ABSTRACT
Eugen Bleuler first used the term ‘autism’ at the beginning of the twentieth century to refer to what he thought to be a variant of schizophrenia characterised by ‘a narrowing of relationships to people and the outside world, a narrowing so extreme that it seemed to exclude everything except the person’s own self’ (Frith, 2003: 5). In 1943, Leo Kanner distinguished autism from childhood schizophrenia observing the crucial distinction that ‘people with schizophrenia withdrew from social relationships while children with autism never developed them in the first place’ (cited in Mesibov, Shea and Adams, 2001: 7).
