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Résumé Le rapport de l’enfant autiste à l’espace concret est marqué par l’immutabilité et des conduites exploratoires. L’exploration psychanalytique de cette pathologie suggère que cet enfant a la représentation d’un espace plat ou recourbé sur lui-même dans lequel la relation à autrui n’existe pas et où aucune histoire ne peut se déployer.

Psychoanalytic training in the French Societies belonging to the International Psychoanalytic Association does not grant any place to the observation of babies as it exists in certain societies of other countries. Infant observation is even the object of sharp critiques by eminent French theoreticians. The reasons given for condemning infant observation and refusing to give it any place in the training programme lie in theoretical positions concerning the very nature of the Freudian discovery and its interpretation, which is more idealistic than empirical. The author discusses these reasons while drawing attention to the frequent confusion between a reference to empiricism and a reference to the experimental. The fear of a psychologizing deviation of metapsychology and of a denial of psychic reality leads, in the French model, to placing the emphasis on personal analytic experience during the candidate's psychoanalysis, prolonged by supervisions. It excludes any academic teaching of metapsychology or of related disciplines. The confusion between the empiricism of Esther Bick's method and the recourse to experimental procedures in developmental research stands in the way of making a place for infant observation and of recognizing its training value, not so much for the acquisition of new knowledge or the validation of metapsychological models, as for its usefulness in developing a mode of psychoanalytic observation and an increase in the candidates' containing capacities.

Starting from Frances Tustin's description of failure of the containing function in autistic children due to a splitting between the masculine and feminine aspects of the containing object, the author suggests that the first stage in the psychoanalytic treatment of an autistic child consists in restoring that function by working through what he calls the transference on to the container. His description of container bisexuality differs slightly from that given by Tustin. In the author's description, the masculine elements of the container do not penetrate the female ones, but rather strengthen them in the same way as buttresses strengthen a building. Once the transference on to the container is sufficiently worked through, the child can begin to trust the containing capacities of the object. Thereafter, an infantile transference, as defined by Melanie Klein, begins to develop. That transference tends to have a special intensity in autistic children, with the emergence of a fantasy that Tustin called the 'nest of babies' fantasy. A clinical illustration of that fantasy is given. The infantile transference represents the second stage in the psychoanalytic treatment of an autistic child. The third stage consists in working through the transference neurosis as described by Freud. An autistic child who reaches this degree of psychic organization may look like an ordinary child, but this level of mental functioning will remain very unstable for some time. The end of the treatment can be envisaged when the child continues to make progress mentally even during breaks in the analysis. Clinical material illustrates the three stages described in the paper.Keywords Transference on to the container; infantile transference; infantile autism; psychic bisexuality; 'nest of babies' fantasy.