ABSTRACT
A marked characteristic of encapsulated autistic children is that the early infantile stage in which the mother acts for the child has been perpetuated in a crude and pathological way, long past the time of normal usefulness. For example, they will use the limb of another person as if it were their own, with no acknowledgement of their indebtedness and little or no recognition of the separateness of the other person. Thus, they will pull a grown-up person’s hand to make it open a door for them instead of using their own hand for this purpose. John, in the assessment session described in Chapter 5, did not attempt to turn back the cuff of the sleeve of his pullover which had become turned down so that it hampered the movements of his hand - it was as if he expected me to do it for him. Sam, the subject of the clinical study of the previous chapter, stood on the therapist’s feet as if to use them as part of his body. In this mode of behaving, the children are only aware of the outside of the body and what they can stick onto the outside of it. They are averted from being fully aware of the inside of the body. In Sam’s case, this seems likely to be because, as he told the psychologist in the assessment session, he felt that a ‘family of pains’ lived inside him. Other children have shown that they felt that their insides and, in adhesive equation, the mother’s insides, were damaged. This inhibition of awareness of the inside of the body restricts curiosity about the inside of the mother’s body and, by extrapola tion from this, curiosity about the outside world. As infants they will sit virtually motionless where they have been put down. Thus, learning is inhibited, and, as I hope to show in this chapter, the development of thinking is similarly impeded.
