The string and the abyss: an autistic child’s experience of space

Abstract

ABSTRACT The author presents the issue of the development of internal space, as a function of the relationship of intimacy and synchrony with the caregiver, with the purpose of rendering more tolerable the experience of space outside the body. This paper argues that if this relationship does not stabilise by the end of the first year of life, an absence of representation of an internal space in the unidimensional realm might ensue. The psychoanalytic treatment of autistic children offers windows to certain developmental challenges associated with the representation of both internal and external spaces, the consequent development of dimensionality and its deviations. The case of a young autistic child in the first year of her four-session-a-week analysis is described as an illustration of the child’s struggle to overcome precipitation anxiety around the experience of falling by using her movements in the external space. The child’s autistic defences and deficits at first functioned to keep her in a liquid state, and later denied gravity by means of repetitive movements of her body while exploring the space of the analyst’s room. Her mouth was experienced as a hole to be completely blocked with either food or a pacifier, preventing exchanges with the analyst. Her subsequent compulsive use of strings in activities revealed at the same time the search for links, and her difficulty connecting and establishing communication. At the end, the analyst realised an archaic equivalence between their room and body, as a ‘concrete transference’, revealing the child’s attachment and motivation to explore it, which could be interpreted as an affective link between the analyst and patient.