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Mother-child interaction in the first year of life
and autistic mother-child interaction :
first steps towards an integrated interactive model
of both normal and pathological development. - The paper puts forward an integrative view between the clinical study of early infantile autism and the study of the first phases of normal development. The approach is clinical and Winnicott's psycho-analytical contribution on mother-child relationship and recent research on early social development (R.H.Shaffer, D. Stern, etc.) are used as a conceptual frame of reference. It is suggested that the discontinuity between normal developmental models and pathological ones can be compared in the study of autism if the following criteria are assumed : a) the treatment of such a disturbance in dyadic terms, focusing on mother-autistic child interaction ; b) an observational methodology ; c) a comparison with data from mother-infant interaction in the first year of life observed in a natural setting. The interactive model suggested is that autism is a rigid ripetition of the original relationship caracterized by a marked asynchrony between the rhytms, the needs and feelings of both child and mother. The comparison between clinical observation of both autistic and normal mother-child interaction indicates that this disturbance « reveals » the inadequacy, the excessiveness or the distorsio of early interactional patterns that are described in some detail.