ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the clinical process in the early psychoanalytic treatment of autistic children. It explains a case study of Lila a 19-month-old mute autistic girl. Lila, a nice, smallish, well-proportioned girl with an absent expression, came to consultation (LBA) at 19 months of age, brought upon her mother's worry that she did not speak. Initially, the mother came alone, having sought on the Internet information on pervasive developmental disorder (PDD), autism. Lila's autistic retraction came up long after nursing proper and does not seem to have resulted from "a precocious and abrupt awareness of their separateness from the mother's body" but from a protracted deprivation of affective maternal contact and a withering away of the 'primal dialogue'. A playful scene indeed, which evidences Lila's pilgrimage from the waste-lands of autistic encapsulation to the emotional greenlands of childhood oedipal games. It is indeed difficult to describe the unfolding of the process in the treatment of autistic children, especially non-verbal ones.
