Lucchelli, Juan Pablo
Autism and psychosis: A misunderstanding
- 2021.
2
For decades, autism was considered a childhood psychosis. In this way, the adult psychiatric clinic was extrapolated to pathological phenomena in children. If psychoanalysis followed this path, it is because it in turn followed the path of European psychiatry, reducing observations to well-defined categories. Experience shows that many phenomena and clinical pictures cannot be reduced to pre-established cases, and this is the case with autism. In this text, we will focus on Margaret Mahler and the interpretation of one of her most famous cases by a contemporary psychoanalyst.