Table hockey: attack or linking? Psychoanalytic psychotherapy with an autistic boy

Abstract

This paper explores some issues that might arise when one considers having a table hockey game in the therapy room, and describes how an autistic boy, aged fourand-a-half when starting treatment, used that game. The unfolding process from withdrawal to separateness, intersubjectivity and playfulness is illustrated by the progress of two years of twice-weekly psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Special attention is paid to how the play progressed through the intermediate area that the therapist provided.

The incubator psyche

“…Fink (1989) talks of her client never really emerging from the incubator and Gampel (1993) describes her patient, who was cared for in an incubator, as sheltering in the 'incubator mind' of the therapist. Nilssen (2009), likewise, refers to her young client with autism who had been in an incubator after birth, and talks of feeling as if she were in the incubator with him. However, again, the interrogation of the incubator in each of these papers in not sustained, but is rather more a footnote with the core focus of the paper in a different direction.…”