Recent news reports have stated the government's intention to discover the cause of autism shortly. Which, I predict, won't happen! The origin of autism has long been known and ignored for reasons that lie deep within the unconscious. Autism arises in a child who has experienced severely deficient, not merely imperfect, parenting during their earliest years.
Infants are perceptive so, sensing this, they try to become independent which is why these children often appear precocious. When this attempt fails as it must, the child protectively creates and enters a world of their own, one which may be described as the autistic protective shell.
A recent study in Australia found that when the parents of infants who were diagnosed as autistic were provided intensive parent education and counseling, most of the children were no longer diagnosed as autistic by four years of age. This knowledge is resisted because of the unwarranted parental guilt it would arouse. This, even though children are not born with parenting instructions and all adults had their own childhood issues to deal with. Incidentally, autism is vastly misdiagnosed and children with mild autistic symptoms can have them vanish after brief play psychotherapy.