ABSTRACT
As a psychotherapist, those children whose autism seems likely to be psychogenic in origin have been the focus on attention. Such children seem to be in a massive, unmitigated primal sulk such as was described by Blake at the head. Clinical work with psychogenic autistic children in whom no brain damage can be detected by the investigative methods at present available indicates that they developed, as infants, a massive formation of avoidance reactions in order to deal with a traumatic awareness of bodily separateness from the mother. The encapsulating reactions support and protect the damaged part and shut out the fear of being killed but, metaphorically speaking, their psychic functioning is frozen and immobilized. Encapsulating reactions mean that in an isolated area of the personality, attention has been deflected away from the objective world which presents such threats, in favour of a subjective, sensation-dominated world which is under their direct control.
