Asperger

Asperger attributed “sadistic traits” to autistic children writing of the “primitive spitefulness” and “negativism and seemingly calculated naughtiness of autistic children” who “delighted in malice” (Sheffer, 156). His clinic reports “not only generalized about the children’s ways of relating – to the point where their descriptions are interchangeable – they also generalized about the youths’ disobedience.” Such children were impetuous, impulsive, and indifferent to adult authority (160). In his postgraduate thesis of 1944, Asperger “cited eminent figures such as Ernst Kleschmer, Ludwig Klages, and Carl Jung . . . – and his work has been interpreted in terms of these more mainstream figures – Asperger framed his work in the ideas of Nazi child psychiatrists and Gemüt in the introduction. And it is these Reich concepts that provided the basis for Asperger’s ultimate definition of autistic psychopathy” (215). In his thesis of 1944, autistic child “is like an alien, oblivious to the surrounding noise and movement, and inaccessible in his preoccupation”.” As such they were incapable of joining the Volk (220). Between 1938 and 1944, Asperger’s “diagnosis of autistic psychopathy became aligned with his senior associates in Nazi child psychiatry that it would seem to be the result of his immediate circumstances rather than of the evolution of autonomous research and independent thought” (221).