ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by discussing some of the events and themes that particularly stand out in the mind after a reading of Gunilla Gerland's book. It considers how her account is illuminated by what has been learned through psychoanalytic psychotherapy with people on the autistic spectrum, and also how it adds to this. Gerland describes an achingly lonely childhood in which she felt cut off from everyone except for her elder sister, Kerstin. Kerstin, she felt, genuinely liked her as she was—she knew how to make up games that they both enjoyed, in spite of Gunilla's very limited understanding of cooperative pretend play. The behaviour of Gerland's parents raises the whole embattled issue of psychotherapy for autistic spectrum disorders and of psychotherapists' supposed tendency to blame parents. Gerland was hypersensitive to other people's emotions, which she apprehended in terms of an idiosyncratic colour system, much like the borderline adults treated by the psychoanalyst Henri Rey.
