ABSTRACT
The impressive progress of contemporary neurobiological science, together with the possibilities offered by brain imaging, compel us to consider autism a fundamentally a multi-factorial neurobiological disorder. This chapter rediscovers the many insights provided by a psychoanalytic approach, and to make the techniques of conditioned learning less robotic. The real problem is that contemporary leadership of the cognitive–behavioral approach has completely dismissed and tried to discredit the psychoanalytic results of psychotherapy with autistic children. In "The a-symbolic nature of autistic states" Tustin insisted on the difficulty or impossibility of representation for the autistic child. The notion that the a-symbolic nature of autistic states is at the core of the child's cognitive, linguistic, and metaphorical inabilities is a challenge to the analyst. It implies that, in order to pull the autistic child away from his a-symbolic world towards proto-symbolic communication, he must employ the rudiments of what makes him human: symbolic communication.
