This paper offers an integrative approach to the increasingly complex puzzle of autistic spectrum disorders. The author demonstrates how the work of one group of neuroscientists in Parma, on a special class of brain cells called "mirror neurons", and the work of researchers at the University of California in San Diego, applying these…

Starting from Frances Tustin's description of failure of the containing function in autistic children due to a splitting between the masculine and feminine aspects of the containing object, the author suggests that the first stage in the psychoanalytic treatment of an autistic child consists in restoring that function by working through what he…