostic substitution. Deinstitutionalization as key to explaining diagnostic substitution. Deinstitutionalization and the variation in autism rates. Chapter 2: The Feebleminded. Chapter 3: The Surveillance of Childhood. The unification of mental deficiency and mental hygiene under child psychiatry. The role of the middle class family. The institutionalization of children as part of a comprehensive surveillance system. Chapter 4: Deinstitutionalization. A new look at the deinstitutionalization of the retarded. The middle class family and the "valorization of retarded existence". Chapter 5: "An existence as close to the normal as possible": Normalization. Normalization as therapeutic practice. Behavior modification and normalization. Chapter 6: Childhood Schizophrenia. Chapter 7: The Rise of the Therapies. Autism therapies in the 1950s and 1960s. Working on the child's brain. Inculcating habits and building skills. Fuzzifying the boundary between expert and layman. The space between fields. Chapter 8: Rimland and the Formation of NSAC. The problem of credibility. Schopler and the new economy of blame and worth. The implications of behavioral therapy. Conclusion. Chapter 9: The Atypical Children. The struggle over inclusion in the developmental disabilities act: Autism as analogous with mental retardation. "Items of autistic behavior": Autism as concurrent with mental retardation. Looping and the transformation of autism. Chapter 10: Asperger and Neurodiversity. The riddle of simultaneous discovery dissolved. "Personality trait" vs. "psychotic process". Twins reunited. Loops of self-advocacy. Chapter11: The space of autism therapies and the making and remaking of the Spectrum. The Return of Rimland. The agonistic network. Fuzzifying the boundary between medicine and alternative medicine. The space of autism therapies. Conclusion.