ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the use of physical mirrors by children on the autistic spectrum, whose sense of identity is often so rudimentary and fragile and whose bodily existential anxieties and experience of physical fragmentation can be so extreme. It considers a number of ways in which children with autism relate to the physical mirror. These vary in respect of the child's representational capacities; they also vary in respect of the child's implicit conception of a primitive parental couple. Donald W. Winnicott emphasised that "the actual mirror has significance mainly in its figurative sense". One of the key points to emerge from Winnicott's paper is that looking in the mirror can be object-related, rather than narcissistic. An extensive experimental literature exists on the capacity of both normally developing children and children with autism to recognise themselves in the mirror.
