The First Autism: From Kanner’s Definition to the DSM-IV

1. Autism before autism 2. The ‘discovery’ of autism 3. Criticism of classical psychoanalysis 4. Autism in other cultures This chapter introduces autism in its classical definition, the one that goes from the definition proposed by Leo Kanner to the DSM-IV. The first chapter has its natural extension and continuation in Chapters 7 , 8 and 12 . In this sense, this is the suggested reading path for those who are more interested in an exclusively socio-historical reconstruction. The definition and distinction between first and second autism is borrowed from Bonnie Evans who introduced it in 2013.