ABSTRACT
EXTERNAL APPEARANCE OF ENCAPSULATION CHILDREN
These are the children whose psychological disorder is akin to the Kanner syndrome of Early Infantile Autism. (These are the children described in Chapter 1.) Almost invariably, these children have well-formed limbs and beautiful, ‘other-wordly’ faces. They often have such a translucent skin that they look like ‘fairy children’. Their body movements are nimble and graceful, although they may walk on their toes. Sometimes they are fearlessly agile. For example, one child I observed at the Putnam Center, in Boston, Mass., could walk a tightrope placed very high from the ground. Although they may be clumsy at first, as treatment progresses, their fingers become very deft in that they can perform very fine finger movements. They have a feather-light touch and they may tap surfaces in this way. When touched or picked up, their bodies are usually stiff and often they do not ‘body-mould’, as Mahler terms it (although a few of them may do this).
