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Ellen Stockdale's autism became apparent when she was in her twenties. I wish to relate what she said about the onset of her autistic breakdown to what I have learned from psychotherapy with Kanner-type autistic children whose overall autism had been apparent from early infancy, often from birth. Ellen's autism had been associated with a split-off part of her personality that she characterized as “Red”. The “Ellen” part of her seems to have been what Winnicott (1958) has called “a caretaker self”. This “caretaker self” had enabled her, as she says, “to pass through the system” in a state of being “withdrawn, painfully shy, and lacking in confidence.” It was only when a series of events broke through this fragile façade that her autism was exposed.
Stockdale calls it “secondary autism.” The hypothesis of pathological autism being a regression to an early infantile stage of normal autism had been propagated by Mahler (1958) who, like myself (1991), abandoned it as infant observations by such workers as Stern (1985), Trevarthen (1979), and Miller et al. (1989) made the idea of normal autism in earliest infancy untenable. Grotstein's (1980) formulation of a “dual track” in early infancy in which undifferentiated states alternate with more differentiated ongoing ones is an attempt to incorporate these new findings concerning early infancy into our scheme of understanding.