Letters To My Weird Sisters by Limburg Joanne;

Author:Limburg, Joanne;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books

Frau V

I have not found any dates for Frau V, or her real name. The little I know of her comes from the brief portrait which appears in the Austrian psychiatrist Hans Asperger’s 1944 paper, ‘“Autistic Psychopathy” in childhood’. She was the mother of Fritz V, one of the troubled children who were brought to see Asperger when he was director of the Remedial Department at the University Paediatric Clinic in Vienna. For a long time, this paper was unknown in the English-speaking world. This changed in the eighties when the British-based psychologist Uta Frith translated the paper and another, Lorna Wing, took its author’s name to create a new diagnosis – Asperger’s Syndrome – which could be applied to individuals who showed autistic traits without evidence of language delay. This reflects the way in which the founding cohort of patients described by Asperger contrasted with those of Leo Kanner, the American-based Austrian émigré psychiatrist credited with first identifying autism in children. Broadly speaking, Kanner sees his young patients as merely defective; Asperger describes boys (entirely boys) who experience problems in many areas, but also believes them to have the potential for exceptional achievement. Asperger was working in Nazi-occupied Austria, and some have argued that he was a hero, emphasizing his patients’ potential in order to save them from state-sanctioned murder. Others have questioned this, drawing attention to the number of children who passed through his clinic and on to the killing wards. Whether he resisted or collaborated, Asperger was working under conditions of murderous totalitarianism, which were especially hostile to any form of vulnerability or difference. Frau V had to mother under those same conditions: as a non-Jewish Austrian woman, her job was to bear and raise strong, disciplined and productive members of the German race. Unfortunately for her and for him, her eldest son didn’t fit the mould. As Asperger tells it, neither did she. I don’t know what became of her, whether or not she survived the war, and if she did, at what cost.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.