This is a good site, which summarises Hans Asperger's work in the form of
questions and answers
http://www.paulcooijmans.com/asperger/a ... rized.html
"Dr. Hans Asperger, the Austrian pediatrician after whom Asperger Syndrome is named, published his article Die "Autistischen Psychopathen" im Kindesalter while working at the University Children's Hospital in Vienna. The essential points of Asperger's paper are summarized below in the form of questions and answers. These are intended to be an objective condensation of Asperger's observations related to the relevant questions, which in most cases are spread over the various sections of his article. The comments are by the present author (which is posh language for "I"). One may also wish to read the German original oneself, which can be found through the hyper reference at the beginning of the present paragraph."
I found this section on bullying and anger very interesting as it's what I've always thought about bullying ie that it's ultimately all about an attempt to wipe out a person's genes. Therefore people who commit suicide as a result of bullying are doing exactly what the bully intends.
So people should never even contemplate suicide, otherwise you are facilitating the desire of the dominant genes, as represented by the bullies, to wipe your own genes out.
"They tend to be the focal point of extreme bullying, to be at the centre of a roaring group of boys mocking them or beating and kicking them. Asperger stresses repeatedly that this bullying is understandable, is provoked by their deviant appearance, clumsiness, and behaviour, including their own possible rage against the other children, and by the fact that they "can not take a joke" - Sie verstehen keinen Spaß - , that they can not stand derision. Hans Asperger says they are not able to understand the world from the heart, which is the basis of true humour: Sie [...] bringen es nicht zu jenem aus dem Gemüt kommenden Verstehen der Welt, das im echten Humor liegt."
"The excessive bullying that is so typical in relation to Aspergoid individuals may have an ancient evolutionary background. Someone so deviant is, on the unaware tribal level, not recognized as a member of the own tribe by the normal instinct-driven children. Such an intruder must therefore be prevented from spreading his genes. When a patrol of chimpanzees spots a male member of a neighbouring band at the border of their territory, the opponent is typically captured and held to the ground by two chimpanzees while being battered to death by a third. This is the archetype of bullying. Humans and chimpanzees are parallel species that happen to share this trait, inherited from the common ancestor. Even though it is done by children, make no mistake; The purpose of bullying is to kill, to keep the deviant individual from procreation.
Toward the end of puberty children tend to stop their bullying, as by that time most have reached the abstract thinking phase (which in Aspergoids starts in infancy but in in normal children in puberty), and acquire the option to use intellect to control the ancient instincts. Intellect is the great peace-bringer that keeps the mammalian brain in check. Without intellect, instincts of violence, aggression and xenophobia run wild in the male brain, as so clearly seen in children and in adults of below-average intelligence (Most criminals have I.Q.s between 60 and 100, while violent crime peaks in males between I.Q. 80 and 90).
The blind rage sometimes seen in these children when bullied or mocked appears to come from the "reptilian brain", the brain stem that houses the vegetative functions and is even more ancient than the mammalian brain. It is the rage of the crocodile attacking its prey. In such a rage, there is no awareness of or consideration for consequences, pain, or damage, and no recognition of the supremacy of the opponent; One is a barely aware insensitive killing machine. That nevertheless few are killed in such rages is partly due to the clumsiness and physical weakness of most Aspergoid boys, and partly to the superior tactical insight of the mammalian brain of the instinct-driven bullies, who will only take on their victim in a situation of supremacy, when they are confident they will win a possible fight. Bullies only target those weaker than themselves, mirroring the fact that chimpanzees only attack members of neighbouring bands if they outnumber them by at least three to one.
The reptilian rage can overcome everyone, but one may imagine that in normal persons the mammalian brain acts as a buffer, takes over the anger and expresses it in the more moderate, tactical ways of instinct-driven intonation, facial expression, and "body language", including controlled physical violence as in punching and kicking. One is then "angry", not "enraged". In Aspergoid persons, these mammalian instincts are disturbed, and the anger may be handled directly in the raw, blind, non-tactical way of the reptilian brain. Blind to the supremacy of the opponent, and blind to the consequences. When growing up, the intellect must learn to control these reptilian impulses, and compensate for the disturbance of mammalian instinct. This apparently succeeds in most cases. One might speculate though that the frequent occurrence of depression in these people, as well as the less frequent occurrence of psychosis, have something to do with the ongoing effort of controlling this rage; with a failing therein, a breaking down or disintegration under the stress of it. Also, in forensic psychiatry it is observed that serious aggressive outbursts, sometimes with fatal result for the victim, do occur in Aspergoid individuals, however the existing scientific literature on that phenomenon does not warrant the conclusion that aggressive behaviour is more frequent in persons with Asperger Syndrome than in the general population."
26 Dec 2012, 7:57 am
