ABSTRACT
This chapter explains an attempt to extend the concept of psychological 'positions' or organizations to include the most primitive aspects of human experience. It also explains the idea of an autistic-contiguous position that is proposed as a way of conceptualizing a psychological organization more primitive than either the paranoid-schizoid or the depressive position. Anxiety in autistic-contiguous mode consists of an unspeakable terror of the dissolution of boundedness, resulting in feelings of leaking, falling, or dissolving into endless, shapeless space. The word contiguous provides the necessary antithesis to the connotations of isolation and disconnectedness carried by the word autistic. Although pathological autism can be thought of as constituting an 'asymbolic' realm, the normal autistic-contiguous mode is 'pre-symbolic' in that the sensory-based units of experience being organized are preparatory for the creation of symbols mediated by experience of transitional phenomena.
