The Body of the Autistic Child: An Integrated Approach

Abstract

The question of the infantile autism was mistreated for such a long time in partisan reductions and blindnesses "of chapels". According to us, it is a question of measuring today the real stakes in a conception developmental complex and multidimensional of the disorders of the autistic spectrum. A real plea for a developmental psychopathology will deduct which, of the research and the hypotheses of etiology until the modalities of interventions and accompaniments (educational as much as psychotherapeutics), should consider just as much the substrata of equipment and the genetic, neurobiological and cognitive reasons in the peculiarity of the autistic functions, that the reasons of stories of life and the other psychic and emotional stakes (intraas inter-subjective) which inextricably mixed prematurely the development of the young autistic to color, to direct, to subvertir sometimes, to repair the other times, the initial data, and the instrumental peculiarities and of equipment. The body and the singular way "to live in it" is probably the first presentation of the person with autism both in its difficulties, specificities and in its sometimes extraordinary potentialities; the first one as the ultimate datum of this specific development. We suggest here approaching this issue developmental multi-dimensional by the question of the body. If we notice all that the persons with autism treat rather the details than a global seizure of things, we immediately have to notice the autistic “contamination” which makes that the specialists never consider the global apprehension of the person with autism but only a collection of functions and singular difficulties... And for example towards the body, we decline all the perceptivo-driving difficulties, praxies and instrumental, ever the global apprehension of the body, the singular way of the subject to live in its body, the representation of one and the images of the body which are his, dimension of its body-inrelation to evoke J. de Ajuriaguerra. By this integrated approach (the global nature of the body) we find a more complete and more complex vision of the pervasive developmental disorder of autistic spectrum. Based on the historic teachings of "the French school of psychomotricity" we shall develop: