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.