Post-Autism recounts in close and vivid detail the story of the
author's struggle to analyse and communicate with a pubertal boy who
presented with a diagnosis of untreated infantile autism. Marisa Melega,
who was at that time a young and relatively inexperienced analyst,
worked with Mario in Sao Paulo, Brazil, from 1978 to 1982 and during
most of that period the case was supervised by Donald Meltzer, who had
recently published his pioneering work Explorations in Autism, based on
ten years of collaborative endeavour with a group of therapists. At that
period the condition of autism was relatively little understood, and
psychological therapies undeveloped.