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The authors of this extraordinarily beautiful book have set out to explore, describe and conceptualise certain features which they take to be discernible in the complex and well-nigh incomprehensible illness of autism. They have recorded in great detail in four psycho-analytical case studies their observations, their counter-transference, their bewilderment, and their gradual attempts to formulate and reformulate the mysterious phenomena of the mental life of these absorbing children. Confusion, lapses in transference, randomness, and in particular, meaninglessness of behaviour are only some of the problems they approached by the psycho-analytical method, which almost by definition involves an assumption of and search for meaning. Yet through an examination of the minutest details of the behaviour of these children, of sequences and repetitions, of emotion in the transference, and surprisingly, of interruptions in the transference, they have managed to locate and elucidate certain clearly defined phenomena, above all, the meaninglessness itself.
They have gone equipped with the theories of Melanie Klein and W.R. Bion, but appear to have enlarged these theories where the facts did not fit them. They do not make therapeutic claims, although all four children seem to have improved to a marked degree under the treatment. Nor do they claim to have made etiological discoveries, although some hypotheses are advanced as to possible predisposing personality factors and as to possible environmental failure of a particular kind at the period of maximum dependence in the first month of life.
These are rather by the way, however. The book is much more concerned with exploring the mental life of autistic children, and it does this with rich and illuminating precision. The main thesis of the early theoretical chapters, written by the editor, D. Meltzer, is that a particular state of mind which he terms the Autistic State Proper, can be differentiated from other types of mental funct