The desert, the jungle, and the garden: some aspects of autistic functioning and language development

Abstract

This chapter focuses on a retrospective qualitative study based on psychotherapy sessions with children presenting autistic features who use language in atypical ways. The purpose of this research was to explore what factors could hinder or enhance the development of communicative language and symbolic thinking. The method of analysing two different cases was chosen because of similarities but, more importantly, marked differences between the two children’s clinical presentations. The two children selected for the research presented language difficulties and had been previously diagnosed as being on the autistic spectrum, they had very different clinical presentations. Autism is considered to be a syndrome with a multi-factorial aetiology and there is much to be investigated and discovered about it. Most researchers and clinicians agree that nature and nurture both play a role in its genesis, and that it has genetic, organic, psychological, and environmental factors implicated in it, to different degrees.