Chapter 11 On the Concept of an Autistic-Contiguous Position

The exchange of ideas constituting the British psychoanalytic discourse of the 1930s to the early 1970s revolved in large part around the work of Klein, Winnicott, Fairbairn, and Bion. Each of these analysts provided the context for, as well as a counterpoint in relation to which, the others generated their ideas. The history of the development of British object-relations theory of the last twenty years can be viewed as containing the beginnings of an exploration of an area of experience that lies outside of the states of being addressed by Klein's (1958) concepts of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, by Fairbairn's (1944) conception of the internal object world, by Bion's (1962b) conception of projective identification as a primitive form of defense, communication and containment, or by Winnicott's (1971) conception of the evolution of the mother-infant relationship and the elaboration of transitional phenomena.

The clinical and theoretical work of Esther Bick (1968, 1986), Donald Meltzer (1975; Meltzer . 1975), and Frances Tustin (1972a, 1980, 1981, 1984b, 1986a), developed in the context of their clinical work with autistic children, has served to define a heretofore insufficiently understood dimension of all human experience (more primitive than the paranoid-schizoid position) that I will refer to as the autistic-contiguous position. The present paper represents a synthesis, interpretation, and extension of the work of these analytic thinkers. (A partial listing of other important contributors to this area of investigation includes Anthony (1958), Anzieu (1970), Bion (1962b), Bower (1977), Brazelton (1981), Eimas (1975), Fordham , E. Gaddini , R. Gaddini , Kanner , S. Klein , Mahler and Furer , Milner , D. Rosenfeld , Sander , Spitz , Stern , Trevarthan and Winnicott .)

In a previous paper (Ogden 1988), I have termed the psychological organization generati