This paper is a discussion of autistic disorder, a developmental disorder that is characterized by severe impairment in social interaction and communication exhibited before the age of 3. First identified in the early 1940s, autism is often described as a state of siege, in which the child, unable to control or derive satisfaction from the world, retreats from reciprocal contact with others and creates a strictly regulated fantasy world in which to exist. Frequently misdiagnosed in its original manifestations, autism can be especially frustrating for parents and therapists to deal with. Only about a third of autistic children can be taught to become partially independent. Autism is relatively rare, occurring in two to five cases of 1,000, but it is a remarkably striking disorder, offering interesting insights into normal childhood development and the establishment of individual personality.
The term "autism" was first introduced by psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler in 1911 to refer to a schizophrenic disturbance (Bleuler also coined the term "schizophrenia"), "namely the narrowing of relationships to people and to the outside world, a narrowing so extreme that it seemed to exclude everything except the person's own self" (Frith, 1989, p. 7). Although the psychiatric community now classifies autism as a developmental disorder, the name, derived from the Greek autos (self), persists. Both Leo Kanner and Hans Asperger, publishing independent studies of autistic children in 1943 and 1944, chose to use the label to begin to describe the fundamental disturbance they each saw in separate case studies. Kanner, because he published in English, is more widely recognized as identifying the disorder initially, but both papers give detailed descriptions and analyses of what is unquestionably the same condition.
Kanner argued that, despite a wide range of apparent differences among cases, autism could be diagnosed by the presence of just tw...