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Autism is an intriguing and troubling disorder. Its core symptoms include impairments in social interaction, communication, imagination, and repetitive stereotyped behaviours. Most autistic individuals are also intellectually impaired, although this impairment is not thought to be a core feature of the disorder. Compared with other childhood disorders, autism is uncommon—with a prevalence rate estimated to be about 5:10,000 for the full syndrome, and perhaps 21:10,000 for a ‘spectrum’ that would include milder forms of the disorder. Yet, in spite of its uncommonness, autism has attracted enormous research attention, with some of today's most brilliant and productive investigators trying to understand it. These include many working in psychology and psychiatry throughout the Englishspeaking world (which this book focuses on), with a significant proportion of these in the United Kingdom (where the author is Professor of Developmental Psychopathology at the Tavistock Clinic and at University College, London). Among such investigators, in addition to the author, are: Michael Rutter, Lorna Wing, Uta Firth, Alan Leslie, Simon Baron-Cohen, Dennis Cantwell, Marian Sigman, Donald Cohen, Peter Tanguay, Sally Rogers, Bruce Pennington, Geraldine Dawson, Deborah Fein, Theodore Shapiro, Helen Tager-Flusberg, Catherine Lord, and Peter Mundy—to name only a few of those whose work is reviewed in this book!
Why such attention? Perhaps it is because autism involves a basic disability in what is most human about us and what we usually take for granted, namely, our social connectedness. In Hobson's words, ‘one needs to convey what it is like to relate to an autistic individual, how it feels to try to communicate or otherwise become engaged with the child. In such a situation, it is not uncommon to feel that one is faced with a strangeling who moves on some other plane of existence, a person with whom one cannot “connect.” This experience of being with an autistic child seems to correspon