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This paper is aimed at exploring the idea that parents of children on the autistic spectrum must, throughout their child's development, contend with a particular and painful paradox unique to the neurobiology of autism. This is the paradox: For no reason other than the vagaries of biology, their child has come into the world with a fundamental disability in the capacity to develop relationships, a disability that will have devastating and pervasive consequences not only for the child, but for those who love and care for him as well. These difficulties stem from a neurobiologically based inability to process social information, such as facial expressions, affects, social cues, certain elements of language, and the like (Volkmar, 2007; Volkmar et al., 2004), which in turn profoundly limit the child's capacity to make sense of or even recognize his own or others' mental states, that is, to mentalize (for reviews, see Allen, Fonagy, and Bateman, 2008; Sharp, 2006).
From the parent's perspective, the unique constraints of the child's “mindblindedness” (Baron-Cohen, 1995) make him a most challenging and disorienting social partner, one who, at least until treatment has begun to take hold, brings few of the pleasures and rewards inherent in reciprocal interaction, and who, as a function of his difficulties meeting the mind of the other, elicits feelings that are at times frightening and nearly unbearable and that cannot be processed within the relationship itself. Yet, like all children, this child needs relationships to survive, on every level. But even more than most children, this child needs his parents, in particular, to initiate him into and guide him in the world of relationships and to remain stable regulators of his experience well into adulthood. Thus, the parents of children on the spectrum must not only make sense of what at first, second, and tenth glance seems incomprehensible, but they must also do so in the absence of the palpable pleasures of r