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- [00:00]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Hi there, it's Claire. If you're hearing me, that means you're listening to the free preview of one of our Patreon episodes. We switch off every week between free and Patreon exclusive episodes. So if you'd like to hear the rest of this conversation, head over to patreon.com thisguysucked and join our honorary Haters Club. A list of sensitive themes and topics covered in this episode can be found in the episode description Foreign welcome to this Guy Sucked the show where we prove that it's never too late to have haters and you can't libel the dead. I'm your host, Dr. Claire Aubin, and I'm a historian, writer, and most importantly for the purposes of the show, certified Hater. On this show we talk about people from throughout history with legacies that need a little updating. Whether it's because of their politics, their behavior, or their impact on society and culture, these guys actually kind of sucked. And we bring in a new scholar every week to tell us why. With me today is Dr. Hannah Zeven, who is an assistant professor of history at UC Berkeley, Go Bears. As well as a co founder of the Psychosocial foundation and founding editor of Parapraxis magazine. She is also the author of several books including the Distance, a history of teletherapy and Germane to the Show, a brand new book called Mother Hot and Cool parenting in the 20th century. By the way, Hannah sent me a copy of this new book and it is very beautifully written which I expressed to her before we started the show. It looks great and also just the writing is really incredible and I highly recommend it if you want a really thoughtful exploration of the themes that she covers in the book. So welcome to the show and thank you for being on.
- [01:48]
Dr. Hannah Zeven
Thank you so much for having me. And thank you for saying that anytime.
- [01:55]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Can I just say also, you are the first guest on the show in whose home I have previously been inside of. So that's a kind of dubious honor for you.
- [02:07]
Dr. Hannah Zeven
Well, you were wonderful in my home, so it's just an honor.
- [02:12]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Thank you. I recently attended a very fun party at Hannah's house after a conference on Freud. Who else? And it had delicious catering. I highly recommend it. If anyone can ever get an invite to one of Hannah's party parties, you should go. Also, a fun fact about both myself and Hannah is that we have different pieces, chunks, I don't know what the word parts body part limbs of the same plant in our house. Houses. I'm going to put a photo of the begonia that we both have on our Instagram story when the episode comes out so you can all see it. But, Hannah, can you explain this plant that we have?
- [02:53]
Dr. Hannah Zeven
Sure. And thank you again for being my mentor on how to help it grow correctly. We both have cuttings from Freud's begonia plant from his final home in London near Hampstead Heath. And they offer this plant as part of, like, an ongoing fundraiser for the Freud Museum, where I do a lot of archival work for all three of my books. And, yeah, my most recent time there was for, like, to do a whole evening kind of like, on. It's like the opposite tone of your podcast. Like, actually, maybe Anna Freud deserves her moment in the sun. And it was about Anna Freud and her lifelong relationship with Dorothy Burlingam. And at the end of it, I received the cutting and immediately needed to use our mutual friend to relay, like, my panic about how to get it back into the country.
- [03:51]
Dr. Claire Aubin
And here we are with. With our smuggled plants. So, sorry, anyone who works at customs and is hearing this, although I think begonias are allowed, I think house plants under a certain size. I mean, I will say, yeah, my. My whole experience, because I got this plant for my partner who has shown up on the show in the background. He's like the ghost of the show who is a therapist, is a psychoanalytic therapist and also a big Freud Freud. He's a Freudian. He is. He's a big Freud fan. And I got this for him years ago for Christmas as a Christmas present for him. And then I had to smuggle it from the UK into the US via a sort of, like, system of wet paper towels and Tupperware and stuff. And I brought it, but I brought it here when I moved back to the US So it was kind of wrapped up in this whole gigantic, terrifying moving process, which included moving the dog and all this stuff. So this plant. I also was like, if I kill this plant, I will have gotten my partner the best possible Christmas present and then immediately ruined it. But now it's. They're thriving.
- [05:00]
Dr. Hannah Zeven
They are.
- [05:00]
Dr. Claire Aubin
They are thriving, just like us.
- [05:05]
Dr. Hannah Zeven
I don't know.
- [05:06]
Dr. Claire Aubin
We started this by both being like, we're tired today. Okay? I'm sure people are tired of hearing about our plants. Let's get into what we're actually all here for. Who are we talking about on the show today?
- [05:18]
Dr. Hannah Zeven
Today we're going to talk about Dr. Leo Kanner, who is certainly not a plant, but is a psychiatrist, and I'm happy to say much more about him and possibly why he sucks.
- [05:32]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Please do. First, can we start with you telling us, me, the listeners, I've been using the royal we here telling us what his original sort of popular historical narrative is. A lot of people won't have heard of him, but they will be familiar with some of the effects of some of his work and his relationship to things like the field of psychiatry. So what do people need to know about him?
- [05:56]
Dr. Hannah Zeven
Yeah, I mean I'm happy to start right there, which is that we all live in the aftermath of mid century psychiatry, whether we know it or not, and it touches all of our lives, the ways we're thought of as well or unwell. And sometimes we have no idea who to blame for like absolutely horrific ideas about the mind. Leo Cannor's someone we can point to. So we may not know his name. And I can just say like, right, he's born in 1894, he's Austrian, eventually comes to the U.S. died in 1981. So actually really like was, was, you know, in well into his 80s, really spanned the really intense, you know, changes in the history of psychiatry. He's really understood to be one of the first professional child psychiatrists. And the reason we would know of him without knowing his name is because his work on autism really set up the paradigm that despite being scientifically disproven, like still totally runs so much of our cultural thought on autism. You know, the way that's most concrete is, you know, many of us will have heard the idea of the refrigerator mother, which is to say that a cold, affectively shut down mother is going to quote, unquote, beget a similar child and that child will be autistic. And yeah, we have Leo Canor to blame for that for sure.
- [07:23]
Dr. Claire Aubin
In, in fact he is this right, he's the originator of the word autism. He's absolutely. So that is a pretty enormous legacy for him to have even just with that. He's like you said, is most commonly associated with the recognition and diagnosis of childhood autism, or what he calls early infantile autism. Is the originator of the word autism for some backstory before he kind of gets into psychiatry so people understand the sort of general milieu that he's living in. He's born in the Austro Hungarian Empire, attends medical school in Berlin, moves to the US about three years after finishing medical school. So he moves to the US in 1924. He was originally a cardiologist and then began getting into pediatric psychiatry while working at a hospital in South Dakota.
- [08:12]
Dr. Hannah Zeven
And just hop in there. There's like a Wonderful fact about Kanra's medical schooling, which is that he did really well in everything except for psychiatry. So when he shows up in North. In South Dakota, the reason for that is like, Berlin, where he trained was like this hotbed of all these Americans coming over to learn cutting edge science. After World War I, he was bored and Ken, or never liked Berlin. And so he took an offer to move his wife, himself and his young child to South Dakota, where he was like, sure, put me in coach. I'm happy to work on the one thing I wasn't good at alongside his also, like, very strange interests in like, historical dentistry.
- [08:58]
Dr. Claire Aubin
I did see that.
- [08:59]
Dr. Hannah Zeven
Yeah, he was like a kind of. He was like kind of wild guy. He was also. He was a Jewish emigre. And many of the stories I tell in my book are actually about people from the Austro Hungarian empire, but particularly Vienna as they emigrate to the US Remaking American psychiatry. And one thing that was interesting about Kanner is he grew up super religious, but very early on was like the sort of doxy around religiosity is like horrible for Jewish people. And so was really excited to emigrate to the U.S. a place where he thought of as like, okay, we can get away from all that. And describes like arriving in South Dakota being like, it's really beautiful here.
- [09:39]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Go go bears, basically. I mean, it is funny also. I mean, this isn't funny necessarily, but it does later in his life seem to be a kind of theme in the way that people are reading, reading, are writing and thinking about him, where they start to talk about him as this, like, early survivor of the pre Holocaust and how that's a. They want that to be a big part of his personality, that he got out of Germany ahead of the Holocaust and that this is like, important to him. But I don't know if that, like, actually fits with some of the, like, narratives he has around his Jewishness, around his experiences or not, or if people are just reading that onto him.
- [10:18]
Dr. Hannah Zeven
Yeah, I mean, I think that's a really good question. He emigrates in the 20s, and it's not like there's no antisemitism in Berlin in the 1920s. There was, and a great deal of it, but that's not. It doesn't seem to be at all why he left. Again, it was like he had emigrated to Berlin as a young man and like, was not just never sort of found his way, didn't really like it. Like, definitely talked shit on the kind of meld of cultures in Berlin and he wanted out. We can keep going to say that like, so he's in South Dakota, not for very long. When he attracts the attention of Adolf Mayer, who is also like, you know, as easily we could have done a like, whoa, this dude podcast on. Because one thing that was so strange in writing my book is, and I made a joke about this on Twitter, you can trace back so much of the history of psychiatry in the US To Mayer and in ways that have been written about, but in other ways that are still under featured. Mayer was running Johns Hopkins, which is a super important site for all kinds of history of psychiatry and history of psychoanalysis. It's from when psychoanalysis gets popularized in the US In a big way. And Canner shows up there in 1928. By 1930, he's running the first child psychiatry clinic and is able to really make that FIELD in the U.S. in a sense, whole cloth.
- [11:47]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Yeah. And so he moves to Johns Hopkins in 1930. And it is interesting because I think Johns Hopkins is kind of popularly thought of in culture as just sort of like the home of medical training, of cutting edge medical technology and schooling. The medical faculty there is for better or for worse what people think of when they think of medical schools in the US that is the name one, the brand name Medical School for America. So in 1930, he's hired, joins the faculty of the medical school, founds the Johns Hopkins Children's Psychiatric Clinic. And that's where all of this kind of takes off. And that's the wellspring from which all of this, this kind of flows. He was particularly concerned with the experiences of children with intellectual disabilities, which then transitions into studies around childhood experiences of neurodivergence. Not that that's what they're classifying it as. And the identification of childhood autism and childhood schizophrenia, is that right? Yeah.
- [12:54]
Dr. Hannah Zeven
And I think like, it's important to say that like, Right. So Kanner in South Dakota publishes his first book, which is literally on the folklore of teeth. That's the title. He. He has this two year fellowship under mayor and then suddenly is like flooded with cash. This will mean very little to most listeners, but to the listeners it will mean a lot too. Right. Like the Macy and Rockefeller foundations, which are these huge grant givers that structural like structure so massively the history of social science in this country are like flooding him with cash. He sets up what's called the Harriet Lane home. And yeah, so he becomes very interested only in children. It is at Hopkins. And I'm going to talk about this like, but in Baltimore and one of the first things he does. And I think this is, like, a place where we can see just how complicated this is, which is like a more ambivalent version of, this guy sucks, right? Like, one of the first things he does is he makes, like, this grand study of, you know, over 150 state institutions and all of these programs for children, but also adults with, quote, unquote, developmental difference and disability. And one of the major places he makes an intervention is that in Baltimore, there was this program where all of these adults were sent into private homes to work for free as domestic servants. On the one hand is like, this is super messed up. This is really, really bad for these individuals who are basically in this unwaged form of labor. And, like, they're getting sick, they're being physically abused, they're, like, contracting STIs. Not that that's what they were called then. But, you know, he also has this interest in syphilis. They're being reinstitutionalized. They're dying on the job. What's going on? And he, like, immediately takes to the press. This is, like, going to be co evil with the beginning of his work on childhood autism. And two things happen. Like, on the one hand, he's really rewarded as being. And I think this is part of the, like, crux of the contradiction of his legacy. He's really rewarded as being an advocate, but at the same time, no system comes in to replace. And he also argued, and this is the part that's forgotten that, like, yeah, it's bad for the people who are being shipped into this, like, very untenable, unsafe situation. And I agree with that, and that's horrific. But he also argued it was bad for, like, rich Baltimore society to have to tarry with, quote, unquote, such people. And we remember the first part about him.
- [15:27]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Remember it.
- [15:28]
Dr. Hannah Zeven
We don't really remember the second part. And I think that's the thing about his legacy that I'm sort of interested in. In the book Mother Media is like, he contributes all this stuff, but also what he contributes can be quite bad for lived experience of both the children he's working with, but also especially the mothers who he has this, like, very long standing, you know, impact on even till today.