Autistic Breathing

The history of many autistic children shows a severe disruption occurring around the time of birth. This may take the form of actual physical difficulties at birth that the child has not been able to recover from; of depression in the mother; of hostility aroused in the parents by the particular child or what it represents (which may include their lack of permission from their own internal objects to have a healthy child); or of damage of various kinds to the child which serves to traumatize the parents so that they are not able to attend to the child they have. It can seem as though the family had been literally ‘winded’ by the arrival of this particular baby. (Of course, not all autistic children's history shows this particular pattern: the autism may be the reaction to a later trauma in which it seemed that the child's own destructiveness had been actualized in external reality. Such a case has been described by Velleda Cecchi (Cecchi, 1990), although even here the trauma of political events was preceded by depression on the part of the child's mother.) In Frances Tustin's terms, the child has experienced psychological — and sometimes physical — birth as a catastrophe (Tustin, 1992: 96ff.).

I wish to discuss material from two autistic children which relates to the two major physical changes undergone at birth, that is, to the cutting of the cord and the onset of breathing. One of these children was reported to have had difficulties in beginning to breathe, although not sufficiently dramatic ones to have left a clear memory in his parents’ minds. No physical distress at birth was reported in the other's case, but his parents had been given cause to worry about his development in utero