Bruno Bettelheim, The Empty Fortress: Infantile Autism and the Birth of the Self (New York: Free Press, 1967).
Complete original source available here.
The Empty Fortress was the most popular book to communicate the theory of psychogenesis, which located autism’s origin in disordered interpersonal relationships at the dawn of life. Ironically, it was published at the very time that psychogenesis went into sharp decline. Bettelheim was a gifted writer whose book narrated a psychoanalytic story about development in which desperate children shielded themselves from the cruelty and indifference of their parents—mothers especially—by retreating from the relational world. Their responses, Bettelheim suggested, were both understandable and analogous to residents of German concentration camps, who had also faced “extreme situations.” In autism, tragically, babies and young children were destined for more of the dehumanization that caused their original retreat into “the empty fortress.”
Beyond the many “scientific” reasons that make it important to study this severest arrest of personality [autism] there was also a personal bent to my interest. What first disturbed me and aroused my interest in these children was how deliberately they seemed to turn their backs on humanity and society….
Some victims of the concentration camps had lost their humanity in response to extreme situations. Autistic children withdraw from the world before their humanity ever really develops. Could there be any connection, I wondered, between the impact of the two kinds of inhumanity I had known—one inflicted for political reasons on victims of a social system, the other perhaps a self-chosen state of dehumanization (if one may speak of choice in an infant’s responses)? In any case, having written a book on dehumanization in the German concentration camps what next preoccupied me was the present volume on infantile autism….
For myself it was the German concentration camps that let me to introspect in the most personal, immediate ways on what kinds of experience can dehumanize. I had experienced being at the mercy of forces that seemed beyond one’s ability to influence, and with no knowledge of whether or when the experience would end….
There was still another experience that enabled me to observe and to introspect about infantile autism. From 1932 until March 1938 (the invasion of Austria) I had living with me one, and for a few years two, autistic children….
Dynamics of Autism
Seen from outside the person, all emotional disturbance is marked by some serious breakdown in communication with others.
Ordinarily, things do not happen with dramatic suddenness, neither the giving up of talking nor of the impulse to act. They happen rather in a slow, step-by-step process. In normal development the child begins to act as his mouth seeks the nipple, as he responds to auditory and visual stimuli, as he engages in visual pursuit. And communication begins as he nurses. Even in this earliest stage of acting and interacting which is hence the earliest stage of personality formation, things may go wrong.
The infant, because of pain or discomfort and the anxiety they cause, or because he misreads the mother’s actions or feelings, or correctly assesses her negative feelings, may retreat from her and the world. The mother, for her part, either frustrated in her motherly feelings, or out of her own anxiety, may respond not with gentle pursuit, but with anger or injured indifference. This is apt to create new anxiety in the child, to which may now be added the feeling that the world (as represented by the mother) not only causes anxiety but is also angry or indifferent as the case may be.
Any such retreat from the world tends to weaken the baby’s impulse to observe and to act on the environment, though without such an impulse personality will not develop. Retreat debilitates a young ego barely emerging from the undifferentiated stage, and leads to still further psychic imbalance.
How severe the imbalance will be depends on the nature and degree of the breakdown in communication with the outside….
Viewed from inside the person (or intrapersonally) however, this breakdown in communication is caused by overwhelming anxiety. The anxious person may seek minimal security by first reducing his contact with a world that makes him too anxious. In more severe cases he may later avoid such contact and lose all trust in his ability to deal with the world. If the retreat is not just temporary, he may be caught in a vicious circle where anxiety leads to retreat from reality, retreat to still greater anxiety, and in the end to more permanent withdrawal. Here it makes little difference whether the anxiety began because of the real or imagined dangers in the world, or because of some inner psychic processes. Inner hostility, for example, can arouse tremendous anxiety if we are convinced that giving vent to it will cause our destruction.
Still, as long as the person views his anxiety as caused by something on the outside, he remains in some distorted contact with reality. It matters little whether he is anxious about the hostile intentions of others or what they may do in response to his own hostile wishes. To the degree that he connects his anxiety or hostility to the external world he is in contact with it, though his view of it and responses to it are distorted. Depending thus on the degree of anxiety, and hence of distortion, it remains possible for him to view the source of his anxiety more or less correctly.
But if anxiety increases beyond a certain degree, if it overwhelms the organism and results in panic, then the contact with reality is lost. Whether anxiety reaches panic proportions depends on whether the person believes he can take action to reduce the dangers that cause it, and with it reduce the anxiety. Here again it makes little difference whether the external source of anxiety is in fact irreducible. What counts is whether the anxious person thinks so or not….
[T]he child’s only safety lies in not being provoked into action. Any stimulus reaching him from the outside might provoke action, so he must make himself insensitive to whatever might reach him from the outside. And since inner hostility might also provoke him to act, he must make himself insensitive to what comes from within his own psyche.
This is autism as seen from inside the person….