Un nombre non négligeable d’enfants avec autisme se développent apparemment selon un rythme normal pendant la première année de leur vie pour ensuite régresser ou subir un blocage de leur développement et actualiser une pathologie autistique aux alentours de 18 mois. À partir des données de la littérature et de l’observation clinique, nous tenterons dans cet article : de montrer qu’il est possible de dépister la pathologie autistique chez cette catégorie d’enfants, avant l’actualisation bruyante des symptômes, c’est-à-dire au cours de la première année ; de proposer une réflexion sur les aptitudes qui se mettent en place pendant ce temps de la vie, et qui préparent la suite du développement ; et enfin, de discuter le rôle éventuel de la réaction à la nouveauté des stimuli dans le dépistage précoce de la pathologie. Cette aptitude, souvent décrite comme atypique dans l’autisme, est repérable ordinairement très tôt chez le bébé.

A certain number of autistic children seem to develop normally for the first 12 months of their lives to regress then or have their development stop, and manifest a pathology of autism near 18months. From the data present in the literature, and our clinical observation in this article we will attempt to demonstrate that it is possible to diagnose the autistic pathology within the aforementioned category of infants before the appearance of the obvious symptoms, that is to say during their 1st year as well as to propose a reflection on the aptitudes that fall into place during this period and which prepare the sequel of their development, and finally, to examine the possible role of the reaction to the novelty of the stimuli in the early diagnosis of this pathology. It has to be said that the clinical observation of autistic children, the testimony of their parents and of young high level autistic adults underline a recurrent symptom in this population, whatever their age or level of achievement: It is the difficulty or even the impossibility they experience when faced with new situations, demonstrated by a marked resistance to changes in their daily routine. These subjects appear to present an obsessive and anguished need to preserve a stable environment without the slightest transformation. It seems that they have an extremely intense reaction to the novelty of stimuli. Does this particularity exist in the infant who will become an autistic child, could parents identify this particularity, and could it constitute a sign for the early diagnosis of autism? Around 60 % of these children “become” autistic after their first birthday. In some, the developmental curve shifts and the signs of autism appear gradually. In others, a phenomenon of regression is described at the same time as the emergence of behavioral problems. The fields where this regression is most obvious are language and social interaction. Our hypothesis is that the syndrome of autism does not suddenly appear at the age of eighteen months, but that its ‘emergence’ is in the making during the infant’s first months through a series of dysfunctional phenomena, that are unobtrusive and so go unnoticed by the parents. We have explored these phenomena, using the cognitive genesis habitually described in children with a typical development. We arrived at the conclusion that the subtle disorders relative to the perceptive-sensorial treatments have since the beginning gradually invaded the sphere of their relation to the surrounding world, perturbing their experience of closeness and bonding. Anomalies which lead to faults in the pattern of expected aptitudes, faults which undermine and weaken the foundations, leading to a movement of reversal during the second year and to the massive actualization of the signs of autism, which had previously been latent because the aptitudes, which should have been the base on which the subsequent ones stand, cannot develop due to the missing support of the previous ones, so that the evolutional dynamics are interrupted. Communicational and social behavioral disorders in autistic subjects might come, at least in part, from a major difficulty early on, in processing new aspects of their environment, which are often saturated with dynamic informations. Our study leads us to think that the abnormal reaction of patients with autism faced with the novelty of a situation constitutes one of the key deficits of autism and could be a sign for the diagnosis of this pathology in the first months of life.