Discussion History Main / BreakingTheFourthWall

Edith Sheffer, author of \'\'Asperger\'s Children\", is really pushing the interpretation that Asperger was a villain and that we should throw out the Asperger\'s name. Honestly, it sounds to me like she\'s introducing an important corrective view against the former positive view of Asperger, but going a tad overboard with it and also getting her own agenda about the redefinition of the autism spectrum involved. Herwig Czech, author of “Hans Asperger, National Socialism, and \'race hygiene\' in Nazi-era Vienna.”, doesn\'t go quite that far:

--> \"Regarding Asperger’s contributions to autism research,\" he writes, \"there is no evidence to consider them tainted by his problematic role during National Socialism. They are, nevertheless, inseparable from the historical context in which they were first formulated, and which I hope to have shed some new light on. The fate of \'Asperger’s syndrome\' will probably be determined by considerations other than the problematic historical circumstances of its first description—these should not, in any case, lead to its purge from the medical lexicon.\"

From Steve Silberman, author of \'\'Neuro Tribes\'\', we get:

--> I think the work of exposing the culpability of these historical figures is valuable and necessary, which is why I agreed to be one of the peer reviewers of Czech’s paper for the Journal of Molecular Autism. Because of my research on the Nazi context of Asperger’s work in “[=NeuroTribes=],” the new information in Czech’s paper and Sheffer’s book did not come as a total shock to me. I had already rewritten the US paperback text of [=NeuroTribes=]—which has been out for two years—to reflect Asperger’s more problematic role, including his signature on Herta Schreiber’s death warrant. But there’s new information in Czech’s paper and Sheffer’s book that will have to be taken into account when appraising the totality of Asperger’s legacy.

--> For a long time, Asperger has been viewed mostly in a positive light; now the pendulum is swinging in other direction. But I suspect that the most realistic picture of Asperger is neither a Schindler-like savior nor a Nazi supervillain. He was, most likely, a complicated and conflicted man who belonged to a group of medical professionals that recognized the potential of “autistic intelligence” long before anyone else did but who was willing to go along with his Nazi bosses even when Jewish storefronts were burning in front of his eyes—an image that haunted me while I was writing my book, and coincidentally appears in Sheffer’s book as well. Czech and Sheffer admit that there is no way of knowing how many children Asperger may have saved from euthanasia by using his position—but one child sent to “permanent placement” at Am Spiegelgrund is too many. The willingness of clinicians to go along in the face of great evil is what made it possible for the Nazis to transform the Austrian medical establishment into an industry of death. If you weren’t risking your life by actively resisting, you became complicit in the horror that was created. That’s a heavy lesson for this historical moment, when government officials are routinely asked to ignore norms and ethics to fulfill various agendas.

A bit further along,

--> There’s a tendency to see the barbaric conditions in the Austrian institutions that Czech and Sheffer describe as purely a product of the Nazi ethos, but several of the American institutions I describe in my book were equally barbaric and brutal, even if the staff didn’t practice euthanasia. My book describes Ivar Lovaas, who led the development of Applied Behavior Analysis for autism at the University of California in Los Angeles, subjecting kids to experimental “treatments” for autism that can only be called torture, zapping them with electrified floors or bombarding them with ear-splitting noise. If we think unimaginable cruelty toward autistic people ended with the Allies’ victory over Hitler, we’re fooling ourselves.

--> I admire Sheffer’s scholarly work on detailing what she calls Asperger’s “slide into complicity.” Now more than ever, we have to be aware of how violence against stigmatized people—whether it’s Jews, immigrants, people of color, or kids with autism—can quickly become institutionalized, just a part of how society works, “common sense.” Believe me, when I was writing “[=NeuroTribes=],” I never thought I’d see Nazis in the news so soon. Sheffer’s book is well timed. Unfortunately, in the epilogue, she makes a very offbase claim: “Ultimately, Lorna Wing regretted how she brought Asperger’s ideas to the English-speaking world and changed the face of autism.” I did one of the last in-depth interviews with Lorna before she died in 2014, and nothing could be further from the truth. Lorna considered her discovery of Asperger syndrome and the broadening of autism into a spectrum to be the crowning achievements of her career.

To conclude with Maxfield Sparrow:

--> When the chips are down, I will always join with my neurotribe. So I want to officially state that, while I still don’t personally want to be called an Aspie, I am ready to fight on behalf of my Autistic siblings who do connect with that identity—not as a euphemism for high functioning, but as a cultural marker of their understanding of themselves and the world we live in. No, you cannot take away the identity of thousands of Autistics! Asperger had deep flaws, but the identity that has grown around his name is valid and the people who identify with Asperger’s have the right to decide for themselves whether to keep his name or not.

Personally, I\'m not yet ready to move on from the Asperger\'s name. It\'s taken on a life of its own, apart from the man it\'s named after, and there are so many people who have gained recognition and community by identifying with this label. Maybe the trend in the future is going to be to get rid of it, and it will sound kind of like the terms \"negro\" or \"colored\" sound today: former terms of solidarity and pride which eventually came to sound old-fashioned or even offensive. I\'m of such a mind that if a new term that was both accurate and proud were to gain traction, I might be willing to let Asperger\'s go in the future, but I don\'t want to ditch it just out of a misguided sense of moral panic.

I think there\'s a certain hypocrisy in getting all worked up about Asperger\'s crimes when there isn\'t a popular push to re-name Porsche or Volkswagen for using slave labor during the Nazi era, or take the name off of everybody\'s Fords because of his anti-semitic publications. Edwaerd Muybridge, the grandfather of moving pictures, got off Scott-free for the cold-blooded murder of his wife\'s lover. Isaac Singer, of sewing machine fame, was a bigamist and domestic abuser, while James Watson of DNA fame went on that racist rant. It\'s an uncomfortable fact that many of the things we use today were invented by people who were jerkass or even evil, and while that horribleness needs to be brought to light, I think that names have a certain role in remembering history. I think it isn\'t always clear-cut whether the better thing to do is strike their names off the campus buildings, as it were, or keep them around as a reminder of the ambiguous and dark dimensions of history. Sometimes it may be appropriate to distance one\'s community from the name of a morally compromised person--I do support the idea of taking Confederate monuments out of public squares and into museums, for example--but I think we should have a serious discussion about this instead of rushing into it.