This book is intended for all those who struggle with Asperger syndrome in their everyday life. They are many. They range from the people with the diagnosis, and their near and dear, through clinicians faced with the problems of understanding, investigating and intervening in ‘a disorder’ that they heard little about during their education, but read about in the newspapers and magazines almost on a weekly basis.

Asperger syndrome achieved its status as a specific diagnostic entity about 20 years ago. It was only after the death of the Austrian paediatrician Hans Asperger, that ‘his’ syndrome received widespread recognition outside central Europe. In 1981, Lorna Wing, a British autism expert, published a paper in which she coined the term ‘Asperger's syndrome’. Asperger himself had referred to the condition as ‘autistic psychopathy’, which would probably best translate as ‘autistic personality disorder’ in present-day terminology. His first paper on the syndrome appeared in 1944, only months after Leo Kanner published his first report on ‘early infantile autism’. Almost 20 years before Asperger, the Russian scientific assistant in neurology Ewa Ssucharewa, wrote a paper in which she referred to ‘schizoid psychopathy’ (personality disorder) in children. It seems clear that she was describing the same condition that Asperger called ‘autistic personality disorder’. Nevertheless, it is Asperger's name that is now attached to the constellation of symptoms/personality traits that are at the core of the present volume.