An Anthropologist on Mars (1995) (47 page)

Darold Treffert’s Extraordinary People is an excellent introduction to the subject of idiot savants, drawing as it does equally on historical accounts (from Séguin, Down, Tredgold, and others) and Treffert’s own clinical experience.

In a more academic vein, The Exceptional Brain, edited by Loraine Obler and Deborah Fein, brings together a great range of research regarding human talents in general, and savant talents in particular.

Steven Smith’s book, The Great Mental Calculators, is the fullest source of observations on calculating talent as it occurs in normal as well as retarded and autistic people.

A particular favorite of mine, never noted by current writers, is F.W. H. Myers’s Human Personality. Myers himself was a genius, and this shows in every sentence of his great (though often absurd) two-volume book. The chapter on “Genius” is a penetrating and prescient account of computing talents in relation to the cognitive unconscious.

Though Loma Selfe’s Nadia: A Case of Extraordinary Drawing Ability in an Autistic Child is, sadly, out of print, Howard Gardner’s Art, Mind, and Brain contains an important essay on Nadia, which was to some extent the starting point of his subsequent, widely ramifying studies on intelligence and creativity. A particularly thoughtful review of Nadia is provided by Clara Claiborne Park, in which she compares Nadia’s work with that of her daughter, Jessy, and other autistic artists.

The most detailed cognitive investigation of a musical savant, Eddie, is given by Leon K. Miller in his book Musical Savants.

The extensive investigations of Beate Hermelin and her colleagues (including Neil O’Connor and Linda Pring) are mostly available as individual papers, which include detailed studies of Stephen Wiltshire and other savants. An early paper by O’Connor and Hermelin, “Visual and Graphic Abilities of the Idiot Savant Artist”, reproduces and discusses some of Stephen’s early work.

The 1945 monograph on a savant subject, L., “A Case of ‘Idiot Savant’: An Experimental Study of Personality Organization”, by Martin Scheerer, Eva Rothmann, and Kurt Goldstein, raises fundamental questions unanswered (and often unasked) today. It is, to my mind, the deepest and most searching analysis ever made of the savant (and autistic) mind. L. is clearly autistic, though this term is not used, because the original version of the paper appeared in 1941, before Kanner’s description of autism. In their later, fuller 1945 paper, Goldstein et al. compare their formulations with Kanner’s.

Merlin Donald’s book, Origins of the Modern Mind, in which he speculates on the mimetic powers of primitive man, opens vast historical vistas and is one of the most powerfully argued and imaginative reconstructions I have seen of our past (and perhaps future) mental evolution. Jerome Bruner has explored the development of thinking in the child for many years; a very clear account of the “enactive” stage is given in Studies in Cognitive Growth.

A fascinating and richly illustrated study of a gifted, retarded octogenarian artist is John MacGregor’s Dwight Macintosh: The Boy Whom Time Forgot.

I have written three other case histories of savant syndrome, all published in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: “The Autist Artist”, “The Twins”, and “A Walking Grove.”

Finally, and most importantly, there are Stephen’s own books: Drawings, Cities, Floating Cities, and Stephen Wiltshire’s American Dream. (Unfortunately, only Floating Cities is currently in print in the United States.)

See the suggested readings for “An Anthropologist on Mars” for more books on autism, and for autism associations.

The delineation of autism as a medical condition goes back to the pioneer papers of Kanner, Asperger, and Goldstein in the 1940
s
; while it was psychiatrically defined (with misleading suggestions of parental etiology) by Bruno Bettelheim in the 1950
s
(and later in The Empty Fortress), and finally established as a biological condition in the 1960
s
(when Bernard Rimland’s Infantile Autism was published), autism was not fully portrayed as a human condition until biographical and finally autobiographical narratives began to appear.

One of the first (and still the best) of these is The Siege: The First Eight Years of an Autistic Child, by Clara Claiborne Park. Mira Rothenberg’s Children with Emerald Eyes is a collection of portraits-at once clinical, analytic, empathetic, and poetic-of a dozen children among the hundreds in her pioneering Blueberry Treatment Centers. Charles Hart, in Without Reason, provides a remarkable account of his experience of having first an older brother, then a son, with autism. Jane Taylor McDonnell’s beautifully written News from the Border contains an afterword by her autistic son, Paul.

There has indeed been an explosion of books written about and by autistic people since 1990 (many centering on the complex questions of facilitated communication), and it is difficult to mention any of these without appearing to ignore others. But in terms of its forthrightness, its vigor, its fullness and insight (to say nothing of its priority-for it was the book that gave direct, personal access to an autistic world for the first time), there is nothing to match Temple Grandin’s own book, Emergence: Labeled Autistic.

Uta Frith’s Autism: Explaining the Enigma is a very clear and balanced account, though oriented perhaps too exclusively in a “theory of mind” direction. Autism and Asperger Syndrome, edited by Frith, contains a number of important articles, including clinical accounts by Christopher Gillberg, Digby Tantam, and Margaret Dewey. It also contains an essay on the autobiographical writings of Asperger adults, including Temple, by Francesca Happé; and the first English translation of Asperger’s original 1994 paper, appended to a searching essay by Frith on his contributions. Asperger was, in a sense, “discovered” by Lorna Wing, and her essay comparing his approach and insights with Kanner’s also appears in this volume.

The Autism Society of America has chapters throughout the United States and in Puerto Rico. The national headquarters can be contacted at 7910 Woodmont Avenue, Suite 650, Bethesda, MD 20814, telephone (301) 565-0433 or (800) 328-8476. In England, the National Autistic Society is located in 276 Willesden Lane, London NWi 5RB, telephone (081) 451-1114. More Able Autistic People (MAAP), Box 524, Crown Point, IN 46307, publishes a newsletter on higher-functioning people with autism. The Autism Society of Canada is at 129 Yorkville Avenue, Suite 202, Toronto, Ontario M5R 1C4, telephone (416) 922-0302.

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