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.