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This article looks back at the care of two children suffering from autism, five-year-old Francis and six-year-old Juliette, in a small group and during psychotherapy. Drawing upon the work of D.W. Winnicott, it is argued that these children experienced a process of mutual gratitude, which consisted of mutual experiences of attaining the object, of destroying it as a subjective object, of being attained and destroyed by the object, and of surviving this destruction by recreating an object relation with it, all of which were linked to the child’s capacity for loneliness in the presence of the object. This experience of mutual gratitude was developed from an updating of the first encounters between mother and baby.