The Elusive Etiology of Autism: Nature and Nurture?

develop autism, but also affected by parenting behavior. In his original 1943 paper, he stated that they “come into the world with innate inability to form the usual, biologically provided affective contact with people”, while he questioned “whether or to what extent [parenting behaviors and characteristics] contributed to the condition of the children” (Kanner, 1943). Based on his observations of the families of children with autism, he later suggested that autism may be caused by a “genuine lack of maternal warmth” (Kanner, 1949). However, this idea was directly confronted by a psychologist named Bernard Rimland (who was also the parent of an ASD child) in his book, “Infantile Autism: The Syndrome and its Implications for a Neural Theory of Behavior” (Rimland, 1964). Herein he proposed a purely biological mechanism for the etiology of autism.