Unfeeling Malice – Asperger’s Children

And he was a close associate of Hans Asperger, who developed a new label for classifying children, ‘autistic psychopathy’, which he couched in terms of poor or absent Gemüt (‘a qualitative otherness, a disharmony of feeling’), diagnosing them with ‘unfeeling malice’. Edith Sheffer argues in Asperger’s Children that, regardless of the science, and regardless of whether autism is one condition or several, it remains steeped in the cultural values of its Nazi origins, and in the idea of a model personality: obedient, animated by collective bonds, socially competent, robust in mind and body. In 1934, Hamburger made the 28-year-old Asperger head of the children’s clinic while zealously purging Jews and liberals – in Vienna as a whole, 70 per cent of paediatricians were removed – and advancing a social utility view of medicine.

Source: www.lrb.co.uk