Whose memories are they and where do they go? Problems surrounding internalization in children on the autistic spectrum

Abstract

Recent work in neuroscience has highlighted the contrast between ‘procedural’ memory for bodily experiences and skills, which is unconscious though unrepressed, and verbalizable, ‘declarative’ memory, which includes autobiographical memory. Autobiographical memory is weak in people with autistic spectrum disorder, who frequently turn to self‐generated sensations for reassurance that they continue to exist. The author suggests that, instead of internalizing shared experiences leading to growth, children with autism can feel that they add to themselves by taking over the qualities of others through the ‘annexation’ of physical properties that leads to a damaged object and can trigger a particular sort of negative therapeutic reaction. Clinical illustrations drawn from the treatment of two children on the autistic spectrum illustrate some ramifications of these processes in relation to the sense of a separate identity and the capacity to access memories.

Key words:

• annexation
• autobiographical memory
• autistic spectrum disorder
• child analysis
• internalization
• procedural memory

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this paper were presented as part of a panel on autistic states at the IPA Congress of 2007 in Berlin; at the 4th Frances Tustin Memorial Conference in Tel Aviv (May 2008); and at the Conference on Child Analysis, Psychoanalysis Unit, University College London, July 2009. The author wishes to thank Dr. Edna O’Shaughnessy and Dr. Margot Waddell for their helpful comments, as well as the London Editor of the IJPA, Dr. Catalina Bronstein, and the IJPA’s three anonymous reviewers. Some portions of Daniel’s material have appeared elsewhere within a different theoretical context (Rhode 1997, 2000).

Notes

1. For example, Solms and Turnbull (2002) suggest that Freud’s ‘riddle of infantile amnesia’ can be explained without reference to repression simply by the fact that declarative memory systems do not become fully functional until the age of 18 to 24-months. In contrast, Gaensbauer (2002) adduces both experimental and clinical evidence to support the idea that declarative memories can be formed much earlier in infancy and secondarily become linked to language.

2. Previously, in Formulations on the two principles of mental functioning, Freud (1911) had referred to the ego’s introjection of objects that were the source of pleasure, by which it absorbed them into itself.

3. One of these is historical: an understandable reaction against Bettelheim’s unjustifiable statement that the children’s condition was caused by their parents’ death‐wishes (Bettelheim, 1967). Contemporary workers are often erroneously thought to share this view, despite repeated disclaimers by Tustin (1972) and many others. While autistic‐like behaviours can arise in a small percentage of children exposed to extreme conditions of privation (Rutter et al., 1999), the naturally‐occurring condition shows a strong genetic component: some professionals appear to believe that this should rule out a psychoanalytic approach.

4. Many workers in the field have emphasized the importance of keeping interpretations short and simple, and of phrasing them in such a way as to minimize the likelihood that they will be misunderstood as statements of fact. However, simply the fact that a child is not verbal does not necessarily mean that they are cognitively unable to grasp interpretations. For example, Tito Mukhopadhyay was confirmed by Lorna Wing as being a classical autistic, mute, with gaze avoidance and a number of typical behaviours; but, beginning at the age of 8, he has written a number of books with poetic and imaginative descriptions of his subjective experience (Mukhopadhyay, 2000, 2003).

5. Interestingly, Susan Isaacs has described how, in normal development, the sensations in the hungry infant’s mouth may be experienced as though he were being “forcibly and painfully” deprived of the breast, or as though it were biting him (Isaacs, 1948, p. 92).

6. For example, Tustin’s patient Ariadne described how she had unthinkingly taken over a suggestion by her mother concerning her schoolwork, “like snipping off a rose from someone else’s garden, without their knowing, to put in my button‐hole to show off with” (Tustin, 1990, p. 161). Tustin understood this in terms of an experience of taking over the nipple (John’s ‘red button’), and then feeling vulnerable to attack by a despoiled object.

7. Partly, this is the ordinary hostility that all children work through during the so‐called ‘terrible twos’: a friendly independence from parents is based on the security of believing that love ultimately outweighs hate. With Daniel, as with many children on the autistic spectrum, this process was complicated by a seeming lack of belief that he could get through emotionally without breaking through physically: as though an emotional ‘brick wall’ must follow inescapably from bodily separateness. Like many children on the autistic spectrum (Rhode, 2000; Wittenberg, 1975), he appeared to confuse an object that was emotionally pre‐occupied with one that was physically occupied. He also appeared to confuse limits (a circumscribed ‘No’) with a refusal of his communications (a global ‘No’): his teachers had noticed that he seemed to misunderstand ‘No’ as meaning ‘I don’t want to know’).

8. For a child with autism, as I have attempted to convey, separation signifies bodily catastrophe, not just rejection.

9. Indeed, she appeared to experience the onset of menstruation in terms of the characteristic autistic anxiety of spilling out, and she habitually reinforced the body outline of the animals she drew so as to make sure that there were no gaps in the genital area. However, the details of her sexual development are beyond the scope of this paper.

10. I shall not go into detail here about the technical problems encountered during this phase, though this is obviously of central importance.