Although psychotic states of childhood constitute only a small percentage of children's psychiatric and behavior disorders, there is an impressionistic consensus among pediatricians and child psychiatrists that there has been a significant increase of these conditions in clinical practice. Early valuable observational studies by Potter,1 Bradley,2 Kanner,3 Rank,4 and Putnam,5 and Bender and her group6 called attention to the autistic psychoses of childhood. In these reports there was a lack of consensus about etiological factors.Initially, the formulations from these early studies led to a polarization of opinion about etiological factors with the extreme poles of biological (nature) and experiential (nurture) factors being well represented.
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