It is a neologism constituted from the components of the Greek autós (αὐτός), interpreted as ‘oneself’, ‘by oneself’, whose etymological reconstruction according to Beekes is traced to the Proto-Indo-European *h₂ew, meaning ‘back’ or ‘away from’, combined with *to-, serving a demonstrative function, and the suffix -ismós (-ισμός), proceeding from the Latin -ismus, which forms abstract nouns denoting a tendency, doctrine, or condition. In this manner, the etymological composition conveys the idea of a condition oriented toward oneself, a withdrawal into one’s own being.

The term was coined in 1911 by the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler (1857–1939), who at the time served as director of the Burghölzli Hospital in Zurich, in his seminal work Dementia Praecox oder Gruppe der Schizophrenien (Dementia Praecox, or the Group of Schizophrenias), published by Deuticke in Leipzig. Bleuler originally conceived it to describe one of the fundamental symptoms of schizophrenia, establishing the celebrated ‘four A’s’: association, affectivity, ambivalence, and autism, identifying in the latter the detachment from external reality and the patient’s retreat into an internal world of fantasies and delusions. It should be noted that Bleuler had already introduced the term schizophrenia in a lecture in Berlin in April 1908, replacing the concept of dementia praecox put forth by Emil Kraepelin (1856–1926). Subsequently, in 1913, Bleuler would further elaborate the concept in his article “Autistic Thinking,” published in The American Journal of Insanity.

However, the meaning that prevails today differs considerably from Bleuler’s original conception. In 1943, the Austrian psychiatrist Leo Kanner (1894–1981), established at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, published in the journal Nervous Child the foundational article entitled Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact, presenting the case histories of eleven children who exhibited common characteristics: a profound lack of affective contact with other people, an obsessive desire to maintain environmental sameness, and notable peculiarities in language, naming the condition early infantile autism. In a parallel and independent manner, in 1944, the Viennese pediatrician Hans Asperger (1906–1980) published similar observations under the denomination of autistic psychopathy, referring to his patients as ‘little professors.’

It must be noted that previously, in 1925, the Soviet child psychiatrist Grunia Sujareva had published the first detailed description of symptoms associated with this condition, a work that regrettably fell into oblivion for decades and constitutes a legitimate precedent that history tends to marginalize.

The path toward the current conceptualization was long and tortuous. During the 1950s and 1960s, psychodynamic theories dominated the debate, fueling the devastating ‘refrigerator mother’ hypothesis, advanced by Bruno Bettelheim (1903–1990), which attributed autism to the emotional coldness of the parents, a stance that caused incalculable damage to families. It was in the 1970s, through the work of Michael Rutter and of Ritvo and Freeman, that autism was definitively separated from schizophrenia. In 1979, Lorna Wing and Judith Gould introduced the notion of a spectrum, a concept that would eventually be consolidated with the publication of the DSM-5 in 2013, unifying the variants under the designation of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD).

In current times, autism is understood as a neurodevelopmental condition, not a disease, recognizing that the etymological meaning of ‘enclosing oneself within’ does not reflect the reality of many individuals on the spectrum, who are sociable and wish to engage with the world around them.

Among the words associated with the root autós, one may highlight: autonomy (from the Greek autonomía, αὐτονομία, combining autós and nómos, for ‘law’), autocracy (given in the Greek autokratía, αὐτοκρατία, combining autós and krátos, for ‘power’), automaton (observed in the Greek autómatos, αὐτόματος), autodidact (from the Greek autodídaktos, αὐτοδίδακτος), and autochthonous (from the Greek autókhthōn, αὐτόχθων). The suffix -ism, in turn, is observed in compositions such as stoicism (from the Greek stoïkismós), ostracism (from the Greek ostrakismós), or metabolism (from the Greek metabolismós).