Post-Autism

Post-Autism recounts in close and vivid detail the story of the author's struggle to analyse and communicate with a pubertal boy who presented with a diagnosis of untreated infantile autism. Marisa Melega, who was at that time a young and relatively inexperienced analyst, worked with Mario in Sao Paulo, Brazil, from 1978 to 1982 and during most of that period the case was supervised by Donald Meltzer, who had recently published his pioneering work Explorations in Autism, based on ten years of collaborative endeavour with a group of therapists. At that period the condition of autism was relatively little understood, and psychological therapies undeveloped.