Two papers, published within a year of each other in the early 1940s, on opposite sides of a war, by two psychiatrists who almost certainly never read each other’s work at the time, somehow became the dual foundation for how an entire category of human experience gets named and understood today. The story behind those papers is more complicated, and considerably less comfortable, than the brief biography most autism resources offer.
Kanner’s 1943 paper, and what it captured
Leo Kanner, working in Baltimore, published a description of eleven children he called “autistic disturbances of affective contact.” His observations — intense need for sameness, unusual relationships to objects and people, distinctive communication patterns — still echo in diagnostic criteria today. Kanner’s framing, though, also embedded some lasting harm: he speculated about cold, emotionally distant parenting as a contributing factor, an idea that, decades later, hardened into the deeply damaging “refrigerator mother” theory, which blamed mothers specifically for causing their children’s autism with insufficient warmth.
Asperger’s 1942 paper, and the legacy complicated by history
One year earlier, in Vienna, Hans Asperger described a related but somewhat different pattern in children he studied, work that remained largely unknown in the English-speaking world until psychiatrist Lorna Wing translated and discussed it in the early 1980s. Asperger’s legacy carries a far heavier complication than Kanner’s. Research published in 2018 in the journal Molecular Autism, drawing on newly available historical records, established that Asperger had documented, direct involvement with Vienna’s child euthanasia program at Spiegelgrund, a clinic where children with disabilities were murdered under Nazi policy. Asperger personally referred some children to the clinic, fully aware of what awaited them there.
This history sits uncomfortably alongside the fact that “Asperger syndrome” was used as a clinical and identity term for decades, including by many autistic people who found it meaningful as a personal label. The historical record doesn’t erase the genuine value some people found in that label, but it does explain why many autistic advocates and clinicians have moved away from using Asperger’s name, and why the term was folded into the broader autism spectrum category in the DSM-5 in 2013.
The decades that followed weren’t a straight line of progress
What happened after these two foundational papers wasn’t a steady climb toward better understanding. The refrigerator mother theory dominated mainstream thinking through the 1950s and 1960s, despite lacking any real evidentiary support, and caused enormous, unnecessary guilt and harm to a generation of parents told their coldness had caused their child’s autism. France, notably, held onto psychoanalytic explanations for autism — explicitly blaming mothers — far longer than most other countries, with some clinicians still promoting these ideas publicly as recently as the 2010s.
Deinstitutionalization changed the picture again
Through the mid-twentieth century, institutionalization was the dominant societal response to disability generally, including autism, often under genuinely horrific conditions. Public exposure of these conditions, alongside sustained parent advocacy, drove the major legislative shifts of the 1970s in the United States — including the act that eventually became the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act — establishing legal rights to education and services that simply hadn’t existed before.
The most recent chapter is autistic people speaking for themselves
The most significant shift in the last few decades hasn’t come from new clinical research alone, but from autistic self-advocates entering the conversation directly, rather than being discussed only by parents, clinicians, and researchers. The phrase “nothing about us without us” captures this shift precisely, and it’s reshaped everything from language preferences to research priorities to public policy in ways that the field’s earlier era, built entirely around outside observation, never could have produced on its own.
For more on this most recent chapter specifically, see our piece on how autistic advocates changed the conversation. And for the specific damage caused by the refrigerator mother theory mentioned briefly above, our dedicated piece on that history goes into far more depth.
Laura Mitchell’s recent release Where Autism Meets the World covers this entire history across a dedicated chapter, tracing how every culture has interpreted neurodivergent minds long before clinical diagnosis existed. While that title becomes available on Amazon, her current book Navigating Life as an Autistic Adult offers a more contemporary, practical companion to this historical context.
