ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the clinical process in the early psychoanalytic treatment of autistic children. In what from McLuhan on is known as the Age of Media, people inhabit a global sociocultural milieu where, holds his heir Neil Postman, media impact sets the model for the life-world. Frances Tustin noted that to autistic children their body flows into the mother's: they feel continuous with their environment in a state of imitative 'identicity', connected not with others as such but with self-generated auto-sensuous sensations felt as part of themselves. Tustin stresses that while in the schizophrenic child, projective identification is quite active and there is some acknowledgment of an inside and an outside, that is, of objects different from him, autistic child connects with sensations rather than with objects as such. Advancement in the process of humanisation is evinced by the coming into the scene of the first human actor, the girl Bu, needing to be protected and calmed by the analyst-as-mother.
