ABSTRACT
The first published accounts of treatments for autism began to appear in the 1950s, when the condition was viewed primarily as an early form of schizophrenia. Indeed, Szurek and Berlin (1956) suggested that it was ‘clinically fruitless, even unnecessary, to draw any sharp dividing lines between psychosis, autism, atypical development, or schizophrenia’. Kanner (1951), too, although initially suggesting that autism was a developmental disorder (‘We must assume that these children come into the world with an innate inability to form the usual biologically provided affective contact with people’), was influenced by contemporary views of the link between autism and schizophrenia. Consequently, throughout the 1950s and 60s autism was viewed as a psychiatric disorder with a psychogenic basis, and psychoanalysis, together with drugs and other treatments (including ECT) used for schizophrenia, tended to be the treatment of choice (Campbell 1978).
