ABSTRACT
Autistic mechanisms may succeed in stemming precipitation anxiety, but they also prevent mental growth. Melanie Klein lead that some of her pupils were able to use psychoanalysis to explore autism and the autistic enclaves lying at the heart of many psychopathological disorders in children, adolescents and adults. One could say that the patient is describing how he failed to make a strong Oedipal contact with a father figure in an encounter that would help him process his precipitation anxiety. Looked at from a spatial point of view, precipitation anxiety is the kind of anxiety which autistic children experience and against which they try to defend themselves. Donald Meltzer stresses what he calls 'aesthetic reciprocity' in the mother-child relationship. Frances Tustin states that if a baby becomes prematurely aware of the fact of physical separateness as regards the mother, he or she will be faced with catastrophic anxiety which takes the form of a black hole filled with persecutors.
