[Rooming-in as a therapeutic possibility for a 6-year-old autistic girl].

The possibilities of rooming-in as a form of therapy for the psychic abnormal child are demonstrated on the basis of the example of a mother-child-therapy, which lasted six weeks and happened during the stay of mother and child on our station. The patient was a six year old, intellectually retarded girl with autistic behavior disturbances. The points of main effort in our therapeutical interventions were set on reaching a higher selfreliance of the patient as far as every day life-routine was concerned, further more on increasing the child's social and intellectual capabilities and on eliminating the girl's sleeping troubles. In order to reach these aims we started a training in behavior modification (operant conditioning, modeling) for mother and child. The remarkable developmental progresses of our patient are attributed most of all to the thorough efforts that were made in order to improve the abilities of the girl by modifying the contact between mother and child. Besides, the possibility of being able to use the whole day for therapy, to discuss and,--if necessary--to correct immediately the learning experiences that have been made, seems to be a great chance for reaching the appropriate forms of action and interaction in a quicker way.