ABSTRACT
In the clinician's experience, every child, adolescent, and adult whom he have treated for a sufficient length of time and who has clearly been diagnosed with Asperger's has demonstrated a combination of splitting of the self and projective identification into remote objects as central features of their ongoing psychodynamics. With Asperger's patients, he would say these two ways of functioning work hand in glove. Grotstein's statement is that "Splitting and projective identification work hand in hand. Generally speaking, projective identification works as an adjunct to splitting by assigning a split-off percept or self to a container for postponement or for eradication". The clinician suggests in more detail how they might be used in the diagnosis and the understanding of Asperger's. In Asperger's children, the splitting of the self is registered in the numerous dichotomies which regularly and inevitably populate their way of communicating, and which appear in their behaviour and emotional life as well.
