championed the notion that autism was the product of mothers who were cold, distant and rejecting, thus depriving their children of the chance to "bond properly". The theory was embraced by the medical establishment and went largely unchallenged into the mid-1960s, but its effects have lingered into the 21st century. Many articles and books published in that era blamed autism on a maternal lack of affection, but by 1964, Bernard Rimland, a psychologist who had an autistic son, published a book that signaled the emergence of a counter-explanation to the established misconceptions about the causes of autism. His book, Infantile Autism: The Syndrome and its Implications for a Neural Theory of Behavior, attacked the refrigerator mother hypothesis directly. In 1969, Kanner addressed the refrigerator mother issue at the first annual meeting of what is now the Autism Society of America, stating: Leo Kanner's changing views According to the book In a Different Key: The Story of Autism (2016), Leo Kanner's original 1943 paper stated that "the child's aloneness" was evident "from the very beginning of life." Furthermore, he drew a contrast between autism and schizophrenia, in that autism was part of a child's constitution whereas schizophrenia developed later in life. This first paper drew only a handful of citations in the medical literature. The condition he described was not talked about by a single newspaper or magazine article. In addition, clinicians in other parts of the world were not confirming what Kanner had seen, so through approximately 1950, virtually all cases of autism were diagnosed by Kanner himself. Kanner engaged in lengthy conversation by mail with Louise Despert, who was a New York psychiatrist he held in high esteem. Kanner defended his theories whereas Despert maintained that he had not observed anything other than child schizophrenia. When Kanner next revised his textbook, he moved autism to the schizophrenia category although he placed it in a subheading. In a 2016 paper entitled "Correcting the Record: Leo Kanner and Autism," Drs. James Harris and Joseph Piven maintain that Kanner did not go through a middle period in which he blamed parents. Instead, Kanner was describing characteristics of the parents which would later be viewed as part of the broader autism phenotype. For example, in a 1956 paper Kanner and a co-author wrote, "If one considers the personalities of the parents who have been described as successfully autistic, the possibility suggests itself that