Autistic Pockets

Here we find a particularly extreme morphological representation of Autistic Pockets. See page 32 for a milder instance..

The therapist encounters clients who seek to understand, and hopefully overcome, a serious impediment in the intimate experiences they share with their partners. They have no difficulty effecting a sexual union but from that moment they complain of feeling nothing. Although most men succeed in achieving orgasm this is experienced without passion or meaningful pleasure. Women will confess that the experience of penetration leaves them quite uneasy and often has them suffering a sense of numbness or with shallow feelings at best.

The “capsule of autism” in such instances originates at a time when the infant would still be suckling at the mother’s breast. Modes of intervention that fail to address the specific stresses suffered by the infant at this very early pre-conscious period in its development will know only abject failures. Cognitive behavioral therapists, even those identifying with a cognitive processing of schema, will invariably complain (as is their wont) that the client resisted intervention.

History:

Ideally, when the neonate is first delivered to the waiting arms and breasts of the mother the miracle of bonding is received as a blessing by both the mother and her newborn infant. All the inherently libidinal needs and drives that were in the parcel of the neonate’s heritage from its time in the womb now flow from the infant to find their natural targets on the mother’s body. When Ronald Fairbairn, the Scottish psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, amended Freud’s pleasure principle explaining that libido is, in fact, object seeking, we were able to fully comprehend the deep, comprehensive, and utterly absolute nature of this bonding.

An overriding principle in PDC holds that potential always equals need; that wherever we come upon a potential for any talent, trait, ability, or capacity for whatever, that potential will invariably define that person’s responsibility to himself, or herself. When we consider the infant and the considerable libidinal energies invested in it, we would understand the essential dichotomy wherein its potential constitutes both a need to reach a willing target and, equally, the need to experience being the target of libidinal investments originating external to its own body.

The young infant that had the benefit of a full and rich bonding with its mother quickly learned to identify with the reality wherein it was totally secure, total complete, totally contained, with its perfect wellbeing embellished with the most pleasurable tastes, smells and sounds.

Consider, however, the experience recorded by the neonate, and later the young infant, when its rich libidinal drives do find the mother’s body but, for whatever reason, or reasons, the mother is prevented from investing her own libidinal drives to link organically to her infant. She might be suffering a period of depression, or overtaken with anxieties of one order or another. She might be contending with health issues or relationship issues. But her child never gets to record the experience of its body serving as the target, hosting the libidinal drives originating with its mother.

Nothing is ever forgotten. In the first instance when the child as an adult enters a relationship that lends itself to romantic and physical intimacies, a bonding is effected. It is a sexual bonding where the two bodies merge comfortably into what becomes a single body. This person would find delight in this bonding because it promises to deliver the total security, the whole sense of completion, the experience of being entirely contained, and with his or her  perfect wellbeing thoroughly assured. With that original idyllic experience of bonding grafted into this person’s memory, however early in life, it remains as a vital reference to everything he or she seeks to duplicate. It is an experience fixed in the lexicon of references this person now has to himself, or herself. In the wake of a full sexual experience this person is rewarded with virtually every joy the infant had known.

Note the “S” shape of the red line on the little finger.

In the instance of the person that had never known the experience of its body receiving the libidinal drives of its mother, the physical union with the body of a partner proves to be bereft of any true sense of attachment. Two people remain two very separate people. The wealth of experiences that the original bonding with the mother’s body might have afforded this person in earliest infancy had never been realized. Nothing of those experiences would be in that same lexicon of references this person would have to himself or herself. None of those experiences would be available for replication. And herein is the autistic pocket – the capsule of autism. The woman would feel the penetration into her body as something foreign to her, almost unnatural and at best a source of temporary discomfort. The man in this instance may easily effect a penetration but then knows very little if any sexual excitement. A numbness of feelings invariably leaves him cold and disappointed. As a rule he faults his partner, explaining to himself that she is not the right woman for him. The woman, more often than not, demonstrates a tad more honesty and blames herself.

It is with intention that I have made no mention of the defenses often enlisted to disguise autistic pockets of this order. A woman may impress her partner as being very sensual and invariably gratified in the wake of their intimate experiences. Shortly after they marry, however, the defenses she had enlisted may lose much of their urgency. Some men may be reluctant to marry until rather late in life, if at all. Many feel compelled to seek intimate experiences with many women in the hope of somehow coming upon that one woman who can deliver them that ethereal sense of completion. It never happens, although sometimes, later in life, exhaustion brings them to believe that at last they did find her.