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The Autism Spectrum

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Handbook of Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities

Part of the book series: Issues on Clinical Child Psychology ((ICCP))

Abstract

Autism was first delineated as a syndrome of childhood onset by Leo Kanner in the United States in the 1940s (Kanner, 1943). Long before that—at the turn of the 18th century—classic autism cases had been described by John Haslam in the United Kingdom and Jean Itard in France. The word autism (from the Greek autos for self) was introduced by Eugen Bleuler to depict the self-cantered thinking believed to be typical of schizophrenia. Believed by Kanner to be a discrete disease entity, early infantile autism was conceptualized as an extremely rare disorder, and one that would be easy to identify and diagnose. It was only in the early 1980s that the concept of an autism spectrum was introduced by Wing (Waterhouse, Wing, & Fein, 1989; Wing, 1981, 1988) and Gillberg (Gillberg & Steffenburg, 1987). Wing put forward the notion of a fairly specific triad of impairments of social, communicative, and imaginative functioning as being at the basis of all autism spectrum disorders. She also coined the term Asperger’s syndrome for the kind of “high-functioning” autism spectrum disorder originally described by Hans Asperger (1944) (who used the term autistic psychopathy) at about the same time that Kanner described his more “low-functioning” variant of autism.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. St. George’s Hospital Medical School, University of London, London, United Kingdom

    Christopher Gillberg

  2. Queen Silvia’s Children’s Hospital, University of Göteborg, Gothenburg, Sweden

    Christopher Gillberg

Authors
  1. Christopher Gillberg
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. NYS Office of Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities, Albany, New York

    John W. Jacobson

  2. Department of Pediatrics and Psychology, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, 43205, USA

    James A. Mulick

  3. Department of Psychology, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, 22030, USA

    Johannes Rojahn

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Gillberg, C. (2007). The Autism Spectrum. In: Jacobson, J.W., Mulick, J.A., Rojahn, J. (eds) Handbook of Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities. Issues on Clinical Child Psychology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-32931-5_2

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