Autistic children present a special problem for child psychotherapists trained in psychoanalytic play technique, in that they do not play. The main impediments to play come from such

children's use of autistic objects and autistic shapes. They are both reactions to deal with a catastrophic awareness of bodily separateness from the suckling mother. In treatment, psychogenic autistic children have to go through elemental processes of mourning for this loss, mourning which has been suppressed. The deleterious effects of this suppression upon such children's capacity for empathic identification with other people, for imaginative activity, for symbol formation, and for the processing of experience through play are discussed.