The word “autism” is over a century old, first appearing in a 1911 psychiatric textbook. But autism as the distinct developmental condition we recognize today was first described in 1943. The condition itself, of course, has existed for as long as humans have, even if it went unnamed for most of that time.
Where the Word Came From
Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler coined the term “autism” in 1911. He wasn’t describing what we now call autism spectrum disorder. Instead, he used it to describe a symptom he observed in adults with schizophrenia: a withdrawal from reality so complete that it excluded other human beings. Bleuler defined it as “this detachment from reality, together with the relative and absolute predominance of the inner life.” For the next three decades, “autism” remained a descriptor for a feature of schizophrenia, not a condition of its own.
The 1943 Paper That Changed Everything
In 1943, child psychiatrist Leo Kanner at Johns Hopkins published a paper titled “Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact,” describing 11 children who shared a striking pattern of behaviors. He observed children who referred to themselves in the third person, repeated words spoken to them, and communicated their desires by attributing them to others. Kanner recognized this as something new. Rather than labeling these children as “feeble-minded” or “schizoid,” as previous clinicians had, he described a distinct syndrome he called “infantile autism.”
One year later, in 1944, Austrian pediatrician Hans Asperger independently published descriptions of children he also called “autistic,” though his patients differed from Kanner’s. Asperger’s group had high nonverbal intelligence and used large vocabularies appropriately. Neither Kanner nor Asperger knew about the other’s work at the time, making it a remarkable case of parallel discovery.
Kanner also noticed something that would prove important later: autism seemed to run in families. He described it as an “innate” disorder and recognized the need for biological markers from the very beginning.
The Refrigerator Mother Theory
Despite his early instinct that autism was innate, Kanner veered in a damaging direction. By 1949, he was describing autistic children as “reared in emotional refrigerators,” blaming the condition on cold, unloving parents. He noted that many of the families he observed were intelligent and of Jewish or Anglo-Saxon origin, and that the parents seemed emotionally distant. From this, he built a theory that parental coldness caused autism, an idea that became known as the refrigerator mother theory.
The theory gained enormous traction. In 1967, psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim amplified it in his book “The Empty Fortress,” where he compared mothers of autistic children to Nazi prison guards and their homes to concentration camps. Bettelheim, himself a Holocaust survivor, drew on Freudian psychoanalysis to argue that autism was a psychological response to a hostile environment. This framework dominated clinical thinking for roughly two decades, causing immense guilt and suffering among parents of autistic children, particularly mothers, who were told they had caused their child’s condition through emotional neglect.
The theory was eventually dismantled as researchers accumulated evidence that autism has biological and genetic roots, not psychogenic ones.
How the Diagnosis Evolved
Autism’s journey through the official psychiatric manual reflects how slowly the medical establishment came to understand it. In the first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), published in 1952, the word “autism” appeared only once, as a feature of childhood schizophrenia. By 1968, in the second edition, “autistic, atypical, and withdrawn behavior” was still listed under schizophrenia.
It wasn’t until 1980, with the DSM-III, that infantile autism finally appeared as its own diagnosis, separate from schizophrenia. That was a watershed moment: for the first time, autism was officially recognized as a distinct condition rather than a variant of psychosis. The 1987 revision renamed it “autistic disorder” and described it as a “pervasive lack of responsiveness to other people.”
In 1994, the DSM-IV expanded the landscape considerably, listing sixteen possible diagnostic criteria and creating four subcategories: Asperger’s disorder, pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified, Rett’s disorder, and childhood disintegrative disorder. Then in 2013, the DSM-5 collapsed all of those subcategories into a single umbrella diagnosis: autism spectrum disorder, or ASD. This is the framework clinicians use today.
Autism Before It Had a Name
Autism didn’t begin in 1943. People with autism have always existed; they just weren’t identified as such. Some historical cases have drawn retrospective attention. Victor of Aveyron, a boy found living wild in the French countryside around 1800, could make speech sounds but not words, rocked when seated, trotted rather than walked, and had a limited attention span. Modern researchers have suggested these behaviors are consistent with autism.
The 18th-century scientist Henry Cavendish, who made foundational discoveries in chemistry and physics, was retrospectively diagnosed with what was then called Asperger’s syndrome by the neurologist Oliver Sacks. Historical accounts describe Cavendish as extraordinarily reclusive and rigid in his routines. These retrospective diagnoses are inherently speculative, but they illustrate a point: the behavioral patterns we now call autism are visible throughout recorded history, long before anyone had a word for them.
From Rare Condition to 1 in 31
When Kanner first described autism in 1943, it was considered extremely rare. Today, according to CDC data published in May 2025, about 1 in 31 children (3.2%) aged 8 are identified with autism spectrum disorder. That figure comes from surveillance of children born in 2014 across 16 monitoring sites.
This dramatic increase reflects several overlapping factors: broader diagnostic criteria, greater awareness among parents and clinicians, better screening tools, and the removal of separate subcategories that previously fragmented the count. Whether there has also been a true increase in the underlying rate of autism remains an open question, but the expansion of who qualifies for a diagnosis has clearly been a major driver.
The Neurodiversity Shift
In 1998, Australian sociologist Judy Singer, herself on the autism spectrum, wrote an honors thesis examining autistic self-advocates and their online communities. Her work, revised into a book chapter published in 1999, helped introduce the concept of neurodiversity: the idea that autism and similar neurological differences are natural variations in the human brain rather than diseases to be cured. This framework has reshaped public conversation around autism over the past two decades, influencing everything from workplace accommodations to how autistic people describe their own experiences.
So while the word “autism” is 114 years old and the formal diagnosis is 82, the condition itself is as old as humanity. What has changed, and continues to change, is how we understand it.