Generation time lag

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Why, oh why was Hans Asperger's work left untranslated until the end of his life. It's not as if he spent his post-war decades in the eastern bloc, back in his pre-war post at Leipzig. He was in his native Austria and therefore much more accessible. Austria has excellent standards in so many things, including both medicine and English-speaking. Why did Asperger slip through the net for so long? I'm not being ungrateful for the pioneering work of Wing, Gould and Frith in promoting awareness of Asperger in the English-speaking world but surely someone else should have already done that long before them. It seems to me that someone else's tardiness has denied many of us adults of a childhood diagnosis, if not also an adult one.

I think it has to do with the fact that English was not the lingua franca it is nowadays in science. A lot of scientific publications were in German or French and not in English. And a lot of people in the English-speaking world do not read in other languages. I also get the feeling that non-technical studies have less international contacts.

During my studies I read a lot of German articles.

My father was a physician, my mother was an elementary school teacher and I was a psychology major until I dropped out and we didn’t know until about ten years ago. Now I claim that Asperger’s is not one syndrome but a name given to several similar syndromes that haven’t been identified yet. I hope I live long enough to see that.

This is just a guess but maybe because Freudianism was the main psychology practice until pretty recently. I didn't really think about this until I read Temple Grandin's autobiography where she talks about being sent to a shrink for her autism in the 50's/aerly 60's and being psychoanalyzed with Freudian psychology. As a middle aged adult writing her book, she was aggravated at the therapeutic time wasted in her childhood trying to find the parental-caused trauma that gave her autism when all that time would have been better spent in pragmatic speech therapy. So maybe Asperger's work was too "out there" for anybody to bother translating until it suddenly all made sense in light of the neuroscience advances of the 70's and 80's. Then people suddenly realized the worth of his work.

It would be interesting to see if asperger's is still considered the correct explanation for this list of symptoms some twenty or thirty years from now. The genetics doesn't seem to bear out a solitary condition and the limited pathology makes it look like many of the secondary issues are more societal problem.

An idea that I had:

Some decades ago, children with moderate social problems were identified relatively late: until 6-7 y.o., they stayed at home; in the first school years, any problem was considered "the adaptation to the school"; then, only in the late childhood/begining of adolescence is that there problems are really noticed - and, at these age, any problem was considered more psychological then neurological (perhaps even the begining of adolescence crises).

Then, there was few specialists working in the field of "innate/neurological social problems in children", then, few people people to translate Asperger's papers.

Today, children go to pre-school relatively earlier (perhaps at 1 year age), then this kind of problems gets much more attention.