Hans Asperger Quotes

Not everything that steps out of line, and thus ‘abnormal’, must necessarily be ‘inferior’. Hans Asperger (1938).

Asperger's actions are perhaps more reflective of the nature of perpetration in the Third Reich than those of more prominent figures. The Reich's systems of extermination depended upon people like Asperger, who maneuvered themselves, perhaps uncritically, within their positions. Individuals such as Asperger were neither committed killers nor even directly involved in the moment of death. Yet, in the absence of murderous convictions, they made the Reich's killing systems possible.

We do not believe this. We claim—not on the basis of theory, but on the basis of our experiences with many children like this—that this boy’s positive and negative qualities are two natural, necessary, interconnected aspects of one well-knit, harmonious personality.

Not everything that steps out of line, and thus 'abnormal,' must necessarily be 'inferior.

It seems that for success in science or art, a dash of autism is essential.

For a while, every smart and shy eccentric from Bobby Fischer to Bill Gate was hastily fitted with this label, and many were more or less believably retrofitted, including Isaac Newton, Edgar Allen Pie, Michelangelo, and Virginia Woolf. Newton had great trouble forming friendships and probably remained celibate. In Poe's poem Alone, he wrote that "All I lov'd - I lov'd alone." Michelangelo is said to have written "I have no friends of any sort and I don't want any." Woolf killed herself. Asperger's disorder, once considered a sub-type of autism, was named after the Austrian pediatrician Hans Asperger, a pioneer, in the 1940s, in identifying and describing autism. Unlike other early researchers, according to the neurologist and author Oliver Sacks, Asperger felt that autistic people could have beneficial talents, especially what he called a "particular originality of thought" that was often beautiful and pure, unfiltered by culture of discretion, unafraid to grasp at extremely unconventional ideas. Nearly every autistic person that Sacks observed appeard happiest when alone. The word "autism" is derived from autos, the Greek word for "self." "The cure for Asperger's syndrome is very simple," wrote Tony Attwood, a psychologist and Asperger's expert who lives in Australia. The solution is to leave the person alone. "You cannot have a social deficit when you are alone. You cannot have a communication problem when you are alone. All the diagnostic criteria dissolve in solitude." Officially, Asperger's disorder no longer exists as a diagnostic category. The diagnosis, having been inconsistently applied, was replaced, with clarified criteria, in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders; Asperger's is now grouped under the umbrella term Autism Spectrum Disorder, or ASD.

The idea that Autism is a “boy’s” disorder goes all the way back to when the condition was first described at the turn of the twentieth century. Hans Asperger and other early Autism researchers did study girls on the spectrum, but generally left them out of their published research reports.[55] Asperger in particular avoided writing about Autistic girls because he wanted to present certain intelligent, “high-functioning” Autistic people as “valuable” to the Nazis who had taken over Austria and were beginning to exterminate disabled people en masse. As Steve Silberman describes in his excellent book NeuroTribes, Hans Asperger wanted to spare the “high functioning” Autistic boys he’d encountered from being sent to Nazi death camps. Silberman described this fact somewhat sympathetically; Asperger was a scientist who had no choice but to collude with the fascist regime and save what few children he could. However, more recently unearthed documents make it clear that Asperger was far more complicit in Nazi exterminations of disabled children than had been previously believed.[56] Though Asperger held intelligent, “little professor” type Autistics close to his heart, he knowingly sent more visibly debilitated Autistics to extermination centers.

How odd is his voice, how odd his manner of speaking and his way of moving. It is no surprise, therefore, that this boy also lacks understanding of other people’s expressions and cannot react to them appropriately. –Hans Asperger ([1944] 1991)

It seems that for success in science and art, a dash of autism is essential. For success, the necessary ingredient may be an ability to turn away from the everyday world, from the simply practical, an ability to rethink a subject with originality so as to create in new untrodden ways. —Hans Asperger, 1944

If only there were an emotional Google Translate app for those living with autism. Perhaps one day someone would invent such an app—someone on the high-functioning end of the spectrum, diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. One of the group that Hans Asperger first labeled in 1944 as “little professors.

During the third consultation, Dr. Kline talked about the research of Dr. Hans Asperger from a clinic in Vienna, which was not well-known yet but intriguing. Some personality traits of Bobby aligned with certain symptoms described in his papers, and the fact that the child’s father was almost fifty when he was conceived... “Are you suggesting that Bobby is mentally retarded?” “Oh, no. He’s a normally developed boy intellectually. Quite sharp in some aspects. He has a good visual memory and spatial perception. It’s the emotional intelligence where we encounter a problem.

The autistic personality is an extreme variant of male intelligence.

Once one has learnt to pay attention to the characteristic manifestations of autism, one realizes that they are not at all rare. —HANS ASPERGER

In the past 100 years there have been a number of different terms for autism and its manners of presentation. It was in 1908 that the word “autism” was first used by Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler to describe self-absorbed patients with schizophrenia. Dr. Leo Kanner referred to some of his patients as being “autistic” in 1943. Hans Asperger in 1944 was labeling some of his patients as autistic psychopaths. For a while, autistic patients were said to be suffering “Kanner's syndrome” and others who were affected somewhat differently were said to be afflicted with Asperger syndrome.