ABSTRACT
The practical suggestions given in this chapter have been culled from thirty years of working with autistic states in both psychotic and neurotic children. (It has been my experience that some neurotic children have a capsule of pathological autism which has to be worked over if therapy is to be effective. This will be discussed in Chapter 19.) An indispensable capacity for therapy with psychotic states is the ability to tolerate and understand acute terror, for which Bion’s term ‘nameless dread’ has seemed an appropriate description.
