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The premise of this book is that autistic children are not reducible to their brains or neurochemistry on the biological level, nor to their behavior. Rather, the authors in the book argue, and seek to demonstrate, that autistic children have personalities, like all human beings, and that their treatment requires work with their personalities, dealing with them as persons. Beyond recognizing that children vary in the severity of their autism, the editors and contributors conceive of most, if not all, of the children they work with as having a nonautistic, as well as an autistic, part of their personalities. The etiological point of view that links the contributors to this volume is that autistic children experience physical and psychological separation from their mothers as a catastrophic rupture (Bick 1968). This experience may well reflect a biologically based deficit in the ability to filter out stimuli, and to regulate arousal, so that the experience of physical and psychological birth entails being overwhelmed by chaos. Other people being particularly unpredictable and overstimulating, autistic children turn away from the human world in favor of the more predictable world of inanimate objects. Frances Tustin (1990) had provided a framework for thinking about autistic experience with her discussion of the “protective shell” constituted by “sensation dominated subjective shapes” (p. 18). Absorbed in a world of sensations, the child with autism presents to the clinician with a greater or lesser degree of unrelatedness to the human world and the verbal and nonverbal modes of communication that link people together. This way of being in the world purchases stability and manageability at the expense of the joy and pain of human interaction.