A psychiatric approach to autism and its relationship to a psychoanalytic perspective

In 1943, Leo Kanner, an American child psychiatrist who worked at John’s Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore, lucidly described “eleven children with fascinating peculiarities”. In his paper “Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact” (Kanner, 1943) he sets out for the first time a psychiatric description of a syndrome he called “Early Infantile Autism”.