Autism as the Defusion of Drives

The author's metapsychological view of the dismantling and adhesive identification typical of infantile autism is that these phenomena result from the fate of the death drive and the libido in a situation of thoroughgoing defusion of the drives. He notes that Freud's original idea of the defused death drive was taken up by Ferenczi and then by Klein, who applied it to the situation at the very beginning of life. A clinical illustration is given and the author observes that this view has therapeutic consequences that are also relevant to the work of an institution and to the therapists' countertransference, in terms of the value of sadism and masochism in helping to fuse the drives. Fusion of the drives is presented as an important element of Bion's alpha or container function. This conception also tends to modify the therapist's attitude to the parents of autistic children. In the author's view, the fate of the libidinal component in autism has tended to be disregarded, but accounts for the phenomena of adhesiveness and auto-sensuality; the latter should in his opinion rather be called dismantled erotism, to emphasise the absence of the unifying function of forms of auto-erotism in integration of the self. The author stresses the lack of projection in autistic pathology and discusses its possible reasons.