......The outstanding, "pathognomonic," fundamental disorder is the children's inability to relate themselves in the ordinary way to people and situations from the beginning of life. Their parents referred to them as having always been:
“self-sufficient"; "like in a shell"; "happiest when left alone"; "acting as if people weren't there"; "perfectly oblivious to everything about him"; "giving the impression of silent wisdom"; "failing to develop the usual amount of social awareness" ; "acting almost as if hypnotized."
It is therefore highly significant that almost all mothers of our patients recalled their astonishment at the children's failure to assume at any time an anticipatory posture preparatory to being picked up.
Eight of the eleven children acquired the ability to speak either at the usual age/or after some delay. Three (Richard, Herbert, Virginia) have so far remained "mute." In none of the eight "speaking" children has language over a period of years served to convey meaning to others.
Almost all the parents reported, usually with much pride, that the children had learned at an early age to repeat an inordinate number of nursery rhymes, prayers, lists of animals, the roster of presidents, the alphabet forward and backward, even foreign-language (French) lullabies.
Thus, from the start, language—which the children did not use for the purpose of communication—was deflected in a considerable measure to a self-sufficient, semantically and conversationally valueless or grossly distorted memory exercise.
It is difficult to know for certain whether the stuffing as such has contributed essentially to the course of the psychopathological condition. But it is also difficult to imagine that it did not cut deeply into the development of language as a tool for receiving and imparting meaningful messages.
"Yes" is a concept that it takes the children many years to acquire. They are incapable of using it as a general symbol of assent.
The same type of literalness exists also with regard to prepositions. Apparently the meaning of a word becomes inflexible and cannot be used with any but the originally acquired connotation.
Personal pronouns are repeated just as heard, with no change to suit the altered situation.
The repetition "Are you ready for your dessert?" means that the child is ready for his dessert.
The pronominal fixation remains until about the sixth year of life, when the child gradually learns to speak of himself in the first person, and of the individual addressed in the second person. In the transitional period, he sometimes still reverts to the earlier form or at times refers to himself in the third person.
Our patients, reversely, anxious to keep the outside world away, indicated this by the refusal of food. One child had to be tube-fed until 1 year of age. Most of them, after an unsuccessful struggle, constantly interfered with, finally gave up the struggle and of a sudden began eating satisfactorily.
Another intrusion comes from loud noises and moving objects, which are therefore reacted to with horror. Yet it is not the noise or motion itself that is dreaded. The disturbance comes from the noise or motion that intrudes itself, or threatens to intrude itself, upon the child's aloneness.
The child himself can happily make as great a noise as any that he dreads and move objects about to his heart's desire.
There is a marked limitation in the variety of his spontaneous activities. The child's behavior is governed by an anxiously obsessive desire for the maintenance of sameness that nobody but the child himself may disrupt on rare occasions.
Changes of routine, of furniture arrangement, of a pattern, of the order in which everyday acts are carried out, can drive him to despair.
Once blocks, beads, sticks have been put together in a certain way, they are always regrouped in exactly the same way, even though there was no definite design. After the lapse of several days, a multitude of blocks could be rearranged in precisely the same unorganized pattern, with the same color of each block turned up, with each picture or letter on the upper surface of each block facing in the same direction as before.
This insistence on sameness led several of the children to become greatly disturbed upon the sight of-anything broken or incomplete.
A great part of the day was spent in demanding not only the sameness of the wording of a request but also the sameness of the sequence of events.
It was impossible to return from a walk without having covered the same ground as had been covered before.
Objects that do not change their appearance and position, that retain their sameness and never threaten to interfere with the child's aloneness, are readily accepted by the autistic child.
Two patients began in the second year of life to spin everything that could be possibly spun.
The children sensed and exercised the same power over their own bodies by rolling and other rhythmic movements.
Every one of the children, upon entering the doctor’s office, immediately went after blocks, toys, or other objects, without paying the least attention to the persons present.
The father or mother or both may have been away for an hour or a month; at their homecoming, there is no indication that the child has been even aware of their absence.
After many outbursts of frustration, he gradually and reluctantly learns to compromise when he finds no way out, obeys certain orders, complies in matters of daily routine, but always strictly insists on the observance of his rituals.
There is a far better relationship with pictures of people than with people themselves. Pictures, after all, cannot interfere.
The astounding vocabulary of the speaking children, the excellent memory for events of several years before, the phenomenal rote memory for poems and names, and the precise recollection of complex patterns and sequences, bespeak good intelligence in the sense in which this word commonly used.
They all come of highly intelligent families. All but three of the families are represented either in Who's Who in America or in American Men of Science, or in both.
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