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The study of autism does not hold a central place in adult psychoanalytic training programmes. If you want to learn about autism and about current research into the cognitive deficits in autism, this is a good book to read. There is also information here about cognitive and emotional development in normal infants. The book covers both autistic and normal development.
Hobson is a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and experimental psychologist, and this book reports his work in experimental psychology. His research has been concerned with how autism emerges over the course of early development.
Hobson believes that ‘central to autism is an impairment in emotional aspects of interpersonal relatedness’. Something is wrong with the ability of autistic people to connect emotionally with other people. This is not a new idea. Hobson is one of a group of researchers who share a view about autistic people that they lack a ‘theory of mind’. Another way to put it is to say that autistics suffer from ‘mind blindness’. That means that autistics have trouble understanding that people have their own experience of the world, with their own thoughts, beliefs and feelings. To the extent that autistics are blind to this reality, they are socially impaired and have trouble relating to people in the rich and complex ways that non-autistic people do. Autistic people ‘don't get it’. They're ‘out of it’.
Leo Kanner, in America, identified autism as a disorder in 1943, and Hans Asperger identified a group of children with similar and milder symptoms in Germany in 1944. The idea that these children lack a theory of mind or suffer from mind blindness came much later. This work does not come from within the psychoanalytic tradition, and it all comes long after Freud's work. Much current thinking about autism is largely non-psychoanalytic.
The same is true for Hobson's work. An experiment conducted by Hobson and his colleagues was designed to see whether autistic people could match photographs of expressi