In 1930s and 1940s Vienna, child psychiatrist Hans Asperger sought to define autism as a diagnostic category, aiming to treat those children, usually boys, he deemed capable of participating fully in society. Depicted as a compassionate and devoted researcher, Asperger was in fact deeply influenced by Nazi psychiatry. Although he did offer individualized care to children he deemed promising, he also prescribed harsh institutionalization and even transfer to Spiegelgrund, one of the Reich's deadliest killing centers, for children with greater disabilities, who, he held, could not integrate into the community.
With sensitivity and passion, Edith Sheffer's scrupulous research reveals the heartbreaking voices and experiences of many of these children, while also illuminating a Nazi regime obsessed with sorting the population into categories, cataloging people by race, heredity, politics, religion, sexuality, criminality, and biological defects?labels that became the basis of either rehabilitation or persecution and extermination.
Grace
2025-11-10
I appreciate the fact that Hans Asperger’s past is never forgotten about and how incredibly dangerous an institution like psychiatry can be for individual people (patients) who always have a lower level of voicing how they experience their own inner self (world.) To this very day, patients vs caregivers (generally speaking) are always bound by the same basic principles of caregivers having more autonomy over a patient than the patient itself has, which in today’s day and age should be considered as contradictory in the scope for this “world of psychiatry” where the word autonomy has become a symbol for patients rights to participate in their own care and treatment, however this hasn’t been very successful for most patients! Warmest regards, Grace
Gwynedd
2024-11-17
Mycket intressant men tappade läsork halvvägs genom.
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