Marina Bardyshevsky
This paper concerns the second year of a little boy with autistic features who had been exposed to the emotional deprivation of life in an orphanage. His development was followed by means both of ethological observation and of infant observation as developed by Esther Bick (Bick 1964). His autistic features were displaced as he became able to form attachments to adults, and, in the context of these, to overcome the pain he previously experienced in situations of close emotional contact.
The theoretical context of the research
The present work concerns the problem of the early dynamics of abnormal ('distorted') emotional development. Russian psychologists (Vygotsky 1936; Lebedinsky 1985) consider the specific trajectory of such development to be determined by the following factors:
- the partial or general regulatory quality of the defect
- the time at which the defect originated
- the nature of links between primary and secondary, specific and non-specific symptoms: the main direction in which disturbance is propagated (e.g., from basic functions to higher functions, or vice versa)the way in which links between functions are disturbed (e.g., by isolation, fixation, or impairment of hierarchical coordinations).
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