Some theoretical comments on personal isolation

The capacity for personal isolation is as critical to psychological health as is the capacity for object relatedness. In this paper, the notion of personal isolation is expanded to include a form of isolation in which the infant replaces the mother‐as‐environment with his own sensation matrix. This form of experience is not conceived of as a phase or stage of development prior to object relatedness; rather, it is viewed as an ongoing facet of all human experience that serves as a buffer against the continual strain of being alive in the world of human beings. The understanding of this primitive dimension of personal isolation provides a way of thinking about the differences between the elaboration of universal “autistic‐contiguous”; forms of experience and the development of pathological autism.