Concept
Autistic-contiguous position
A mode of generating experience that Thomas Ogden proposed in 1989 as more primitive than Klein's paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions. It is sensory-dominated and presymbolic, and builds a rudimentary sense of self from rhythm, the feel of surfaces, and contact with the skin. Its characteristic anxiety is a terror of leaking, dissolving or falling into shapeless space, and its defences include autistic shapes and objects. Drawing on Frances Tustin and Esther Bick, Ogden held that all three modes exist together throughout life in dialectical tension, each creating, preserving and negating the others, rather than as stages that follow one another.
Development
1989
introduced by Thomas H. Ogden
In On the Concept of an Autistic-Contiguous Position (1989);The Primitive Edge of Experience (1989)
Relations
- 1989 derives from Paranoid-schizoid position
Ogden modelled the new position on Klein's idea of a position and placed it beneath the paranoid-schizoid as a third, more primitive mode. The three stand in dialectical relation rather than in sequence.
Works
- 1989
On the Concept of an Autistic-Contiguous Position
Ogden reads the British object-relations thinking of the preceding two decades as having begun to explore forms of experience lying outside those described by Klein, Winnicott, Fairbairn and Bion, and proposes for them the concept of an autistic-contiguous position, more primitive than both the paranoid-schizoid and the depressive positions. The three stand in dialectical relation, each creating, preserving and negating the others. The autistic-contiguous position is a sensation-dominated, pre-symbolic mode of generating experience, which supplies much of experience's sense of boundedness and an early sense of the place where experience occurs. Its characteristic anxiety is an unspeakable terror that this boundedness will dissolve, felt as leaking, falling or dissolving into endless, shapeless space. With clinical illustrations, the paper discusses the position's principal defences, its ways of organising experience, its forms of object relatedness and its avenues of psychological change.
See also
People
References
- On the Concept of an Autistic-Contiguous Position1989Evidence for a relation
- The Primitive Edge of Experience1989Evidence for a relation