Prologue

The theme of autism, once a remote entity associated with mental retardation, has captured the attention and imagination of infant-development researchers and clinicians in recent times. It has now come to have meaning in its own right for psychoanalytic study and treatment. Even more importantly, however, it demonstrates exaggerations as well as departures from more general primitive mental states that reveal significant parallels for higher order conditions. Frances Tustin, one of our contributors, for instance, speaks of “autistic enclaves in neurotic patients.”

We are privileged in this issue in having at our disposal an autobiographical account of secondary autism by an adult clinical psychologist, Ellen Stockdale, who generously shares with us what it has been like to be so different and how she viewed the world. (Dr. Andrea Moscowitz [personal communication] tells me that another autobiographical account of an autistic patient tallies in many ways with Ellen Stockdale's [see Grandin & Scariano, 1986].)

The Stockdale report was submitted to an international roster of psychoanalysts who are known for their interest in autism and their contributions to the literature on the subject. Their discussions of the report constitute the remainder of this issue of Psychoanalytic Inquiry.

The forerunners of the field of infant psychiatry that was ultimately to include autism took the form of such infant distress syndromes as “marasmus” (Spitz, 1945), infants with “unusual