Developmentally informed psychoanalytic psychotherapy with autistic children and their families

A wide range of interventions and treatments is now available for autistic children. In this workshop we will explore the specific contribution of psychotherapeutic work with autistic children and their families. I hope we will also consider ways in which the phenomenon of autism is interesting to psychoanalytic thinking. Understanding autism can tell us about the early development of social relationships and how these contribute to mental life. Autism also poses considerable challenges for psychotherapeutic technique. Psychotherapy works through the relationship between the patient and the therapist. But autistic children may appear to not want relationships, preferring their own worlds, and/or that they do not know how to make them. What is going on for these children and how can we reach them?

I will begin by asking members of the group about their experiences of autism and their particular interests.

I will then talk about the service we are currently developing at the Tavistock Centre and how we are evaluating it.
I move on to describe family work with young autistic children and their families.

After a short break, we will then explore factors to consider when thinking about whether psychotherapy might be helpful for particular children. Using examples of children who, despite all having diagnoses of Autistic Spectrum Disorder, nevertheless present themselves in different ways, we will what we might hope that psychotherapy might achieve in each case.

I hope that members of the group will be able to tell us a little about autistic children they have known.

I will refer to the development of psychoanalytic theories of autism throughout, stressing the degree to which autistic children find it difficult to be separate or tolerate separateness. I will include work making use of development psychology studies of early relationships, and of work identifying the impact of trauma in the child and or in the parents as a relevant factor in some cases. I will draw out the implications of these theoretical accounts for how we might work psychoanalytically with these children and their families. Some of the literature that I will refer to is given below.