It's conversations like this where I wish I had a copy of seanchai's Hypervelocity "Asperger's Bait Sub-personality" icon.
Reeds doesn't know how to deal with emotional connections
No, and the difficult part of that is that he can't really learn how - on an intellectual level, maybe, but not on the same instinctive level that non-Reed people can process social interaction on. It's not that he doesn't love his family, or care about them; it's that he doesn't know how to handle those feelings or how to express them. Hence Reed acting like a jerk sometimes.
It's like Tony's excessive dickishness during parts of the Drinking Arc and other points of extreme Tony angst; clinical depression can make people act like selfish, insensitive jerks, because you don't have the emotional resources to focus on anything but your own pain (Matt Murdock does the same thing, with bonus paranoia and manic violence).
Someday, I'm going to get motivated enough to do my massive meta post on Marvel characters and psychological illness. Aside from Reed being a posterboy for autism-spectrum-disorder, you have Tony and depression, Hank Pym and Matt Murdock and bipolar disorder, Carol & Tony and substance abuse, Steve and PTSD... and then, of course, you've got things like Disassembled/House of M!Wanda to balance out the surprisingly good treatments of mental/emotional disorders with a giant helping of Human Psychology Doesn't Work That Way.
Re: I had no idea you felt that way about Reed!
Reeds doesn't know how to deal with emotional connections
No, and the difficult part of that is that he can't really learn how - on an intellectual level, maybe, but not on the same instinctive level that non-Reed people can process social interaction on. It's not that he doesn't love his family, or care about them; it's that he doesn't know how to handle those feelings or how to express them. Hence Reed acting like a jerk sometimes.
It's like Tony's excessive dickishness during parts of the Drinking Arc and other points of extreme Tony angst; clinical depression can make people act like selfish, insensitive jerks, because you don't have the emotional resources to focus on anything but your own pain (Matt Murdock does the same thing, with bonus paranoia and manic violence).
Someday, I'm going to get motivated enough to do my massive meta post on Marvel characters and psychological illness. Aside from Reed being a posterboy for autism-spectrum-disorder, you have Tony and depression, Hank Pym and Matt Murdock and bipolar disorder, Carol & Tony and substance abuse, Steve and PTSD... and then, of course, you've got things like Disassembled/House of M!Wanda to balance out the surprisingly good treatments of mental/emotional disorders with a giant helping of Human Psychology Doesn't Work That Way.