I chose the Legacy of Autism edition of the Fresh Air podcast on NPR. Psychology is a pet subject of mine and autism particularly as I have a close friend with Asperger’s (or what would have formally been called Asperger’s before the newest DSM.) Anyway, they interview Dr. Silverman who gives a brief introduction of autism – though rather than repeat the old tired phrases, he refers to autism as an over-arching difficulty interpreting “social signals in real time” which I found fascinating.
The podcast gets really interesting in that in delves deep into the history of autism and illustrates how the way we think of it today – it terms of the problematic high-functioning vs. low-functioning distinctions – was in some way shaped by forces of history. Hans Asperger, a child psychologist, did research in the 1930s on autism. He is sometimes mistakenly credited with discovering Asperger’s (because it’s named after him) but that’s not quite accurate. He actually discovered and documented the existence of the entire autistic spectrum that had “a wide variety of clinical presentations.”
Unfortunately, when the Nazis invaded Austria, his work at the clinic became threatened. The children immediately became targets of the eugenics program. So Dr. Asperger ingeniously gave the first public talk on Autism in history to the Nazis — he presented the “most promising cases” in the hope of protecting the children he was treating in his clinic and that is where Silverman asserts that the idea of high-functioning / low-functioning autism really stems from.
