ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the psychoanalytic treatment of a boy with psychogenic autism whose beginning development was shut down due to extreme parental neglect, resulting in a picture of classic autism diagnosed at 20 months. The patient's reliance on autistic objects to forestall terrors of atomizing or falling into a black hole of nonexistence makes such objects addictive and therefore relinquishing these may be felt as horrifying. Autistic protections, therefore, suffocate further psychic development: the mollusk-like shell that is formed insures a minimal level of survival from the shock of premature separateness. The autistic child is thus faced with an impossible dilemma: to live without an adequate skin boundary that leaves him vulnerable to the onslaught of an overwhelming sensory implosion or, on the other hand, to be shielded in an impregnable carapace. In both situations, the "semi-transparent envelope" of which Virginia Woolf spoke is absent and there is no dialogue between inner experience and the outer world.
