ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the clinical process in the early psychoanalytic treatment of autistic children's threw detailed clinical case studies. Leo Kanner was a child psychiatrist and described a unique syndrome starting before age 2, of which the outstanding disorder is children's inability to relate themselves in ordinary way to people and situations from the beginning of life. Kanner kept infantile autism conceptually apart from child schizophrenia, though he granted that some children later fell into it. For Kanner autism was varied lot, encompassing typical childhood cases as well as withdrawn but seemingly functioning adults. Such wide panoply in the severity of autism was, however, mostly lost to the public, likely because Margaret Mahler and Bruno Bettelheim, who brought child autism into the psychoanalytic fold, considered autism to be the severest of child psychoses. Bettelheim, in his widely influential book The Empty Fortress, put the clinical lens on the sickest cases, interned for treatment at late age, years after illness started.
