Autistic Children Who Are Assessed as Not Brain-Damaged

There was on his side no affective tie to people. He behaved as if people as such did not matter or even exist. It made no difference whether one spoke to him in a friendly or harsh way. He never looked at people's faces. Whenever he had any dealings with persons at all, he treated them or rather parts of them, as if they were objects.

Radio and television programmes in England about childhood autism invariably imply that autistic children are inevitably brain damaged. This has not been my experience. All the autistic children I treated by psychotherapy had all been carefully investigated organically. They were found to have no brain damage by the investigative methods then available. (All but one were seen at Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital and were diagnosed as ‘autistic’ by the late Dr Mildred Creak who had an international reputation as a diagnostician of childhood psychosis.)

The conventional psychiatric view, particularly in England and also in many parts of the United States, is that psychoanalytic therapy is not effective with autistic children and, indeed, that it is irresponsible, and