Diagnosis Collapse

[writerkit]

So there are very good reasons to collapse the Asperger's Syndrome diagnosis into the autism spectrum as a whole-- but the "Asperger was a Nazi!" thing tends to ignore that the word "autism" was coined by someone who totally would have been a Nazi if he'd lived a bit longer: Eugen Bleuler.

Really everyone involved with early autism research was varying degrees of terrible. So the people suggesting that the history of the word autism is so much better than the history of Asperger's come across as a little disingenuous, because it's not like Bleuler was any better than Asperger; he just didn't have the opportunity to participate in a genocide.

But Bleuler died in 1939 and his Wikipedia page's sole of mention any of this is in a single-sentence aside which compares his attitude towards his patients to Freud's (Bleuler, as far as I can tell, was significantly more active about his eugenicism than Freud was), so everyone's just like "Yup, autism! Not coined by Nazis as at all, not like Asperger Syndrome!"

Comments

[squirrelitude]

I also just like... don't care if someone who came up with an idea was terrible in some other ways. Was the idea a good one, or not? It's not inherently *theirs*, it's everyone's idea now. Accepting the idea is not a celebration of everything else the person said or did.