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THIS IS THE SECOND in a series of papers reporting my current concepts about autism, symbiosis, and individuation. I am concerned, here, not only with patients suffering from schizophrenia of whatever degree of severity, but with, for example, the subtly-present autism that emerges in the course of the neurotic patient's analysis.
In the first paper, which dealt with pathologic symbiosis and autism, I mentioned that
As the months and years of the analyst's work with the autistic patient wear on, the analyst is given to feel unneeded, incompetent, useless, callous, and, essentially, non-human in relation to his so troubled and beseeching and reproachful, but so persistently autistic, patient. It is essential that the analyst be able to endure this long period—a period in which, despite perhaps abundant data from the patient, transference-interpretations are rarely feasible—in order that the patient's transference-regression can reach the early level of ego-development at which, in the patient's infancy or very early childhood, his potentialities for a healthy mother-infant symbiosis became distorted into a defensively autistic mode of ego functioning. At that level of ego-development the infant or young child had not yet come to achieve a perceptual and experiential differentiation between himself and his mother, nor between his mother and the surrounding non-human world. When in the evolution of the transference that early level of ego-functioning becomes accessible, then it is possible for therapeutically symbiotic processes to occur between patient and analyst, and be interpretable as such. … patient and analyst … experience one another and themselves in a manner analogous to that in which a healthy mother and a healthy infant are immersed, as being far more than merely human in the adult sense, but as forming confluently a whole growth-world." 5
Meanwhile, during the autistic phase of the treatment, the analyst's attempts at transference-interpretation meet wit