ABSTRACT
The term autism, meaning “living in self” (in Greek aut means self, and ism refers to a state), was coined by a Swiss psychiatrist, Eugen Bleuler, in 1911, to describe selfabsorption due to poor social relatedness in schizophrenia (1). Leo Kanner (Fig. 1), in 1943, borrowed this term to describe 11 children who “were oblivious to other people, did not talk or who parroted speech, used idiosyncratic phrases, who lined up toy in long rows, and who remembered meaningless facts.” In his classic paper, “Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact,” Kanner described the features of classic autism with uncanny detail (2). Describing the social isolation of his first case, Kanner said, “Donald got happiest when left alone, almost never cried to go with his mother, did not seem to notice his father’s homecomings, and was indifferent to visiting relatives. The father made a special point of mentioning that Donald even failed to pay the slightest attention to Santa Claus in full regalia.” His second child played abnormally, “He never was very good with cooperative play. He doesn’t care to play with the ordinary things that other children play with, anything with wheels on.” The third child said “no recognizable words, although he did make noises (3).” In 1956, Eisenberg and Kanner suggested two essential criteria for the disorder: inability to relate in the ordinary way to people and situations and failure to learn to speak or inability to convey meaning to others through language, both occurring from the beginning of life (4).
