ELECTRIC WORD
THE INTERVIEW
How did Kanner’s and Asperger’s concepts of autism differ? Kanner’s conception of autism was much more limited—he saw it as a rare form of childhood psychosis. Eventually, by 1948, he had decided it was caused by bad parenting—refrigerator mothers. That had huge effects on the history of autism. Autistic children were dumped in state institutions. They did very badly, and that became what people thought was the natural course of autism. Being diagnosed with autism was considered a fate worse than death. Autistic people became invisible—not only because the kids were in institutions but also because the parents were being blamed for having caused the disorder. So Kanner’s rigid definition of autism helped create the impression it was extremely rare? Yes. And it became a self-fulfilling prophecy: Kanner once bragged he turned away from his office nine out of 10 children who were referred to him as autistic by other clinicians, without giving them an autism diagnosis. Now you have a whole infrastructure of clinicians who are qualified to diagnose autism. Teachers know what to look for. Parents know what to look for. Everybody’s looking at young children to see if they’re autistic or not. Whereas back then, all you had was Leo Kanner’s office.
THE CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL and Prevention estimates that one in 68 children in the US are on the autism spectrum, a number that stands in staggering contrast to a 1970 study that put the figure at one in 14,200. Some people believe we’re in the middle of an autism epidemic. But autism has always been part of the human experience, as journalist (and wired contributor) Steve Silberman shows in his new book, NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity. It’s only recently, he argues, that we have become properly aware of it. We spoke to Silberman about how the modern world came to recognize autistic people and how autistic people helped shape the modern world.
So how did the rediscovery of Hans Asperger—and the naming of Asperger’s syndrome in his honor—come about?
WIRED: In your book you write about Austrian pediatrician Hans Asperger, who did early work on autism in the 1930s. Why is he so important? SILBERMAN: The more that I discovered about Asperger’s conception of autism, the more it struck me as incredibly prescient. He saw autistic people as a subset of humanity that had accelerated the evolution of science and technology. They were a hidden thread in the weave of culture. They had always been here. Asperger conceived of autism as a condition that lasted from birth to death. It was not just a childhood disorder. And yet he didn’t get credit for discovering autism. This guy Leo Kanner, who wrote a paper that came out in 1943 in English, got nearly all the credit for discovering it, and Asperger was reduced to a footnote.
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Carl Zimmer (@carlzimmer) is the author of 12 books. He wrote about gene therapy in issue 21.08.
In the 1970s, a cognitive psychologist in England named Lorna Wing and her research assistant, Judith Gould, went out to do something that should have been done 30 years earlier—they looked at autism in the general population. They pounded the pavement in this London suburb called Camberwell, looking for autistic kids. Basically, they found that there was a broad and diverse and colorful range of presentations of autism and autistic traits in the kids. Kanner’s definition was obviously too narrow, so they decided to throw it out. Then Wing read one of Kanner’s papers citing Asperger and said, “What is this other paper?” Her husband spoke German, so he translated for her, and she said, “This is it. This is what we’re seeing in Camberwell.”
