The constitution of children with autism

diagnosis and its implications

Abstract

This article aims to understand how the issue of diagnosing child development is treated by Lev Vigotski in his studies about disability and, from there, reflect how the autism diagnosis has been produced historically and its impacts on the subjectivity constitution of the child who receives it. The result of doctoral research in education, part of the problem of the hegemony of biologizing tendencies that circulate in the school environment and that end up affecting teaching relations and the ways in which children diagnosed with autism are understood. The study is based on Vigotski’s texts about diagnosis and modes of human constitution. The empirical work focuses on the Miguel’s story, a child with autism, in the second year of elementary school. In this text, the analyzes were carried out based on a narrative report made by the child’s mother to the researcher, and on excerpts from her field notes. For the records, audio recor-ding and subsequent transcription were used. The results allow us to understand two movements: the first concerns the way in which the theme is worked in Vigotski’s texts; the second signals the historical construction of the diag-nosis of autism in school and non-school social practices through the words of others. Finally, the discussions give indications of the possibilities for Miguel’s participation at school, on the street, in commerce, in games, in short, in different social practices.