Autistic disturbances of affective contact
Leo Kanner's Original Article
Source: http://www.ama.org.br/kannereng12.htm accessed 2-07-05
This article is the complete article by Leo Kanner, written in 1943 paper. It appears on the Brazilian autism site of the Autistic Friends Association the home page of which is to be found at http://www.ama.org.br/main.htm
The hard-copy print original is to be found in the sources listed below:
"Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact", Nervous Child 2 (1943): 217-250. Reprinted inChildhood Psychosis: Initial Studies and New Insights, ed. Leo Kanner (Washington, D.C.: V. H. Winston, 1973). Also reprinted in Classic Readings in Autism, ed. Anne M. Donnellan (New York: Teacher's College Press, 1985).
The following is an MS Word conversion and edited correction of the complete article as it appears on the Brazilian web site. Kanner's article, much less often read today than Hans Asperger's article written only a year later, actually reads much easier than Asperger's more convoluted, complex description of children he worked with at the same time. We felt it would be useful for persons interested in Kanner's observations to read his original article, which appears fresh if not a bit old fashioned today, over six decades since its first appearance in print.
One striking difference between Kanner's paper and that of Hans Asperger is that Kanner saw the majority of his cases in the context of expressed family of origin concerns. These were children brought in by their parents or referred to him by private practitioners who mostly had seen the children in private consultation as opposed to institutional, clinic settings. His paper provides family history and information about the current status of parents and relatives in each of his children, something noticeably absent in Asperger's report of children roughly the same age. Asperger's patients were disconnected from their families by virtue of their resident institutionalized status in his clinic, some for considerable periods of time by the time he first saw them. He also saw them in a safe, sheltered environment in Vienna where their abberant behavior, had they remained in the open community, would have prompted Nazi removal from their families and likely extermination in death camps. Since Asperger's children weren't interactively involved with their families in the same way Kanner's children were, Asperger's observations, while keen and far-reaching, lack the family of origin and family history content and flavor of Kanner's cases.
It is our "amateur opinion" that many of the children in these cases, and certainly some if not most of their relatives described by Kanner would today more likely be diagnosed with Autistic Spectrum Disorder.
[Readers please note that while some some typographical and syntact errors in this text remain from our copy editing, they are due to the fact that the original article was painstakingly copied and typed from a hard-copy printed source. We are grateful for our friends in Brazil for having made the original paper available. We have made no effort to return to the original printed source to confirm our corrections, but believe them to largely accurate.]
Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact by Leo Kanner
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