The aetiology of childhood autism: a criticism of the Tinbergens' theory: a rejoinder

Extract

The Editor has kindly offered us space for replying to the paper by Wing and Ricks, in which they reject, and advise their readers to discard, our views on early childhood autism. Rather than using this space for a ‘counter refutation’ we prefer to call attention in this journal to what, after careful study of Wing's and Ricks' criticism, we still consider a potentially fruitful approach to the problems posed by the autistic deviation. We take this course because we feel that our critics have missed the point of our publications. As we see it, the disagreement is not so much a matter of facts per se as one of how to look at the problems. The primary aim of what we have written (as was indicated, for instance, in the subtitle of our joint paper of 1972) has been to sketch a method of approach, to illustrate its potential, and to advocate the application of this approach in child psychiatry. The method has been developed in studies of animal behaviour, where it has led lo valuable insights. But we have not simply extrapolated the results of animal studies. We have looked at certain details in the behaviour of the children themselves. When we applied this ‘ethological’ approach to autistic behaviour, we arrived at certain, naturally tentative conclusions which seemed, and still seem to us, to have the merit of being plausible interpretations of quite a number of hitherto puzzling parts of the syndrome.