Psychoanalytic Work with Autistic Features in Adults

Book excerpt: Psychoanalytic Work with Autistic Features in Adults deals with the diagnostic and therapeutic difficulties of working with patients with autistic residuals, formed in early life experiences that have remained dormant in the unconscious mind. Laura Tremelloni traces the process of identifying them in adult patients, and stresses the need to develop a treatment plan suitable for this kind of pathology. This book uses clinical cases to examine the difficulties of work with hard to reach adults with 'gaps' in their sense of Self and symptoms related to primitive experiences of "non-being". Tremelloni presents new, adaptive therapeutic intervention methods for overcoming such obstacles and identifies the personification and permanence of undeveloped parts of the Self, in hard to reach adults who have otherwise developed satisfactorily and would not be diagnosed as autistic. In such cases, the author suggests the need for clinicians to adapt classic psychoanalytic approaches to the alternating levels of development of the separate parts which the Self has broken into. Psychoanalytic Work with Autistic Features in Adults will help clinicians in psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy to more effectively reach such patients, whilst attempting to address the problematic limitations of therapeutic techniques in very difficult clinical cases.