The influence of innate perceptual and motor factors on Oedipal realisations in young children on the spectrum

ABSTRACT

The assumption that primal phantasmatic activity stems from bodily functions is widely accepted in developmental and psychoanalytic thinking. This article attempts to give more specific meaning to this abstract assumption. It examines the influence of sensory, perceptual, and motor capacities on the consolidation of typically differentiated erotogenic experiences relevant to pre-Oedipal and Oedipal organisations. It then proceeds to examine the impact of innate deficiencies in these capacities on the development of phantasmatic organisation in children on the autistic spectrum who often manifest atypical erotogenic organisation. Additionally, it pays attention to non-symbolic therapeutic communication and the unconscious transference-countertransference relationship stemming from such a problematic matrix. The paper is clinically derived from a description of the early-Oedipal organisation of a child with low cognitive and functional capacities and proceeds to the manifestations of the Oedipal constellation of a high-functioning autistic child.

KEYWORDS:

• Oedipus complex
• early Oedipal organisation
• autism
• sensorimotor capacities
• mental development

Disclosure statement

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

Patient anonymisation statement

Potentially personally identifying information presented in this article that relates directly or indirectly to an individual, or individuals, has been changed to disguise and safeguard the confidentiality, privacy and data protection rights of those concerned, in accordance with the journal’s anonymisation policy.

Notes

1. The child I refer to as Adam finished his therapy with me quite a while ago. Adam is not capable of giving consent. I offered his single mother a Hebrew version of the article asking for consent. She did not want to go back to her son’s past. I gave her a short description of Adam’s clinical material described in the paper and explained the context of publication. She authorised the publication.

2. In our parent meetings, I had already discussed the clinical material with Noam’s mother in the way I found suitable for her. More recently I let her know my intention to publish a description of the session and discuss it in a professional journal published in English. She read the material and approved it for publication.

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. Mrs 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 inter-subjective psychophysical space’ and ‘Autistic twisted loops’ in the Journal of Child Psychotherapy, and several 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 to English.