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It WAS NOT BY CHANCE that psychoanalysts were drawn to the problems of children who were diagnosed as autistic during the 1950s. It was a time when analysts were trying to solve the mysteries of everything from neuroses to schizophrenia by application of the psychoanalytic method—and this despite the fact that Freud considered his method to be most apt for neuroses. It was a time of experimentation with the clinical application of psychoanalysis, which was applied to any unyielding disorder of behavior or emotion with the hope of resolution or cure.
During the prior decade, as this general enthusiasm and therapeutic zeal was growing within psychoanalysis, there were nonanalytic physicians and pediatricians who were describing new syndromes and disorders that were considered to be inborn and not psychogenic. One such discovery was made by Leo Kanner (1943) at Johns Hopkins in 1943. He described Early Infantile Autism as a disorder that was characterized by an “inborn disturbance in affective contact” that consequently interfered with social interaction and language development and provided for only a narrow repertoire of play and other behaviors that appeared as a demand for sameness and an intolerance for change. These children had normal motor landmarks, were physically unstigmatized, and showed none of the telltale marks of the many syndromes that were beginning to be described in the