Pioneering, prodigious and perspicacious: Grunya Efimovna Sukhareva’s life and contribution to conceptualising autism and schizophrenia

Abstract

Grunya Efimovna Sukhareva’s seminal role in being the first to publish a clinical description of autistic traits in 1925, before both Kanner and Asperger, has been revealed relatively recently. Nevertheless, Sukhareva’s work is little known and largely unrecognised beyond Russia. Amidst calls for greater recognition of her pivotal contribution in the genesis of autism conceptualisation and categorisation, this article provides a biographical and historical background. Sukhareva’s wide-ranging psychiatric work is adumbrated and her pioneering efforts in conceptualising both schizophrenia and autism are elucidated. The article reflects on possible explanations for the belated and incomplete recognition of Sukhareva’s role. The current article indicates how Sukhareva’s work was ahead of its time in reflecting modern criteria for autism diagnoses and in its focus on female case studies. Sukhareva’s somewhat precarious position as a foremost psychiatrist condemned in the Stalinist years for being anti-Marxist is explicated. The article outlines further directions for academic research on Sukhareva’s work and contributions.

Autism as emergent and transactional

“…One of the immediate paradoxes is sure that the very term “autism” is categorical; a term that has been used historically to name something, and has also more recently become a term naming a valued social identity. The history and evolution of this naming is in itself a valuable subject for reflection ( 4 ); from the earliest highly theory-driven accounts of Bleuler and others, the more considered clinical descriptions of Sukhareva ( 5 ), Binswanger, and Kanner; into the tradition of empirical description and nosology elaborated in the last 60 years, which morphed into the developmental science and neurodevelopmental account of the current paradigm. The rise of the social advocacy and the pressing forward of social identity in relation to autism introduces a new note into this progression; a lived-subject assertion of experience which results in a rather different idea of autism as an “identity”—giving, in Levi-Strauss’s formulation, “every individual … his own (identity) as …a signifier of his signified being” ( 6 ).…”

‘We’ve come a very, very, long way’ Overcoming stigma of autism: An interpretative phenomenological analysis within the UK Jewish community

“…In particular, cultural sensitivity may be enhanced by a programme that observes the strong tradition of Jewish scholarship and activism in pioneering autism categorisation and conceptualisation and raising awareness and knowledge of autism in broader contexts. The pioneering work of the Jewish researchers Grunya Efimovna Sukhareva (Manouilenko & Bejerot, 2015; Sher & Gibson, 2021; Simmonds & Sukhareva, 2020; Ssucharewa, 1927; Wolff, 1996), Leo Kanner (1943), Georg Frankl and Anni Weiss (Baron-Cohen et al, 2018; Muratori & Bizzari, 2019; Muratori et al, 2020; Robison, 2017, p. 869; Sheffer, 2018; Silberman, 2016), Simon Baron-Cohen (2002), and others might be referenced, to encourage communal pride and inspire greater knowledge and awareness of autism.…”

Ecological-enactive account of autism spectrum disorder

“…This condition was later called "Asperger syndrome", but the full acknowledgement only came as late as the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-4) (1994). However, recently, it has been pointed out (Sher & Gibson, 2021) that the Soviet-Russian child psychiatrist Grunya Efimovna Sukhareva gave the very first clinical account of autistic children. She published her description of autistic traits of six boys aged between 2 and 14, who spent two years at her 'hospital-school' at the Psychoneurological Department for Children in Moscow, in a German psychiatry and neurology journal in 1926, two decades before Kanner's and Asperger's seminal papers.…”