Historically, psychoanalysis has a fraught history in its handling of autism. Despite emerging evidence of neurological differences, the myth that bad parenting was the cause of autism was widely propagated in the 1950s and '60s by psychoanalysts such as Bruno Bettelheim and David Rapaport. The idea of the emotionally distant "refrigerator mother" permeated society for years, causing unnecessary shame to families, years of psychoanalysis for parents, and delays in relevant research (Silberman, 2015).
Psychoanalysts have long sought intrapsychic or interpersonal explanations for traits now known to be constitutional. In her book Live Company, Anne Alvarez, a child psychotherapist from the Tavistock Clinic in London, describes the debate between "organicists," who believe that autism is biological, and the "psychodynamicists," who attribute it to psychological factors. Alvarez ultimately makes the case that, regardless of the etiology of autism, people can be helped by psychodynamic therapy. Most psychologists eventually acknowledged that there are multiple causes of autism, primarily heredity.
Initially, the psychodynamicists tended to explain autism as "resistance, avoidance, and defense against anxiety" and later came to see symptoms as a "depressive collapse." Frances Tustin (1972) was writing about autism as a "catastrophic experience of bodily separateness." Tustin saw autism as primarily a trauma of separation from the mother and believed that the child protected itself through autistic "encapsulation," using "autistic objects" (or hard sources of sensation) as a means of self-regulation and relief from overwhelming anxiety.
When it came to typical child development, early pioneers in the field, such as Margaret Mahler and Tustin, initially saw babies as symbiotic with their mothers, moving along a gradual developmental trajectory toward separation-individuation. Development was seen as a linear process, with more and more independence being the goal. There was a belief in a........