ABSTRACT
This chapter considers some of the ways in which systematic research has furthered understanding of autistic children’s abnormalities in personal relatedness. It wants to consider studies of autistic children who are well past infancy, but in whom it is possible to investigate a level of psychological functioning that would correspond with infant-style relatedness in normal individuals. The chapter discusses the infant-level modes of relatedness and relationship, and then shift the focus on to matters of social perception and finally on to the development of self. It defers the treatment of more explicit forms of interpersonal understanding, including the distinction between self and other as expressed in personal pronoun usage. The chapter illustrates how research workers have extended and refined this early work, in an attempt to specify more precisely what is present as well as what is absent or abnormal in the social relations of autistic children and adolescents.
