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Happy International Aspergers Day - from our Ambassador Jeremy Samson

18 Feb 2018 12:24 PM | Anonymous member (Administrator)

Happy International Aspergers Day! (from Jeremy Samson at Time2Train, Ambassador for AV)

   Hans Asperger was a Viennese child psychologist who published the first definition of Asperger syndrome in 1944. In four boys, he identified a pattern of behavior and abilities that he called "autistic psychopathy", meaning autism (self) and psychopathy (personality disease). 

 The pattern included "a lack of empathy, little ability to form friendships, one-sided conversation, intense absorption in a special interest, and clumsy movements." Asperger called children with AS "little professors" because of their ability to talk about their favorite subject in great detail. It is commonly said that the paper was based on only four boys.

 Asperger was convinced that many of the children he identified as having autistic symptoms would use their special talents in adulthood. He followed one child, Fritz V., into adulthood. Fritz V. became a professor of astronomy and solved an error in Newton’s work he originally noticed as a child. 

 Interestingly, as a child, Hans Asperger appears to have exhibited features of the very condition named after him. He was described as a remote and lonely child, who had difficulty making friends. 

 He was talented in language; in particular he was interested in the Austrian poet Franz Grillparzer, whose poetry he would frequently quote to his uninterested classmates. He also liked to quote himself and often referred to himself from a third-person perspective.

 Hans Asperger's findings were ignored and disregarded in the English-speaking world in his lifetime. Finally, from the early 1990s, his findings began to gain notice, and nowadays Asperger's Syndrome is recognized as a condition in a large part of the world.

Hans Asperger died in Vienna on Tuesday 21st October 1980, at the age of 74, not living to see his work either acknowledged or recognised in the English speaking world. 

" It seems that for success in science and art, a dash of autism is essential ... the necessary ingredient may be an ability to turn away from the everyday world, from the simply practical, an ability to rethink a subject with originality so as to create in new untrodden ways." 

Hans Aspergers

He was born on Sunday 18th February 1906.

Source: Jeremy's Facebook www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1614939891876009&set=a.214903071879705.48601.100000800424044&type=3&theater


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