Let us stop callng 'Asperger' Syndrome, 'Asperger'

 What is required of the naming of Asperger is a linguistic de-Nazification

Edith Sheffer argues in Asperger’s Children that, regardless of the science, and regardless of whether autism is one condition or several, it remains steeped in the cultural values of its Nazi origins, and in the idea of a model personality: obedient, animated by collective bonds, socially competent, robust in mind and body. 

Rooted in years of meticulous archival research, Sheffer’s book has already had an impact on activists who have called for the burial of Asperger’s syndrome.
But that’s too easy. Her book does not offer all encompassing message. It explores the various ways in which, over time, cultural ideals shape ‘scientific’ diagnoses, and vice versa. It’s about the way words like Gemüt create models, and the way these models help create ‘defects’. It’s about conscious and unconscious complicity, in-the-moment improvisation, and the moral grey areas where so much human action takes place. was about being unmoved, solitary in a crowd, impervious to affective communion.

. To be ‘cured’ at the clinic was to be brought into Gemüt-ful tribalism.Nazi psychiatry did not arise out of nothing, and it hasn’t been tidily buried. Thirty diagnoses created under the Third Reich are still in use today, created against the idea of a ‘model personality’. 

None of this is where Sheffer started. Her initial interest was visceral and personal. -She came to the subject thinking quite simply to honour Asperger. Her son, like an ever increasing number of boys in Silicon Valley and elsewhere, was diagnosed with high-functioning autism. Asperger, Sheffer assumed, was an early proponent of neurodiversity, someone who promulgated multiple ways of of inhabiting the world,

who in the view of some (as sentimentality’ about the subject was bureaucratised away) have a 

psychopathic clarity of vision’, speakin quotations, and of one's in the third person; and averse to nomaking eye contact;