Timeline: Early Years | 80s | 90s | 00s | 10s | 20s
Note: The timeline is still in the process of being updated.
[Last updated January 25, 2023]
Autism Politics & Initiatives
The Autism Market
Grants , Funded Projects & Money Raised
Pivotal
Marketing & Media Attention
Organizations & Companies
Autistic Community & Allies
1943
1943
“Autistic disturbances of affective contact” by Leo Kanner published in the The Nervous Child.
In 1943, Kanner published his landmark paper Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact, describing 11 children who displayed “a powerful desire for aloneness” and “an obsessive insistence on persistent sameness.” He named their condition “early infantile autism,” which is now known as autism spectrum disorder.
In this paper, Kanner characterizes eleven cases, 3 girls and 8 boys, and would later call his observations ‘autism’.
1949
1956
Mid-Century
“Behavioral psychology and conditions in children and adolescents was little understood in the mid-twentieth century.
The concept of ’autism’ was first used as a term for schizophrenia. In the 1950s into the 1960s what may be understood as autism in children was regularly also referred to as ‘childhood psychosis and childhood schizophrenia’”
1959
The beginnings of ABA can be traced back to Teodoro Ayllon and Jack Michael’s study “The psychiatric nurse as a behavioral engineer” (1959) that they published in the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior (JEAB).
Ayllon and Michael were training the staff and nurses at a psychiatric hospital how to use a token economy based on the principles of operant conditioning for patients with schizophrenia and intellectual disability, which led to researchers at the University of Kansas to start the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis (JABA) in 1968.
1959
“Joey: A ‘Mechanical Boy’”, Scientific American, 200, March 1959: 117–126. (About a boy who believes himself to be a robot.)
1964
1964
Infantile Autism: The Syndrome and Its Implications for a Neural Theory of Behavior by Bernard Rimland is published.
Rimland disagreed with the “Refrigerator Mother” theory popularized by Bruno Bettelheim. Instead he believed autism was a result of biochemical defects “triggered by environmental assaults.”
He also acknowledged there may also be a genetic component that could cause children to be autistic. Rimland argued that autism could “be treated—or at least ameliorated—with biomedical and behavioral therapies.”
Rimland’s book changed the way many in the medical establishment viewed autism. Rimland captured the attention of parents after the book was published and began networking with them, heard their stories and was asked for advice.
1965
1965
Autism Society of America founded by by Bernard Rimland and Ivar Lovaas together with Ruth C. Sullivan.
This is a parent-founded autism organization.
1965
Lovaas published articles for his behavior system.
In 1965, Lovaas published a series of articles that outlined his system for coding observed behaviors, described a pioneering investigation of the antecedents and consequences that maintained a problem behavior. and relied upon the methods of errorless learning that was initially devised by Charles Ferster to teach nonverbal children to speak.
Lovaas also described how to use social (secondary) reinforcers, teach children to imitate, and what interventions (including electric shocks) may be used to reduce aggression and life-threatening self-injury.
Rimland founded the Autism Society of America (ASA), a parent advocacy organization, to “work on behalf of autistic children and their families at local, state and national levels.”[6]
1967
1967
“The Empty Fortress” by Bruno Bettelheim
The Empty Fortress: Infantile Autism and the Birth of the Self, The Free Press, New York
The Empty Fortress (1967), contains a complex and detailed explanation of this dynamic in psychoanalytical and psychological terms. These views were disputed at the time by mothers of autistic children and by researchers
In a 1997 review of two books on Bettelheim, Molly Finn wrote:
“I am the mother of an autistic daughter, and have considered Bettelheim a charlatan since The Empty Fortress, his celebrated study of autism, came out in 1967.
“I have nothing personal against Bettelheim, if it is not personal to resent being compared to a devouring witch, an infanticidal king, and an SS guard in a concentration camp, or to wonder what could be the basis of Bettelheim’s statement that ‘the precipitating factor in infantile autism is the parent’s wish that his child should not exist.’”
1967
Autism Research Institute (ARI) launched by Bernard Rimland
Bernard Rimland left the ASA to established the Autism Research Institute (ARI), a San Diego-based non-profit organization dedicated to researching and collecting data on autism and related disorders.
Rimland supported Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA), a systematic educational approach made popular by Ivar Lovaas.
He also published an ARI newsletter, which reached an international audience.
Rimland was also the editor of the Autism Research Review International, published by ARI, which covered biomedical and educational advances in autism research.
1968
1968
Researchers at the University of Kansas to start the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis (JABA).
Notable graduate students from the University of Washington include Robert Wahler, James Sherman, and Ivar Lovaas. Lovaas established the UCLA Young Autism Project while teaching at the University of California, Los Angeles.
1970s
1970s
Bettelheim appeared on the Dick Cavett show
Bettelheim appeared ton the Dick Cavett show several times to talk about his theories on autism and psychoanalysis. It’s argued that such appearances shielded Bettleheim’s unethical behavior from scruntiny. After his death, Bettleheim’s work was debunked.
Video shows clips of the Dick Cavett show when Bettleheim was a guest.
1975
1975
Efficacy Research Institute launched.*
Founders: Vincent Strully, Dudley Orr, John Pangburn
* Changes name in 1986 to New England Center for Autism
International Badass Activists 