The term autistic disorder was first coined in 1943 by psychiatrist Leo Kanner. He used it to describe how eleven disturbed children behaved in ways that were not similar to mental retardation or schizophrenia. He named the syndrome early infantile autism as he observed that "there is a from the start an extreme aloneness that, whenever possible, disregards, ignores, shuts out anything that comes to the child from the outside". He found that these eleven children had been unable to relate to people in the normal way from the beginning of life. …
