ABSTRACT
Psychotherapy with psychogenic autism an understanding of psychogenic autism is complicated by the fact that in the elemental, relatively undifferentiated state in which psychic damage occurred, such psychic damage is experienced as bodily damage. John's experience of grief Such a young child's descriptions are probably the closest we can get to crucial, panic-stricken experiences concerned with grief about the loss of a vital object, which John called the 'button'. Empathic identification with John put in touch with the wordless elemental dramas which had provoked the psychogenic autism. These illusory dramas arose from sensations in his body, the 'button' being the product of these bodily sensations. The button it is obvious, in terms of John's early sensuous experience, that the 'button' was something more than the actual nipple of the breast or teat of the bottle. Other objects which had similar shapes, or aroused similar sensations, had accreted to it.
