ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book expresses the author's understanding of a variety of psychotherapeutic clients whose experience is of disintegration, or the dread of disintegration. People with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autistic spectrum traits can benefit from psychotherapy, but do so more slowly and with more difficulty than others. There is a neurobiological basis to these problems, which gives rise to a variety of manifest behaviours, attitudes, anxieties, emotional states, and modes of cognitive processing. People with ADHD particularly experience difficulties with the establishment of the Freudian “reality principle” in dominance over the “pleasure principle”. S. Freud noted that the infant’s initial state of helplessness implies a state where he or she has not yet developed a “reality principle” and is completely dependent on the mother to supply this.
