Moving Together Along the Spectrum: Toward an Empathic Dialogue with Autistic Children and Their Families

Abstract

ABSTRACT The role of sensory-motor impairment as a factor in autistic development is increasingly recognized but there remains a dearth of synthetic models that bridge autism’s psychobiological origins in perinatal development with its later manifestation as a disruption to agency, intersubjective engagement, and social interaction. This article expands on the work of Daniel Stern and the Boston Change Process Study Group on the primacy of embodied intersubjectivity in development, applying recent findings on Autism-specific impairments in intentional movement and dynamic vitality form perception to posit an embodied developmental-relational framework for Autism Spectrum Disorders. In this view, deficits in the regulation and timing of movement subsystems dampen inter-personal kinesthetic and affective bodily resonance during early dyadic interactions, reducing the frequency of “moments of meeting” in the first year of life, with “knock on” effects on implicit relational knowing and later cognitive development. In relational terms, autistic infants and adults face challenges with the “intention unfolding process,” in “mutual sensing,” and with “moving through and being moved by” the other in sustained engagement.