ABSTRACT
The American psychiatrist, Leo Kanner, first described a condition in children he called autism in 1943 after examining eleven children whom he considered to form a group quite distinctive from other groups in the combination of symptoms they revealed. The principal feature of these children for Kanner is their ‘inability to relate to people from the beginning of life’; their ‘aloofness’ and ‘aloneness’ is seen as the most distinctive abnormality. In the childhood versions, however, many diagnosticians reserve these terms, particularly ‘childhood schizophrenia’, to describe children who have had at least some years of apparently normal development. ‘Childhood psychosis’ is often used as a blanket term to cover both children who would be diagnosed as autistic by some, and those whose normality of general development may be in doubt, and who begin to develop abnormal signs at later than 2 years.
