[Psychoanalytical understanding of childhood psychoses]

This short paper, placed in the symposium on child psychiatry within the Congress, is concerned with the psychoanalytic points of view which support the theory of treatment of children with autistic phenomena. After a brief description of the clinical of an autistic three-year boy with mutism, a theoretical point of view is elaborated through a concise revision of the contributions of various classical authors; focusing mainly on M. Mahler and the symbiotic and separation-individuation processes, M. Klein and the schizo-paranoid mechanisms, and finally the technique of treatment based on the transference-countertransference phenomena in the analytic situation.