The Uninhabited Body of the Autistic Child
Type de matériel :
14
The body is the theater of the baby’s primary experiences. The sense of identity, which is connected with the perception of space and time, and develops through reciprocal exchanges with his human environment, is deeply rooted in the body-ego. In autistic states, the absence of any relationship with the external world, which implies the withdrawal from all dimensions of reality, including the perception of space and time, is inevitably mirrored in the child’s relation with his body. The elimination of any exchange includes the elimination of the sense of existing as a body and of inhabiting his body. Since the autistic child cannot bear any perception of existing as a separate individual, being unable to abandon the unconscious fantasy of fusional oneness, he cannot accept his body becoming a 'solid’ entity, since this process would lead to the perception that he is separated from his environment and that his skin represents the boundary between inside and outside. The defensive strategy of many autistic children consists in refusing this process of “solidification” at advanced psycho-physical levels. Their bodies, their movements, their behavior, tend to elicit in the therapist sensations of their being liquid, volatile or viscous, or on the contrary frozen, thus representing a further protective maneuver. The story of three autistic children in psychoanalytic therapy shows how they discovered their bodies and began to experience themselves as existing as a bodily reality in space, in time and in a relationship. This represented a crucial moment in the therapeutic process. In fact, the child’s discovery of his body and the experience of it being solidly contained in a three-dimensional space and in the therapist’s attention was the prerequisite for their psychic container to become able to perform its basic mental functions of projection and introjections.
Réseaux sociaux