How autism became autism: The radical transformation of a central concept of child development in Britain

Abstract

This article argues that the meaning of the word 'autism' experienced a radical shift in the early 1960s in Britain which was contemporaneous with a growth in epidemiological and statistical studies in child psychiatry. The first part of the article explores how 'autism' was used as a category to describe hallucinations and unconscious fantasy life in infants through the work of significant child psychologists and psychoanalysts such as Jean Piaget, Lauretta Bender, Leo Kanner and Elwyn James Anthony. Theories of autism were then associated both with schizophrenia in adults and with psychoanalytic styles of reasoning. The closure of institutions for 'mental defectives' and the growth in speech therapy services in the 1960s and 1970s encouraged new models for understanding autism in infants and children. The second half of the article explores how researchers such as Victor Lotter and Michael Rutter used the category of autism to reconceptualize psychological development in infants and children via epidemiological studies. These historical changes have influenced the form and function of later research into autism and related conditions.

Keywords: autism; childhood schizophrenia; descriptive psychopathology; epidemiology; hallucination; infants; psychiatry.

Figure 1.

Table by E. J. Anthony, ‘The psychotic ego with its defects and defences’, first printed in Anthony (1958a).

Figure 2.

Table by Victor Lotter, ‘Mean percentage scores on 24 behaviour items’ (Lotter, 1966).

Figure 3.

Section from table of items used in discriminant functions analyses (Bartak, Rutter and Cox, 1977).

Figure 4.

‘Comparison of socially impaired with sociable severely retarded’ (L. Wing and Gould, 1979).