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Haswelltodddissertationfinal Proquest Version THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO THE TURN TO THE SELF: A HISTORY OF AUTISM, 1910–1944 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE HUMANITIES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF GERMANIC STUDIES BY STEPHEN D. HASWELL TODD CHICAGO, ILLINOIS DECEMBER 2015 © 2015 by Stephen Haswell Todd To my grandparents: Bunny and Jack Todd and Ruth (Haswell) and (in memoriam) Alex Sidorowicz Je n’étais pas seul, j’étais un homme quelconque. Cette formule, comment l’oublier? —Maurice Blanchot, Le Très-Haut Contents List of Tables vi Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 Chapter One Eugen Bleuler: Autism as the Sickness of the Human 31 Chapter Two Autism between Affect and Logic: From Bleuler to Asperger 87 Chapter Three Hans Asperger: Autism as the General Possibility of Thinking 149 Chapter Four Autism Comes to America: Georg Frankl between Asperger and Kanner 199 Works Cited 263 v List of Tables 1. Fundamental distinctions between Naturwissenschaft and holism 100 2. Kretschmer’s typology of physique and character 110 3. Comparison of patients’ body types as recorded by Weiss and Asperger 220 vi Acknowledgments This text owes its existence to Christopher Wild, whose leap of faith in the beginning, in agreeing to sponsor and advise my project with no assurance of its eventual fruition, is all the more appreciated in retrospect. His presence as Doktorvater has been that of a steady hand on the wheel. David Wellbery and Mark Payne bravely committed themselves to the work of dissertation readers and displayed unaccountable patience and generosity in carrying it out. The remaining members of the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago, both faculty and graduate students, have all given something—an idea, a criticism, a kind word—to this work. Departmental coordinator Michelle Zimet has given more than most, which will surprise no one with any experience of university bureaucracy, or Michelle’s particular way of staring it down in inimitable style. The American Psychiatric Association and in particular Gary McMillan, the librarian and archivist there at the time of my research visit, have my thanks for facilitating my access to critical source material. Paul Belloni, bibliographer for psychology at the University of Chicago libraries, subsequently performed indefatigable detective work on the biographies of the elusive Anni Weiss and Georg Frankl. The staff of the University of Chicago’s interlibrary loan office went to heroic—and at times expensive—lengths to retrieve obscure sources from distant shelves, and never complained. Pat Haswell edited, proofread, and formatted the final text, making many improvements to both style and argument. Any errors that remain, however, are my own. vii A few of those who supported and contributed to this work in less specific but no less valuable ways are listed below, with gratitude (and apologies to the many I have not named): Milena Ang Collán Granillo Pat Haswell Ann Kaplan Tom Pepper Dick Todd Adam Weg viii Introduction Il y a le nom et la chose... 1 —Montaigne The chapters that follow present a history of the concept of autism and elucidate the ways in which this concept moved through psychopathological and other discourses in the early twentieth century. This is not the same as a history of the phenomenon now called autism. But the two are related. The fulcrum of this history of autism is the moment when the name “autism” and the thing now called by that name come together: a concept that already existed joins itself to a thing that, before then, had not existed in the way it does now. The thing in question, autism, is what we are all familiar with from hearing about it in the recent news: a mental abnormality or disability, enigmatic and yet recognizable, a clinical psychiatric diagnosis attached to a relatively small but ever-growing number of people. The name, on the other hand—“autism” in the full range of meanings it had before it became limited to its present object—is as strange to us as the thing we call autism is familiar. And the thing we call autism is becoming very familiar indeed. An estimate recently quoted in the press is that the label “autistic” applies to one in sixty-eight American children,2 though perhaps a more telling measure—and surely just as numerically impressive—would be a count of the newspaper and magazine articles that have been published about it in recent 1. As with so many ideas that have found their way into this work, I gratefully take this epigraph from Montaigne by way of another, my friend and teacher Thomas Pepper. 2. Sandhya Somashekhar, “How Autistic Adults Banded Together to Start a Movement,” Washington Post, July 20, 2015. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/the-next-civil-rights-movement-accepting-adults-with-autism/ 2015/07/20/e7c6743e-f338-11e4-bcc4-e8141e5eb0c9_story.html. Accessed October 14, 2015. 1 decades. With increasing prevalence and visibility, however, new controversy has arisen over the nature of autism. Not long ago it could be viewed simply as a disease or disability, and the only important questions were when and how it could be treated, cured, or prevented. But now, the same newspaper article that reports the latest incidence figures refers to people with autism as “a minority group” and as the subjects of “an emerging civil rights movement,”3 heirs “to the gay rights movement and to the protesters trying to improve police treatment of African Americans.”4 The ultimate goal of the “neurodiversity” movement is to remove the status of a pathology from autism and to assert an autistic identity not unlike those assumed on the bases of sexuality, race, gender, and so forth. Neurodiversity makes ambitious political claims. To many it will seem far-fetched to raise autism—this peculiar and, despite the rising numbers, still somewhat unusual phenomenon—to the same stature as categories of race and sexuality on the political stage, let alone to claim specific rights for “neurological minorities.” Whether these claims are justified is not a question this text seeks to answer. But it is a question that, even to be properly posed, calls for a far better understanding of the history of autism than has been available. In fact, it calls for a different kind of history than autism has had up to now: in addition to the “natural history” of the phenomenon of modern autism, we need a discursive history of autism in order to understand the very reasons for and implications of assigning this name to a particular category of person. How could a discursive history of autism help to clarify the stakes of the public debate over its political status? We can take the comparisons to race and sexuality made by the advocates of neurodiversity themselves as a starting point. Both race and sexuality have natural 3. John Elder Robison, quoted ibid. 4. Ibid. 2 histories, of course: in both cases, histories of biological givens and cultural norms interacting with each other in limitlessly complex ways, and ultimately receding, the further back we go in evolutionary time, into indifference from each other. But race and sexuality have also been made subjects of discursive history, and so offer us valuable precedents. Taking the history of homosexuality as a case study, we can say that natural history posits it as an unvarying factor in human biology, and goes on to study its varying manifestations in different cultural contexts (so we should perhaps more accurately term this “natural-cultural history”). There have always been people whose orientation was toward the same sex, this history assumes; the changing appearances of homosexuality through history are functions of such people’s varying ability—or lack thereof, conditioned by social stigma and oppression—to express the essence of their homosexuality in their actual behavior. But in filling out the details of this history, we run into empirical obstacles: cultures (the classic example being ancient Greece) in which not just homosexuality as a distinct “orientation,” but the very idea of a stable, innate sexual identity appears not to have made sense to the collective spirit, at least not in the way it makes self-evident sense to us now.5 And this in turn has made it possible to look even much closer to home, from the Renaissance to the European nineteenth century, for example, and to ask seriously whether homosexuality itself was not a “construct” that emerged from a shifting matrix of bodily and spiritual practices and discursive factors ranging from the poetic to the medical—rather than a practice stemming from an unchanging essence and its variable expression. Which history is “correct”? That itself is not a question to be settled by way of an empirical metahistory capable of adjudicating between the alternatives. It is a choice with its own further epistemological and political stakes. 5. See Kenneth Dover, Greek Homosexuality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978). 3 In any case, few scholarly programs in recent times have been as influential as Michel Foucault’s historicization of sexuality as a discourse, which opened up an entirely new register in which questions about sexuality could be asked.6 Previously, the political positions one could take regarding homosexuality were essentially limited to two: for or against. One could decry it as a pathology or an offense, or one could affirm it as an identity. Foucault’s discursive historicism unseated the claims of pathology by proposing that it was pathologization itself, as a discursive formation, that had created “the homosexual” as a new category of person—not discovered the essence of homosexuality; but Foucault mounted an equally serious challenge to the politics of identity, revealing identitarian claims to be just another set of ahistorical and essentialist propositions about homosexuality, and just as dependent on the same pathological discourses that invented the homosexual.
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