You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
It has long been my hope that Kleinian psychoanalysts would investigate autism. In 1955 Rodrigue published a pioneering paper and promised more, but nothing has appeared until now—twenty years later. It was therefore with high expectations that I approached this volume.
Autistic children stir people with a mixture of feelings that are difficult to contain, and this makes it necessary, when entering into a therapeutic relation with them, to include the affect produced. Kleinians, it seemed to me, would have the capacity through their imaginative insights, their disciplined theory and their views on the part played by counter transference, to organise and communicate with these children in a unique way. Their openness to unconscious influence, the despair of those who follow the perversely objective approach, would be likely to produce innovative information. I was not disappointed.
In this book there is a wealth of clinical material with detailed accounts of single interviews combined with summaries of longer periods of therapy, Thus one can get a good impression of autism itself, of post-autistic states, and of the impact which the cases