I have been studying autism and autism spectrum disorder for many years, and in addition to private practice, I have worked in various organizations and institutions. Over the past year, I have become stronger in my conclusions, and my assumptions have become confident. Exactly as long as I looked at the problem as the word “Autism” in my head, thoughts changed at the speed of light, and hypotheses were just like a Ferris wheel. And over time, I realized something, the word itself leads us to a dead end. Why? It's simple, the disease has a word, this word has a diagnosis, the diagnosis has a treatment strategy, as well as treatment alternatives. The problem of misunderstanding of autism occurred at the moment when the word diagnosis appeared, which was attributed, completely automatically, to the disease. Autism, on the other hand, is a developmental disorder and in fact has no right to be a disease. So it turns out that if the whole list of symptoms manifests itself, then we are dealing with Autism in its pure form. And if the full spectrum is not manifested, or the picture is vaguely reminiscent, but the symptoms are chaotic, then we are already dealing with Autism Spectrum Disorder (Kanner Syndrome, other). In the picture of classic autism, which, let me tell you, is incredibly rare (!), in my vast practice, I have encountered such a picture only five times. Don't get me wrong, when I say in a huge practice, I don't mean ten cases or even fifty. And when I say rarely, it really is so. As for all other children, in the picture of developmental disorders we encounter a whole spectrum of many problems and of course they are associated with early childhood development, sometimes from conception itself. A little, and very briefly, I want to share theoretical considerations, and for this it is necessary to divide all children, meaning children on the autism spectrum, into two groups. I will divide according to one extremely important principle. In one of the previously written articles https://www.b17.ru/article/125292/ I talk about the protective processes of the psyche, which completely and completely automatically regulate the development of the child’s psyche. So there are two groups: when the protections work and when they don’t work. The first group of children is a dysregulation of the immune system of the psyche, an imbalance of defense systems. The second group of children is the weakness of these same defenses. No one will ever give your little child a diagnosis such as, for example, dissociative disorder, or, for example, anxiety-depressive disorder, or borderline personality disorder. Why? Everything is simple, the psyche is being formed, there is no personality there, and there are many other reasons, not about that now. But in order for such a diagnosis to form in an adult, there must be some underlying reason? And I'll tell you, it exists. We really cannot give a diagnosis of depression to a small child, who at the age of one and a half years suddenly lost contact with his mother, stopped speaking and many other symptoms known to all of us, because we do not know what such a thing could even be! If we delve deeper into our understanding of the development of the child’s psyche, we can learn absolutely incredible things. Well, for example, one of the generally known ones is symbiosis. An extremely necessary period in the development of a child’s psyche, approximately until the first year of life. So, symbiosis is interesting in this context because if the mother is depressed, then what state will the child be in who is in complete symbiotic fusion? In general, depression is a bad example, since in our everyday life this word means anything, just not what it really is. If we look at depression from the point of view of the work of mental defenses, we will find there an “unfeeling” of the object, often with a preserved emotional state. The person remains with the emotion, but feels nothing at all. As one of the variants of depression. In the first year of life, a child lives at the expense of his mother’s feelings. Mom may well smile at herself, but she has feelings, andaccordingly, the child does not feel. This is where the fun begins, in parallel with the mother’s depression (which I guarantee you, she may not even know about), the child’s staphylococcal infection is progressing, and the family knows nothing about depression. And at this time, the “beloved” grandmother comes to visit, who does not like the mother of this child. The mother’s resources are already exhausted with the child; she is no longer enough to protect herself from the aggressor. And believe me, the decline in the child’s condition may also not be noticed; moreover, it does not interfere and is already good, since the mother urgently needs a reboot, otherwise her Self may also suffer. Under such conditions, a process begins in the work of the child’s psyche, which I will call “saving ourselves from decay.” The most valuable thing is our Self. And in my practice I am of the opinion that the Self exists from birth, although it is completely rudimentary. So the protective-adaptive system, also known as the immune system of the psyche, was created precisely in order to protect this most rudimentary self. It is like the skeleton of the entire personality. During early development, all these processes are also pre-formed and can work extremely unstable. In more understandable language, when you are tired from work, you have an upset stomach, you are hungry, you need to go for a walk with the dog, cook dinner, and your head is pounding with everything…. Your psyche will turn on some kind of protective process, or even more than one. The child has the same staphylococcus, an unexamined neuroinfection, an allergy, and other things are severe, to put it mildly, discomfort, which he cannot tell you about. This is a background aggressive impulse, often chronic. As for the second group of children, the most difficult thing is the weakness of protective processes. For a more detailed understanding, I will give this example: two adults can react completely differently to the same dangerous situation. If there is a similar precedent in one person’s experience, then most likely it may be more stable in this case. If a person has never had this, and he does not have the appropriate, for example, protection, habit, adaptation, then we are dealing with one important feature. If he is in the neurotic zone of development, then most likely the person will face anxiety and will try to cope with it, rationalizing, for example, using mature defenses. If a person, for example, belongs to the border zone, then primary, more primitive defenses may well work; the person begins to feel that all this is not happening to him, or, for example, looks at everything from the outside. Or it may turn out that he has a complete weakness of protective processes, and the situation is so unbearable and the person cannot cope and we are dealing with psychotic, schizotypal things. Returning to the small child, the second group of children belongs precisely to such a state when, for a number of reasons, both genetic and many others, the defenses that should work are completely weak, and with excessive painful experiences, psychotic decompensation occurs. So, if we look at the picture of the scale of all these processes, then the impossibility of making a diagnosis on the issue associated with developmental disorders as a whole will become more clear. And so to make a diagnosis: at what stage of development is the child, what diseases does he have, what infections, what condition is the mother in, what protective processes are activated, and accordingly what do they protect from, much more? Imagine the number of variables in this matter? Since the child has an extremely limited range of reactions, we often have a similar picture, which we included in the general field under the name ASD. The methods of working psychologically with two groups of children are completely different, and when in one case we we can see an incredible result after, for example, ABA, and not see it in another case, this is exactly what relates to the incorrect formulation of the diagnostic question. A deeper analysis of what is wrong with the child? Here I will stop my very brief thoughts regarding the diagnosis