Douglas Edwards 
I'm still reading through Steve #Silberman's #NeuroTribes. I'm currently nearing the end of the longest chapter, "Fighting the monster", of which the latter part is largely about Ole Ivar #Lovaas and the origins of #ABA. It makes for harrowing reading. Samples:
#Lovaas: "You see, you start pretty much from scratch when you work with an autistic child. You have a person in the physical sense — they have hair, a nose, and a mouth — but they are not people in the psychological sense. One way to look at the job of helping autistic kids is to see it as a matter of constructing a person. You have the raw materials, but you have to build the person."
#Lovaas describing an occasion on which he dealt with a self-injuring autistic girl: "I reached over and cracked her one right on the rear ... I noticed she had stopped hitting herself. I felt guilty, but I felt great. Then she hit herself again, and I really laid it on her ... So I let her know that there was no question in my mind that I was going to kill her if she hit herself once more, and that was pretty much it. She hit herself a few times more, but we had the problem licked."
#Silberman as narrator: 'In a subsequent round of trials, instead of the electrified floor, Lovaas employed a remote-controlled device called a Lee-Lectronic Trainer — a box the size of a cigarette pack used in canine obedience tests — affixed to the boys' buttocks.
...
Lovaas put Mike and Marty on a strict behaviorist diet: no food at all, seven days a week, but the token scraps earned by their acquiring the ability to perform a complex social task while pressing a bar to avoid shock. Water deprivation was also stringently enforced, though he noted that, "to avoid dehydration," water was available to the boys "ad libidinum" after six p.m. each day.'
There is much more, but this is quite enough to provide an idea of how the research on which #ABA is based, carried out by its founder, was conducted.
It is a scandal that #ABA is not UNIVERSALLY condemned by both the theoretical and the clinical wings of autism psychology.
THINKING PERSON'S GUIDE TO AUTISM
Zia Cobalt, All Skulls Herself