Copy of Asperger's 1938 paper
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Parts of the translation are quoted in this book:
The Complete Guide to Asperger's Syndrome
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I have that book, and the quote which Attwood uses to begin Chapter 1 appears in 600,000 results from Google (Attwood uses a translation by Brit Wilczek, presumably provided directly by Springer). I would very much like to read the entirety of the paper. Adam Feinstein's "A History of Autism Conversations with the Pioneers" (Wiley-Blackwell 2010) describes more of the paper. (Chapter 1, "The Two Great Pioneers", http://books.google.ie/books?id=1-UztWdBkPkC)
This appears to be a serious misconception. The Nazis annexed Austria in March 1938 and it seems clear that Hans Asperger feared they would shortly introduce the eugenics law, already in place in Germany, ordering the extermination of, among others, the mentally handicapped and “subnormal.” Indeed, his daughter claims that he personally witnessed some unpleasant incidents during his visits to Germany in the early 1930s.
A PhD student, Marc Bush, has carried out a very detailed stylistic analysis of Asperger’s papers of 1938 and 1944 and believes that Asperger deliberately couched them in “Nazi-style” vocabulary to deceive the Nazis, while protecting the children in his charge in Vienna. “That explains why the 1938 paper, or Asperger’s follow-up paper in 1944, did not become known in the United States, where you might have expected German-speaking, scientific-minded immigrants to mention them: they saw them virtually as Nazi propaganda and not worth citing. Whereas nothing could be further from the truth.”
Asperger’s colleague, Elizabeth Wurst, told me: “Asperger had a very clear standpoint against the Nazis. He tried to develop this position. Two of his colleagues . . . emigrated to the United States and when he himself visited the US, he met them and discussed the old times. If there had been any problems with Jewish people in his team, he would not have sought them out in America.”
A close reading of Asperger’s 1938 paper throws up some fascinating clues to why he wrote this article in the way he did, as well as to how his vocabulary was misinterpreted. The paper begins by appearing to praise the Third Reich and he then refers to the need to avoid “the transmission of sick genetic material”—apparently falling firmly into line with Nazi thinking on eugenics. However, as Marc Bush has so rightly pointed out, in virtually the same breath, Asperger goes on to defend and praise the children (with autistic psychopathy) in his charge. He speaks about “how much we can do to help” abnormal children.
No, but it is claimed to be the first article describing children with characteristics that later became known as AS - e.g. "Where it is about logical thinking, where the issue is meeting their special interests, they are ahead, surprise their teachers with their clever answers; where it is about more or less mechanical learning by heart, where concentrated learning is demanded (copying, spelling, methods of arithmetic) these ‘clever’ children fail in a severe kind of way, so that they often are on the brink of failing their exams."
Attwood writes (p. 9) "Maria gave me one of her father’s papers, published in 1938, when he first described the characteristics that several years later became known as autistic personality disorder, and eventually Asperger’s syndrome in 1981."
Feinstein writes (p. 10) "For decades, it has been wrongly assumed that Kanner’s landmark 1943 paper—“Autistic disturbances of affective contact,” published in the now-defunct American journal, The Nervous Child 6 —predated Asperger’s 1944 paper, “Die ‘autistischen Psychopathen’ in Kindesalter,” which appeared in the journal, Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten. However, in a lecture given five years before Kanner’s paper—at the Vienna University Hospital on October 3, 1938—Asperger was already talking about children with “autistic psychopathy” (in the technical sense of an abnormality of personality). The speech was subsequently published under the title “Das psychisch abnorme Kind” in the Vienna weekly, Wiener Klinischen Wochenzeitschrift, also in 1938."
Asperger's other papers are easy to find, but this (first) description of AS is unfortunately difficult to locate. I would like to read it in full.
If you can find it in German, we could all work together to translate the rest of it. I know quite a few of us on here speak German; I do. We could all do a page each and have it done in no time. It's quite a historical document, though, so maybe someone has done it already?
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Uta Frith in "Autism and Asperger syndrome" (1991) included an English translation of the later 1944 paper, and described this as Asperger's "first", "original" and "pioneering" paper describing the syndrome. That later paper is Asperger, H. (1944). Die 'Autistischen Psychopathen' im Kindesalter. Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten, 117, 76-136. (As a historical note, Kanner's first paper was in 1943, i.e. after the 1938 paper and before the 1944 paper).
It is a complete copy of the earlier 1938 paper (in English or German) that I am trying to locate.
I've studied german, so can help with the translation
I found a copy of Asperger H (1938). "Das psychisch abnormale Kind". Wiener Klinische Wochenschrift 51: 1314–7. (In English: "The psychically abnormal child". Vienna Clinical Weekly). [http://libgen.io/scimag/index.php?s=das+psychisch+abnorme+kind]
I also posted some extracts of my own translation to English on my blog [http://wordpress.stuartneilson.com/a-brief-summary-of-hans-aspergers-1938-psychically-abnormal-child]. If anyone is interested in the historical context of psychiatry when Asperger wrote this paper, I have some details [http://wordpress.stuartneilson.com/historical-context-of-aspergers-first-1938-autism-paper].
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