48

As a clinician who started working with autistic people in the 1980s, I have witnessed the considerable evolution in our knowledge of autism. While this progress has enabled us to rule out certain false hypotheses (such as the psychogenetic origin of autism) and to raise public awareness of the condition, we are currently finding it difficult to place the progress of our knowledge within a coherent framework. In particular, we are witnessing an exponential increase in prevalence and a loss of diagnostic specificity. In his latest book, Laurent Mottron proposes a coherent refoundation of our conception of autism, by studying a particular band of the spectrum, prototypical autism. Based on the author’s experience as a clinician and researcher, this stimulating reflection clarifies the characteristics of prototypical autism, its development, and its place in the evolutionary history of our species. However, it seems to me that this focus on this specific band of the spectrum should be combined with research into other conditions on the spectrum, notably syndromic autism and autism associated with intellectual disability.