ABSTRACT
In 1943, Leo Kanner, a child psychiatrist working at Johns Hopkins University, published an article titled, “Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact.” (Kanner 1943). In it, he identified a group of children who shared certain traits: “All of the children’s activities and utterances are governed rigidly and consistently by the powerful desire for aloneness and sameness” (249). The children shared an “inability to relate themselves in the ordinary way to people and situations” and an “anxiously excessive desire for the maintenance of sameness,” and displayed “an extreme autistic aloneness that, whenever possible, disregards, ignores, shuts out anything that comes to the child from the outside” (242, 245, italics in original).
