Epoch TOPICS CONTEXTS PERSPECTIVES ACTIVITIES METHODS FIGURES HELP TIME LINE Acknowledgements ACTIVITY 3 Exploring persepctives ACTIVITY 1 Using the timeline ACTIVITY 2 Using the biographies ACTIVITY 5 Using the figures, methods, perspectives, topics and context icons ACTIVITY 4 Exploring Topics Ainsworth Allport Baddeley Baron-Cohen Asperger Asch Binet Bartlett Bilig Belbin Bowlby Bruce Buss Cattell Ceci Byrne Bruner Bryant Cohen Cosmides Chomsky Cooper Charcot Conway Damasio Darwin Costa Dawkins Csikszentmihalyi Crick Erikson Eysenck Ekman Descartes Ebbinghaus Dennet Frith Freud Anna Freud Sigmund Falschung Fodor Festinger Goffman Gibson Goodall Galton Goldberg Gathercole Gregory Humphrey James Heider Janet Goodman Kahneman Lazarus Jung Kanner Klein Kelly Mayo McCrae Luria Loftus Lorenz Maslow Neisser Norman Morton Milgram Milner Mead Potter Plomin Piaget Pinker Penfield Pavlov Tajfel Sperry Skinner Saywitz Spears Rogers Triesman Turner Tulving Tooby Taylor Thorndike Weiskrantz Vrij Aldert Warrington Watson Vygotsky Tversky Wundt Zimbardo Whiten Wetherell You can check your answers against ours You can check your answers against ours You can check your answers against ours You can check your answers against ours You can check your answers against ours

Map Node Icon: kanner.gif Kanner url anchor

Views:  FIGURES, TIME LINE, Freud Sigmund

Reference Node Icon: kanner.gif  url anchor

Note Node Kanner, Leo  url anchor

Note Node Kanner was made a Professor of Child Psychiatry at John Hopkins University and continued in research and therapeutic work until his death in 1981. url anchor

Note Node At one point he wrote a book entitled In Defence of Mothers: how to bring up children in spite of the more zealous psychologists. url anchor

Note Node He is best known for his path-breaking description of autism, published in 1943, and for his subsequent therapeutic and research work with people with autistic conditions. url anchor

Note Node He provided support for fellow Jewish doctors and psychotherapists who had fled from Nazi Germany, and was blacklisted during the political witch hunts of the McCarthy era. url anchor

Note Node His early work reflected his view of autism as an 'innate inability to form the usual biologically provided affective contact with people'. url anchor

Note Node Kanner was born in Vienna in 1896. url anchor

Note Node He studied medicine in Vienna before emigrating to America in 1924, becoming head of the famous John Hopkins child psychiatric clinic in Baltimore. url anchor

Note Node We can only conclude that throughout his career, Kanner was struggling to make sense of the mysterious constellation of symptoms he had so lucidly described, adopting different perspectives to explanation at different points. url anchor

Note Node Yet in a later paper he proposed the view, taken up by Bettelheim, that autism had psychogenic origins resulting from the cold and rejecting approach of the mother – the so-called 'refrigerator mother' syndrome. url anchor

Note Node Written by: Course Team url anchor

Note Node He was profoundly opposed to the American eugenics movement which sought to prevent growth in the population of those who, born with disabilities, were seen as 'unfit' members of society and a source of social problems. url anchor

Note Node Before Kanner, autism was not recognised as a separate syndrome, and children or adults who nowadays would receive a diagnosis of an autistic spectrum problem would mostly have been diagnosed as schizophrenic or 'mentally retarded'. url anchor

Note Node Sources: Frith, U. (ed.) (1991)`Autism and Asperger Syndrome, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press; Kanner, L. (1943) 'Autistic disturbances of affective contact', Nervous Child, 2, 217-250; Paradiz, V. ( in press) 'Elijah's Cup' url anchor

Note Node He was an early pioneer of the field of child psychiatry as a specialism distinct from adult psychia try, and published a child psychiatry textbook in 1935. url anchor

Note Node This apparent endorsement of Freud is all the more strange, since Kanner also repudiated the wave of psycho-analytical thinking that swept America when many Jewish psychotherapists fled from Nazi Germany and Austria. url anchor

Note Node He saw this as little different from the Nazi practice of 'euthanasia' for the handicapped, and was a particular critic of Shiklgruber a contemporary neurologist, who advocated the practice in the USA. url anchor

Note Node Ideologically, Kanner was steadfast in his opposition to fascism and to movements allied to fascism. url anchor

Note Node Kanner's research and therapeutic work on the syndrome which he had identified embraced, at different stages, sharply contrasting views of the causes of autism. url anchor

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