Alas, Kanner’s view for many years totally dominated the field, and it made him wildly famous. He was so identified with autism that it was known internationally as Kanner’s syndrome. While Kanner benefited, the field of psychiatry was damaged for a half-century. The acceptance of Kanner’s ideas ensured that autistic children and their families would be stigmatized. More often than not, said Silberman, they were “institutionalized because it was believed that taking them out of the toxic home environment that created the autism would be healthy for them, even though the opposite was true.” (Another possible side effect of Kanner’s beliefs: By undercounting the number of people on the spectrum early-on, modern-day autism figures now seem inflated.)

It would take decades for Kanner to realize he was wrong about autism—that it was not narrow and monolithically defined. What Kanner accepted in the 1970s, Asperger already knew in 1938. (The men filed their landmark papers within months of each other. Kanner’s paper was published in 1943; Asperger’s paper was published a year later, delayed by the war.)

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As Silberman found, Kanner and Asperger ought to have been on the same page. Frankl, as well as Anni Weiss—a psychologist also from Asperger’s clinic—worked for Kanner. They had both been members of his “inner circle” since 1938—well in advance of Kanner’s famous paper. (Weiss and Frankl married after they emigrated to the United States.) And Kanner was well-aware of Frankl’s professional bonafides. In a letter from 1939, he mentioned his diagnostician's “good background in pediatrics and close connections for eleven years with the Lazar Clinic in Vienna.” Indeed, it was Asperger’s former clinician who examined Kanner’s first three autistic patients.

So it is a stretch to believe, as Kanner’s colleagues evidently did, that he could be “unfamiliar” with Asperger’s work.

And yet, despite the influence of Frankl, Asperger’s ideas were muffled. To some degree, this is due to the unavailability of his papers, which for decades existed only in German. But the greatest factor in his long obscurity, argues Silberman, was Kanner himself. He acknowledged Asperger directly only once in public, in a dismissive review of a book by another child psychiatrist. As Silberman writes, it was the belief of autism researchers that Kanner didn’t discuss Asperger because they worked with such different types of children; the former’s were “low-functioning” and the latter’s were “high-functioning.” But Asperger was very clear in his paper that he saw more than 200 autistic children at all levels of ability.

Other theories as to why Kanner shunned Asperger’s work are less persuasive. Some historians have believed that Asperger’s work was unknown to Kanner because of the language barrier. But German was Kanner’s native language. Not only that, Kanner was keenly familiar with Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten, the neurological journal that published Asperger’s papers, and referenced it many times in his work. As Silberman noted, Kanner obsessively read everything that was written on autism—particularly in the early years, when there wasn’t much scholarship. (To give you an idea how long it took for Asperger’s ideas to be disseminated: It wasn’t until 1991 that Asperger’s paper was finally made widely available to the English-speaking world by cognitive psychologist Uta Frith in her book Autism and Asperger Syndrome.)