The Empty Fortress: Infantile Autism and the Birth of the Self

Psychoanalysis has long represented itself as being not only a treatment tool but a method of research. The reason, of course, is that this method of recollection presumably helps the individual to re-experience the feelings he had during significant events or periods of his life-time and, in doing so, to understand why he behaves and feels as he does. Sometimes it seems that the psychoanalyst claims that this is indeed the only way to self-understanding, but even the most died-in-the-wool, orthodox analyst would not in this day and age claim that self-understanding can come in no other ways than through his chosen discipline.