NeuroTribes: The Untold History of Austim and the Potential of Neurodiversity

by Steve Silberman

Perl was born as a top secret project at the National Security Agency.

In a postgraduate thesis submitted to Hamburger in 1943,

Uhoh

The honorary president of the congress was Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone and telegraph. Bell had his own theories about the threat that people with disabilities represented to the future of the species. His mother and wife had both been born deaf, and in 1883 he warned the National Academy of Sciences that unless the use of sign language was vigorously discouraged in schools for the deaf, society ran the risk of engendering “a race of deaf-mutes.”

Ah, the great company founder

Kanner was learning a heavy lesson: the way to get ahead in psychiatry was to hold your tongue, even when your esteemed colleagues were speaking nonsense.

Kanner loathed the term psychopathy as much as he loathed the terms introvert, extrovert, and neurotic, all cocktail-party buzzwords at a time when psychoanalysis was on the rise.

Man has a point

The total environment of the school was designed to serve a single purpose: to enable the children to restart the process of ego development (with Bettelheim cast in the role of the collective superego),

All a bit X-Men isn't it

But McCarthy would have had no need to seek out a diagnosis, because he was able to carve out a niche in an emerging field that was perfectly suited to his strengths while being tolerant—indeed, appreciative—of his many eccentricities.

Aye, that's the rub

Together, they would build an empire of their own: a shadow infrastructure for autism research in which parents, rather than medical professionals, were the ultimate authorities on their children’s well-being.

WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG

Exuberant use of echolalia turned out to be a distinctively autistic way of acquiring language: children who parrot their favorite Disney movies and Pokémon cartoons learn to use expressive language more readily.