ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that elemental, non-autistic shapes are distinguished from autistic ones, and the significance of their emergence and the part they play in psychotherapy. The appearance of geometrical forms seems to be an important step in psychic development. Such forms appear at a critical point in the psychotherapeutic process, when the patient is struggling out of the 'tomb-womb' of psychogenic autism to achieve what we, metaphorically, call 'psychic birth'. Autistic shapes follow each other in rapid, slippery succession, so that they are virtually indistinguishable one from the other. This and the fact that they are unshareable with other people, means that they are unclassifiable. The undifferentiated autistic shapes are aberrant modes of patterning sensuous experiences; they are ineffectual so far as effective functioning goes. Classifiable, non-autistic shapes usher in a very different state of mind. Patients crippled by autism have met hard, angular reality in a neuromental state in which they could not cope with it.
