In his otherwise fine review (27 July) of Edith Sheffer’s Asperger’s Children, I was dismayed to see Ian Thomson reiterate the old misconception that clinicians Hans Asperger (in Austria) and Leo Kanner (in the United States) “coincidentally” found “new ways of looking at infantile autism … independent of each other”. In fact, their simultaneous focus on autism was not a mere coincidence, and they were not quite working independently.
Perhaps the most significant historical discovery revealed in my book, NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and How to Think Smarter About People Who Think Differently, which won the 2015 Samuel Johnson prize, was that Asperger’s former colleagues George Frankl and Anni Weiss emigrated to America with Kanner’s help before the war, and were working with Kanner when he claimed to “discover” autism in 1943. Surely, their seasoned expertise informed Kanner’s, though he ended up taking a very different view of autism, as Thomson describes – and that had a profound effect on the evolution of the diagnosis over the next several decades, as I explore in depth.
It’s time to permanently retire the notion – which was encouraged by Kanner himself – that he was unaware of the work that Frankl, Weiss and Asperger had done when he developed his much narrower conception of autism.
Steve Silberman
San Francisco, California
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