Chapter 1: Introduction

In his 500-page book, Dementia Praecox of the Group of Schizophrenia, Eugene Bleuler (30 April 1857–15 July 1939) gave us our first, albeit brief, description of autism. In this book he framed autism as one of the four key characteristics of schizophrenia.

The next major development in our understanding of the autism spectrum occurred during the 1940s when Leo Kanner (13 June 1894–3 April 1981) and Hans Asperger (18 February 1906–21 October 1980) independently published their first studies about this subject. In 1943, Kanner published his seminal paper ‘Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact’. In this article he described a condition that he called ‘infantile autism’, which was comprised of three characteristics: restricted and repetitive patterns of behaviour, social limitations and restricted verbal communication abilities (Kanner, 1943). The following year, Asperger published in German his article ‘Die “Autistischen psychopathen” im kindesalter’, which translates to ‘The “autistic psychopaths” in childhood’. He used the term ‘autistic psychopathy’ because the children he observed seemed to demonstrate an indifference towards the emotional states of others (Asperger, 1944). The characteristics exhibited by the four children in Asperger's study closely resembled those exhibited by the 11 children documented by Kanner, although to a lesser extent (Asperger, 1944; Kanner, 1943).