Explorations in autism: a psycho-analytical study by Donald Meltzer / John Bremner / Shirley Hoxter / Doreen

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Relevant to the mutism of autistic children but drawing its clinical material from the psycho-analytical treatment of schizophrenic and manic-depressive patients in late adolescence. No effort has been made to restrict the individual authors within an overall framework of exposition, and for this reason a certain amount of overlap will appear in the descriptions of the children and their analytic material. But in a way this is all to the good, for it not only enriches the concepts by multiplying the illustrations with small variations, but also serves to bind together the group of children being described.

Is our view of autism as a total mental state rather than a split one tenable? O n what evidence do we base this conclusion that the reversibility is something fundamentally different from the rapid shifting of; states of mind seen where splitting is 4? EXPLORATIONS IN AUTISM very severe and where the sense of identity has not been firmly anchored, as in most non-schizophrenic psychotics, or in adolescents? We did in fact start out with the assumption that we were witnessing the operation of splitting processes and only after some years came to hold this different view.

Say a few . words about the relation of the special type of obsessionality to the problem of so-called transitional objects. In later writings. Winnicott recognized the very equivocal value of these constructions: that, while-they might indeed serve economically toitide over a child's transition in its object relations, there was great danger of-the transitional object-taking on a fetishistic significance* and being used as a focus for the isolation of a perverse tendency. fact the basis for the formation of a transitional object..