Epilogue: The Interpersonal World of the Autistic Infant: An Interdisciplinary View

These five articles – representing an array of disciplines including phenomenology, affective neuroscience, infant research, and clinical psychoanalysis – are remarkable in their breadth and scope. All focus on embodied, relational, and enactive dimensions of interpersonal relatedness in autistic development. Taken together, they confirm the relevance of Stern and Trevarthen’s emphasis on the centrality of movement, agency, and temporal dynamics in the elaboration of the autistic infant’s interpersonal world. Although he did not make autism a research focus in his lifetime, Stern’s work, especially on forms of dynamic vitality, has clearly gained posthumous value as an important bridging construct linking impairment in sensory-motor function to the affective and cognitive phenotype peculiar to ASD. Likewise, a growing body of research into the nature of motor disruption in ASD and its impact on primary intersubjectivity attests to the importance of Trevarthen’s conceptualization of sensory-motor intentionality as the ground of the Core Self. The sense of self, as Stern (1985) broadly defines it, is fundamentally enactive – grounded in sensorimotor perception-action loops that recursively refine the infant’s capacity to predict “invariants” or perceptual regularities in its experience. As Muratori and Apicella and others illustrate, this is an apposite frame of reference for empathizing with autistic self-experience where innate sensory-motor disturbances create particular challenges to motor timing, amodal perception, and bodily attunement to the self and others. From an enactivist perspective, we can appreciate that autistic challenges with self-synchrony – with experiencing and using the bodily self as an integrated unit, contributes both to characteristic autistic compensations – and presents unique challenges to sustaining interactional synchrony. All contributions – but especially the first four non-clinical articles – explore the implications of this perspecti