ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the clinical process in the early psychoanalytic treatment of autistic children. Addressing mimetic-autistoid dynamics in the larger society, as well as in current adolescents and adults, unmasks an epochal change in society at large. The changes in adolescent and adult psycho-pathologies in the Age of Media shape up an Autistoid Age where, upon the current impact of the 'epidemic of autism', mimetic-autistic dynamics require being put on an equal level with neurotic, narcissistic and psychotic dynamics. In The Culture of Narcissism, the social historian Christopher Lasch described in postmodern media society a flight from feeling, which people deem to grasp in terms of mimetic-autistoid dynamics. Blunting one's and the others' singularity, mimetic dynamics draw an autistoid limit to emotional contact, and thus a limit to learning from experience, evading the work of psychic two-ness, which is at the core of the depressive position.
