Asperger's Children by Edith Sheffer

Author:Edith Sheffer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

ASIDE FROM CONJECTURES about male autistic intelligence, Asperger was unclear about many aspects of the diagnosis. To Asperger, conditions of autistic psychopathy could manifest in any variety of ways. As he wrote of autistic children, “Not every one of them has every trait,” and “Individual differences within the type are great.” The youths differed “by the degree of contact failure, by the level of intellectual and personal ability, but also by numerous individual characteristics, special modes of reaction, special interests.”113

In speech, for example, Asperger did not have set standards for what counted as autistic. There were “many possibilities.” The voice might be “soft and far away,” or “refined and nasal,” or “shrill and ear-splitting,” or “over-modulated,” or “sing-song.” While Asperger acknowledged that his criteria were diffuse, there was unity in their disunity: “They all have one thing in common: the language feels unnatural.” Apparently, one of the ways Asperger determined what was “unnatural” was the humorousness of the children’s mistakes. Their speech is “often like a caricature,” he said, “which provokes ridicule in the native listener.”114

Asperger likewise claimed that while autistic children had a range of different body types and physical abilities, they all fell short of contemporary masculine physical ideals in some way. Harro was shorter than average, and “his arms and legs looked as if they were too short for his body.” His “posture too was odd,” as he “stood broadly, arms held away from the body, as a portly gentleman or a boxer might do.” Fritz was of “delicate build” and his veins were visible beneath his skin, which was “of yellowish-grey pallor.” The boy’s “musculature was weakly developed,” Asperger related, and his “posture was slouched, his shoulders slumped, with the shoulder blades protruding.”115 In his short description of Hellmuth, Asperger wrote that the boy’s “appearance was grotesque.” He reportedly “had noticeably increased salivation, and when he talked one could hear the saliva bubbling in his mouth.” He was also “grotesquely fat.” Since age eleven, Hellmuth had “distinctly formed ‘breasts and hips’ ” as well as “knock knees and flat feet,” and “when one shook his hand, it seemed as if it had no bones and were made of rubber.”116

Asperger wrote that some children’s deviations from the norm could appear farcical. Their “conduct, manner of speech and, not least, often grotesque demeanour cries out to be ridiculed,” he said. Harro was supposedly “an object of ridicule” and “directly provoked teasing” from other children for his “strange, slightly funny dignity” and “strange and comical behaviour.”117 Asperger noted “motor clumsiness” in “almost all autistic individuals.”118 Fritz and Harro, as well as Ernst and Hellmuth, were all “very clumsy” and poor athletes, unable to integrate with group sports. Harro’s “movements would be ugly and angular” and he was certainly “not a skilled fighter.”119 Asperger asserted that “autistic children also do not have a proper attitude towards their own bodies.” Itemizing the boys’ failures of grooming, he generalized that autistic children lacked “cleanliness and physical care. Even as adults they may be seen to walk about unkempt and unwashed.

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