Infantile autism

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At age 68 i discovered i had infantile autism. This was because i was kept in a pram for the first 10 months of my life. This was in 1948 and my parents had a shop where they kept me with them because there was no such thing as childcare back in those days. And no relatives to take care of me. This earth shattering realisation came to light when i attended a seminar in Sydney Australia by Danish child psychiatrist Susan Hart in 2016. My mother had told me about the pram and her not being able to give me cuddles but i had not understood the significance of that until then. It was like bombshell dropped on me from the blue. Hart was talking about the effect of trauma on early childhood development. During a break in proceedings i went and told her about my early childhood experience. She said i would have been very badly traumatised by it and to read Bruce Perry's book about the boy brought up as a dog. Because of being confined to the pram for six days a week - roughly 240 days - i missed developmental milestones for normal emotional and motor growth. But i was OK with intellectual development because i was out of the pram by the time that was taking place. I am wondering if this is a major cause of Asperger's Syndrome that has been overlooked. I was diagnosed with that at age 60.

How did you discover this?


Back in the 1960's it was believed that autism was caused by childhood trauma, or, more specifically, by "refrigerator mothers." This idea was definitively rejected later.

Current thinking is that autism is due to inborn brain differences that are partly genetic and partly due to things that happen during pregnancy.

Childhood trauma is believed to be a possible cause of personality disorders, mood disorders, and of course PTSD, but not autism.

If you got your autism from neglect, that isn't autism. It's something else. It is possible to have autism and have issues from neglect. But I believe abuse and neglect makes it harder for doctors to diagnose autism.

Could you describe some of the symptoms you exhibit now or exhibited in the past?

I was diagnosed with "infantile autism" back around 1964-1965.

Thank you for your responses. Mona i do not buy the party line. In my own experience Katter was right. I did have a refrigerator mother who i could not bond with because she was shut down emotionally.

Last edited by outerspacenik on 01 Aug 2019, 3:30 am, edited 1 time in total.

OK. Kraftie. My symptoms. I can only deal with one thing at a time. Pressure on me to do more results in sensory overload and maybe a meltdown. I avoid being around people i don't know (even in line for confession) and prefer to be alone so i am not overstimulated. I get upset by noise like my dog constantly barking. I have auditory processing disorder so avoid speaking on phone. I am emotionally disconnected, detached from others.

Susan Hart said once fail to reach developmental milestones cannot go back. However i was assisted by viewing short videos of mothers gazing at the faces of babies which is something i would have missed out on. Susan showed about 10 at her two day seminar and some are in You Tube. I was on a high for about a week afterwards then came crashing down. I could not feel depressed if i tried.

I didn’t bond with my mother, either.....she tried hard.....but there was something within her which I really disliked.

She didn’t neglect me severely, though. My autism was inborn. Perhaps she helped confirm my predisposition towards getting autism...but she didn’t cause it.

Did you succeed in gaining independence? I did. I still have the same job I had for 39 years—but with no promotions.

Good on you Kraftie for gaining your independence. I'm still struggling to stand on my own two feet. It's like i'm still stuck in the pram. I enjoy being on my own, amusing myself and not needing or wanting others around me. Except my dog. I have a very active mind which has helped me get through life but i am definitely an under achiever.

Me too!

What do you enjoy most?

I just read in another post that Leo Kanner came up with the term 'infantile autism'. He wrote a paper about it. Will post its name and try to read it. My mother said as a baby i used to push her away when she tried to cuddle me. I was a forceps birth and that would have been traumatic. What do i like doing most? Mmm. Lots of choice. I think going for drives in my car looking at beautiful scenery. I am very visual.

Kanner published his works in the 40s and 50s.
During the 60+ years that have passed since then, a lot of research has been done and concepts of autism evolved significantly.
In particular, the "refrigerator mother" concept has been debunked. You may be autistic and have history of poor contact with your mother but the cause-effect order is most likely the opposite of Kanner's idea: being born autistic makes you more likely to have poor relationships with your parents.

How do you know that this was the cause of your autism per se, rather than a cause of additional emotional problems?

Anyhow, here is a PDF copy of Kanner's paper.

Thanx Mona and Magz. I trust my gut feel about what happened to me. I believe all knowledge about ourselves is contained in our unconscious and can be brought to the surface consciousness. Which is why i do not toe the party line when it comes to academic research. In my experience what Kanner said about autistic children needing to be held was true. But it is obviously not a cure.

You should read Hans Asperger, too.

My gut feeling that being confined to a pram for the first year does not produce autism.

But if you look to test this hypothesis, I would focus on the children put up for adoption from China.

China adopted a one child policy in the late 1970's. The one-child policy produced consequences beyond the goal of reducing population growth. Most notably, the country’s overall sex ratio became skewed toward males—roughly between 3 and 4 percent more males than females. Traditionally, male children (especially firstborn) have been preferred—particularly in rural areas—as sons inherit the family name and property and are responsible for the care of elderly parents. When most families were restricted to one child, having a girl became highly undesirable, resulting in a rise in abortions of female fetuses (made possible after ultrasound sex determination became available), increases in the number of female children who were placed in orphanages or were abandoned, and even infanticide of baby girls. (An offshoot of the preference for male children was that tens of thousands of Chinese girls were adopted by families in the United States and other countries.)

The adoption process was long and protracted and many of these infants were placed in facilities where the infants were placed in cribs and fed rice water. They received minimal interactions. They were generally not held. So by the age of one or two when they were finally adopted, they were very deficit in motor skills (many could not walk), communication skills (not talk), etc. Yet many of these children once they were adopted, learned these skills at an accelerated rate. So I would suggest these children would provide the answer to that hypothesis.