Autism is biological: that's the one thing everyone agrees about it. Scientific orthodoxy is that it's a neurodevelopmental condition caused by genetics, in most cases, and by environmental insult, such fetal exposure to anticonvulsants, in rare cases. Jenny McCarthy orthodoxy is that "toxins" - usually in vaccines - are to blame, not genes, and that the underlying damage might be in the gut not the brain: but they agree that it's biological.
However, it hasn't always been this way. From the 1950s to about the 1980s, there was a widespread view that autism was a purely psychological condition. Bruno Bettelheim is the name most often linked to this view. Bettelheim spent most of his career at the University of Chicago's Orthogenic School, an institution for "disturbed" children, including autistics as well as "schizophrenic" and others.
His magnum opus was his book The Empty Fortress: Infantile Autism and the Birth of ...
