Chasing the Intact Mind

In Chasing the Intact Mind, Amy Lutz traces the history of the "intact mind" concept, explaining how it influences current disability policy and practice in the United States. Lutz describes how we got to this moment, where the severely autistic are elided out of public discourse and the intensive, disability-specific supports they need defunded or closed altogether. Lutz argues that focusing on the intact mind and marginalizing those with severe disability reproduces historic patterns of discrimination that yoked human worth to intelligence, and that it is only by making space for the impaired mind that we will be able to resolve these ongoing clashes--as well as even larger questions of personhood, dependency, and care.

Amy S. F. Lutz, PhD, is a historian of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. She has written about severe autism for many platforms, including The Atlantic, Slate, Spectrum, and Psychology Today, as well as in two previous books: We Walk: Life with Severe Autism (2020) and Each Day I Like It Better: Autism, ECT, and the Treatment of Our Most Impaired Children (2014). She is Vice President of the National Council on Severe Autism and lives outside Philadelphia with her husband and five children.

PART I: THE HISTORY OF THE INTACT MIND
Introduction
Chapter 1: Valuing the Disabled Child: The Emergence of Disability Parent Memoirs
Chapter 2: Whose Fault Is It? Psychoanalysis and the First Autism Parent Memoirs
Chapter 3: Is There a "Key"? Biomedical Discourse and Second-Generation Autism Memoirs
PART II: THE CASE STUDIES
Chapter 4: The Battle Against Sheltered Workshops
Chapter 5: The Erosion of Guardianship
Chapter 6: The Resurgence of Facilitated Communication
Conclusion