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IAM GLAD AND HONORED TO PRESENT AT THIS CONFERENCE ABOUT taming wild things in the lives of therapists and children. My paper is about using the power of the relationship to tame wild things in an autistic child, in a treatment lasting from early childhood to adult motherhood and beyond. The case I will describe is very old. It began at a time when autism and child psychoses were not treated with medication or behavioral interventions. It is important to remember that when this treatment began, autism was not in the limelight of attention. Mental health professionals considered it a rather rare illness, and often mothers were unfairly blamed for their child's problems.
I was fortunate to have the opportunity to work with a highly gifted autistic little girl and her family, whose treatment was based on a model that relied entirely on the power of the relationship. Margaret Mahler, who had started a nursery school for disturbed children at the Master's Children center in the early 1950s, had found then that autistic children were not amenable to treatment in a nursery school setting. They clung instead to one teacher, and did not pay attention to their mothers' comings and goings. The mothers, in turn, suffered from the feeling that their children were not uniquely attached to them, and often fled the room in a state of helplessness. Mothers who were perplexed by their children's problems
tended to want to escape because of their feelings of helplessness and loss – it was hard to be with their children who did not provide the pleasure and rewards that the mothers needed to be able to take care of them. Mahler's observations led eventually to the tripartite treatment design, in which one therapist saw mother and child together. At the same time, the children were not seen in a group because they were not capable of relating in a group setting. Mahler thought that the main task of treatment at the beginning had to be the establishment of a very close, tha