ABSTRACT
Autism is a variant of thought and its development, which is based on alpha function reversal and on projective identification on the level of the part-object. In this chapter, the author’s meeting with the autistic child in the ward at the Gemelli General Hospital, how everything that in normal personal and social relationships creates contiguity, reciprocity, arouses interest, or courtship, at first glance appears in these patients extraneous to communicative intentionality, enclosed within an unfathomable solipsism. The processes of unconscious transference that underpin the symptoms and the inhibitions of such patients are absent or manifest themselves in a limited way, and are substituted by repetitive, idiosyncratic, excited, and flat behaviours which lack emotional meaning. The flow of projective identification constitutes the physiological element of the mother-child relationship through which embryonic thoughts becomes an unconscious thought and then a conscious thought.
