ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that autistic children’s deficient capacity for and experience of personal relatedness is the cardinal feature of their disorder. It offers condensed versions of several published accounts of autistic individuals in order to illustrate both the consistency and diversity of the clinical picture. Autistic children and adults think and speak in ways that are distinctly abnormal, and perhaps abnormal in a manner that is characteristically autistic. Autistic children do appear to have specific problems with I-Thou relatedness, and with the development of an “interpersonal self’. The chapter suggests a connection with the origins of the capacity to symbolise. The central notion is that autistic children’s primary social-relational impairments place severe developmental constraints on their potential to evolve creative symbolic play. There is a considerable weight of evidence that physical factors which disrupt brain function play an important aetiological role in the causation of autism.
