- Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity by Steve Silberman
Autism, Biodiversity, Disability Studies, Eugenics, Technology and Medicine
Journalist Steve Silberman’s comprehensive and sprawling history of autism attempts to reframe traditional understandings of the condition with a bold claim: “though the spectrum model of autism and the concept of neurodiversity are widely believed to be products of our postmodern period, they turn out to be very old ideas, proposed [End Page 116] by Hans Asperger in his first public lecture on autism in 1938” (16). This claim animates his attempt to elongate the history of autism through case studies of scientists, ranging from Henry Cavendish to Paul Dirac, whom he identifies as autistic. The book is structured as a series of biographical sketches that alternate between individuals Silberman identifies as autistic, the researchers who named and defined the condition, and parents and self-advocates who have argued for rights and inclusion. This juxtaposition allows Silberman to tease out how and why autism should be thought of not “as an error of nature” but as “a strange gift from our deep past, passed down through millions of years of evolution” (470).
While Silberman does not directly engage with disability theory, his definition of neurodiversity relates to disability scholar Rosemary Garland-Thompson’s notion of “disability conservation” (2015). Garland-Thompson argues that disability is a part of human biodiversity and, as such, should be conserved as a way of supporting and sustaining that biodiversity. Silberman’s model of neurodiversity is made apparent in his metaphor of “human operating systems” (471), which he uses to suggest that “not all the features of atypical human operating systems are bugs” (417). Here Silberman’s larger argument veers dangerously close to eugenics, for it places the value not on biodiversity itself, but on the potential utility of difference. This seems to be inevitable given the insistence with which Silberman argues that “conditions like autism. . .should be regarded as naturally occurring cognitive variations with distinctive strengths that have contributed to the evolution of technology and culture” (16). At the same time, Silberman’s careful detailing of the near-simultaneous naming of autism by Leo Kanner, in the United States, and Hans Asperger, in Austria, allows him to detail how the history of autism itself is bound up in the history of eugenics. This apparent contradiction emerges from Silberman’s focus on detailed biography and his adherence to a “great men” approach to the study of history.
Neurotribes begins not with the naming of autism as a condition, but with an extended description of the habits and bearing of Cavendish, whom Silberman names in the chapter title “The Wizard of Clapham Common.” Like the chapters which follow, this biographical sketch focuses on reading Cavendish’s personal traits and scientific work through the lens of autism. Silberman contends that the history of autism does not begin with the creation of the diagnosis, a helpful intervention, and that autism has a special relationship to science. In chapter two Silberman turns to the contemporary story of the Rosa family following the diagnosis of their son, Leo, with autism. Here Silberman persuasively demonstrates the problems with both the psychoanalytical and the biomedical models of framing autism. Instead, Silberman turns to what he claims, with extensive and persuasive research, as the birthplace of the diagnosis: not in Baltimore, with Kanner, which is the conventional story, but at the Children’s Clinic at the University Hospital in Vienna, where Asperger worked. In this chapter, Silberman reveals that Asperger’s conception of autism was nearlyidentical to the spectrum model that is now embraced (130). This insight was obscured, Silberman maintains, not because of Asperger’s work itself, but because of its historical context, whereby Asperger tailored his work to saving patients from the Nazi Party’s child euthanasia program. Silberman reclaims Asperger’s work by [End Page 117] demonstrating how it was unlikely that Asperger joined the Nazi Party (137) while still working within officially sanctioned medicine, at one point even suggesting that his patients...