Autistic twisted loops

ABSTRACT

The paper describes a deceptive kind of autistic encapsulation, charact-erised by pseudo-internal space and distortions in the normal development of psychophysical space. It introduces the metaphor of loops as spatial-temporal organisations that illuminate three aspects of autistic encapsulation, two of which were first described by Frances Tustin. Three types of loops – simple, twisted and double-twisted – are explored. The paper delineates the double-twisted loop as an additional and more complex manifestation, typical to post-autistic organisation. Here, symbolic thinking and communication function as a disguise, obscuring the child’s trajectory on an infinite continuum that folds around itself, thus denying the potential for separateness and preventing the accumulative realisation of mental space. Using two clinical vignettes, the author shows how such a presentation leaves the therapist in danger of being tempted by the child’s pseudo-internal world, while remaining dissociated from their developmental needs.

KEYWORDS:

• Autism
• Tustin
• mental encapsulation
• confusional state
• primitive mental states
• double twisted loops

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Fontana was born in Argentina in 1899 and died in Italy in 1968. He worked in New York for many years. Throughout the 1960s, he created a great many variations on this piece. See -https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/fontana-spatial-concept-waiting-t00694.

2. I sought consent from the mother of this child I have called ‘Ido’, but she declined my invitation to read the paper, saying: ‘O.K. no problem. I trust you. I can’t think of any reason to read it’. This decision, perhaps, allowed her to please me, while avoiding thinking about my work with her son. I am confident that Ido would not recognise the material, which has been thickly disguised, in the event that he come across it in later life.

3. Today, when virtual space is almost at everyone’s fingertips, it is possible to watch an online video at https://www.kleinbottle.com, showing an illustration of continuous movement across the two-dimensional surface of a Klein bottle. The reader is invited to experience the strange absence of an opening, as a critical spatial signifier.

4. For varied and complicated reasons, I did not feel that seeking consent would be ethical in this case and have changed a great deal of the identifying detail, including creating graphic representations of the child’s drawings, to be certain that neither the child nor the family would recognise themselves or the work described.

5. Twisted and double-twisted loops are not exclusive to autistic children, and are also present in adults with an autistic-psychotic core and a shell of neurotic organisation.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tami Pollak

Tami Pollak is a clinical psychotherapist and supervisor in a private clinic and in a day care unit for children with ASD. She teaches on the ‘primitive mental state’ track of the psychotherapy programme at Tel-Aviv University, Israel, and has a PhD in integrating psychoanalytic object-relation metapsychology with French phenomenology. Tami Pollak has published the article ‘The body-container’ in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis; ‘The body and the consulting room’s materiality as a path for developing intersubjective psychophysical space’ in the Journal of Child Psychotherapy and four more articles in Israeli psychoanalytic journals. She has edited the book ‘Treating children with autistic spectrum disorders: A psychoanalytic and developmental approach’ (2017), in which she also contributed two chapters. She is also the author of the book ‘The BodI – psychophysical space as transitional space’ (2018), published in Israel, which is now in the process of being translated into English.