New perspectives in psychoanalytic psychotherapy of autism

The aim of this workshop is to present new findings about the psychological genesis of autism and the new perspectives in the psychoanalytic approach to psychotherapy of autism built on these findings that occurred during the eighteen years of psychotherapeutic work with eight autistic children. The starting point of this presentation are the leading psychoanalytic concepts of autism (Mahler, Tustin, Meltzer, Alvarez) in which autism is understood as a result of the failure of development of the early object relations and the emphasis is given to the importance of early trauma coping with the stimuli of the outside world and the failure of mothers to protect children from them. Within these concepts of autism we meet with psychotherapeutic approach in which the emphasis is on the reconstruction of these early traumatic experiences constructed within the first forms of relationship with the autistic child. In these approaches the therapeutic role is passive collection of contents that serve as the basis for interpretation and reconstruction of early traumatic experiences. In this approach, the least attention is given to the specific construction of a primary relationship with the autistic child and to the development of verbal communication that is necessary in psychoanalytic psychotherapy approach. Just through the recognition of the important role of early narcissistic development, in which the integration of early sensor-motor experiences comes to building primary narcissistic structures necessary for the development of object relations, new perspectives in understanding and psychotherapeutic approach to autism are opened. These new findings in relation to existing psychoanalytic concepts of autism make major changes in psychotherapeutic approach from the tasks of reconstruction early traumatic experience of separation in the psychotherapeutic milieu established primary relationships (traumatic psychotherapeutic model) to the construction of these primary mental structures necessary for coping with the content of separation and construction of object relations (developmental psychotherapeutic model).