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The history of Asperger's

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Summary

The story of Asperger’s syndrome is a story about naming, power, and what happens when a diagnostic category takes on a life of its own. It begins with a Viennese paediatrician working under National Socialism, passes through a British psychiatrist who saw something the rest of the field had missed, becomes an official diagnosis that millions of people build their identity around, gets absorbed into a broader category amid scientific consensus, and then is complicated by the revelation that its namesake was complicit in the murder of disabled children. No part of this history is simple.

The timeline

1944. Hans Asperger publishes “Die ‘Autistischen Psychopathen’ im Kindesalter” (Autistic psychopathy in childhood) in the Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankenheiten. He describes four boys with social difficulties, intense focused interests, pedantic speech, and motor clumsiness, noting that these children possessed a form of intelligence that could be socially valuable. The paper is written in German and remains unknown to the English-speaking world for decades.

Asperger’s paper is published one year after Leo Kanner’s 1943 description of autism in the US. Both use the term “autistic” (borrowed from Bleuler’s earlier use in schizophrenia research), but they describe somewhat different populations. Kanner’s children are younger, more severely affected, many non-speaking. Asperger’s are older, verbal, academically capable. Whether they were describing the same condition at different severity levels or genuinely different conditions would take decades to resolve.

1981. Lorna Wing, a British psychiatrist and mother of an autistic daughter, publishes “Asperger’s Syndrome: A Clinical Account” in Psychological Medicine. She introduces the English-speaking world to Asperger’s work, reframes it within her concept of the autism spectrum, and argues that the children Asperger described represent one end of a continuum that includes Kanner’s autism. Wing’s paper is the single most important document in the history of the diagnosis. She chose the name “Asperger’s syndrome” deliberately, to give clinical recognition to a group of people she believed were being missed by existing diagnostic categories.

1991. Uta Frith translates Asperger’s 1944 paper into English for the first time, making the primary source available to researchers and clinicians who had known it only through Wing’s account.

1994. Asperger’s disorder is included in the DSM-IV as a separate diagnosis from autistic disorder. The distinction: Asperger’s requires no clinically significant delay in language or cognitive development. The ICD-10 had included it slightly earlier (1990/1993). The diagnosis expands rapidly. A generation of children and adults who had been missed by the narrower autism criteria are now identifiable.

2013. The DSM-5 removes Asperger’s disorder as a separate diagnosis, merging it into Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The scientific rationale: the boundary between Asperger’s and “high-functioning autism” could not be drawn reliably, clinicians could not agree on which diagnosis to assign to the same person, and the evidence supported a dimensional rather than categorical model. The ICD-11 followed suit in 2022.

2018. Two publications transform the historical picture. Edith Sheffer’s book Asperger’s Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna and Herwig Czech’s peer-reviewed paper in Molecular Autism (“Hans Asperger, National Socialism, and ‘race hygiene’ in Nazi-era Vienna”) establish that Asperger was not the passive bystander he had been portrayed as. He actively cooperated with the Nazi regime’s child euthanasia programme, referring children he deemed uneducable to the Am Spiegelgrund clinic, where they were killed. He did this while simultaneously arguing that his “interesting cases” — the children who would later bear his name — could be useful to the state.

The distinction Asperger drew was not between autism and non-autism. It was between autistic children who could be productive and those who could not. The former deserved protection and education. The latter were disposable. This is the origin of the functioning labels that continue to divide the autism community: the hierarchy of worth embedded in the diagnosis from the beginning.

The identity question

The diagnostic merger was scientifically defensible. It was also, for many people, personally devastating. A large community had built their identity around “Asperger’s.” The word named their experience. It connected them to others. It distinguished them from the associations that “autism” carried (intellectual disability, non-verbal communication, high support needs). Losing the label felt like losing recognition.

Some people continue to use “Asperger’s” as a self-identifier despite the diagnostic change. Their reasons are personal and varied: it’s what they were diagnosed with, it’s how they understand themselves, it’s what their community uses. Others have moved to “autistic” or “on the spectrum.” Neither choice is wrong. Identity language belongs to the individual.

The Nazi history adds a moral dimension that wasn’t present before 2018. For some, continuing to use Asperger’s name feels untenable once the history is known. For others, the name has been reclaimed and now belongs to the community rather than to the man. The wiki does not prescribe a position. It describes the history and trusts readers to make their own choices.

What the history reveals

The Asperger’s story illustrates several patterns that recur across neurodiversity:

Diagnostic categories are not discovered in nature. They are constructed by people with specific perspectives, operating within specific institutional and political contexts. Asperger’s category was shaped by what the Nazi state considered valuable. Kanner’s was shaped by the American psychiatric establishment’s focus on severe pathology. Wing’s reframing was shaped by a mother’s recognition that her daughter’s condition existed on a spectrum rather than as a binary.

Functioning labels embed value judgements. The split between “Asperger’s” (intelligent, verbal, useful) and “classic autism” (disabled, non-verbal, dependent) carries an implicit hierarchy that the neurodiversity movement has spent decades challenging. The DSM-5 merger was partly an attempt to dissolve this hierarchy, though whether replacing two categories with a spectrum and three “support levels” actually succeeds is debatable.

Historical figures are complicated. Lorna Wing, who named the syndrome and transformed autism research, was a compassionate clinician and researcher whose work improved millions of lives. Hans Asperger, whose name she chose, facilitated the murder of disabled children. The history contains both. See Lorna Wing and Hans Asperger for their individual pages.

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