ABSTRACT
Donald Meltzer offered eloquent testimony to the complexity of autistic experience. His keen formulations remain as valuable today as when introduced in 1975. With his colleagues, Meltzer noted a number of specific features about the children with whom they worked, including the child's often high intelligence; the factor of speed; their openness to sensation; their sensitivity to the therapist's state of mind; and, a primitive permeability to the emotions of others. According to Suzanne Maiello, "Meltzer's metaphor of the dimensionality of the mind has become a ground plan with enormous creative potential. Meltzer used the concept of confusional anxiety in relationship to the capacity for thinking. Didier Houzel offers another crucial point of view: the necessity to consider the function of "orientability" and "nonorientability" as part of the challenge of the autistic child's subjective experience.
