Abstract
In 1943, the American psychiatrist Leo Kanner described a group of 11 afflicted patients with marked social contact disorders from early childhood, communication problems, abnormal responses to some common environmental stimuli, and obsessive desire for immutability, and used the term "early infantile autism ". In his observations, Kanner focused mainly on the description of clinical symptoms and did not pay much attention to the causes of autism, which in later years led to a number of misinterpretations and the emergence of erroneous theories.
Until recently, autism was considered a form of infantile schizophrenic psychosis arising in early childhood, and its etiopathogenesis has also been widely debated. Probably the most unfortunate was the psychogenic theory based on Kanner's observations of abnormal interactions in relationships between autistic children and their parents.
This theory claimed that impaired early parental care and emotionally cold education were the main cause of autism, and that resulted in excessive placement of autistic institutions in an effort to separate children from the "inappropriate" educational influence of their parents.