The young boy and the nun: historical scenes about autism

Syndromes aren’t just there. They have a history. In this lecture I use two historical scenes as a point of departure for my quest after the roots of autism.

In the first scene a young boy Siem, and a nun, sister Gaudia (Ida Frye’s religious name), play a part. They are the main characters in the story of the discovery of autism in the Netherlands at the end of the 1930’s. Autism in this story turns out to be more than simply a medical-biological syndrome. Siem’s peculiar behaviour is mapped using observations that depart from what is considered normal in a child’s development. It is not just Frye, who is responsible for Siem’s daily care as well as for the research, that is involved in this ‘discovery’. The team that researches the boy is equipped with a psychiatrist and a psychologist as well, who also put their stamp on the specific set of characters that is defined as ‘autistic’.

The second historical scene plays in the same period. Centre of this scene is Hans Asperger. He and his colleague Leo Kanner are known as the discoverers of autism. Asperger’s research into and care for gifted children caused a syndrome to be called after him in the second half of the twentieth century: Asperger’s syndrome. This led to the realisation that autism contains an entire spectrum of disorders. The historical scene around Asperger’s discovery shows us something else as well. Science and intervention merged so seamlessly that it had dramatic consequences. Asperger failed to keep a healthy distance from the nazi regime that was advancing in his environment. The arbitrary border between what is and isn’t normal was abused to feed a supressing politic of power, which caused defenceless children to be sacrificed to a poisonous political ideal.