Both in China and worldwide, the prevalence of autism has increased nearly a hundredfold from 2 in 10,000 in the mid-1980s and has recently reached 1 percent. There are no less than 4 million ASD (autism generalized disorder) and no less than 1 million typical autism in China. Although a variety of training institutions have sprung up, they still do not meet the market demand. There are many families who are looking forward to more effective treatments. Therefore, psychological training for autistic children is not only a very promising, but also a very public service and virtuous cause, as well as a job that can realize self-worth in life. There are various reasons for the increase in the incidence of autism, which include environmental factors, diet, and environmental changes. Many parents of children with autism are in great need of such a special career. The music therapy for children with autism (autism) that we talk about below is not just a psychotherapy, but a psychological training that refers to a psychological approach to help them. Many counselors have an excessive fear when they hear about children with autism, and do not feel that it is difficult to start, because we are engaged in a kind of rehabilitation training for children with autism. The medical perspective is that there is something wrong with the genetic fragment of the autistic child, but the current worldwide medical treatments are unable to have a thorough means of help. Currently for children with autism, we not only recognize the medical problem, but also partially rehabilitate them through psychological training. We are not curing them, but just restoring mainly their social skills and language abilities. The same approach to training children with autism applies to attention deficit disorder. There are three general approaches to training children with autism. The first method is ABA behavioral training; the second method is structured education; and the third method is play therapy. ABA behavioral training is the most common method for training children with autism. In many urban autism training centers, trainers have children and parents, children and children, and children and trainers hug each other, then walk up and hug a third child, followed by each child spinning in a circle and exchanging hugs with each other. Why is this training arranged? The reason is that children with autism love hugs, the feeling of skin and warm fluffy things. Many other children with autism like to play in the sand, often all morning, and parents complain, “Look, the child has been playing in the sand all morning again.” This is actually what children with autism need. Interactional hugs are an instinctive need for children with autism, just like normal people need water. There are some needs that they have that are a little stronger than normal children, which fits with Winnicott’s theory, such as warm water, sand, and hugs. We can give children physical sensations, skin close hugs. If it is the mother, she can have frequent physical hugs with the child, providing breast and body closeness. This is an instinctive need for children with autism and can build their sense of security. We would encourage parents, especially mothers, to be completely naked and close to their children at night when they go to bed. With the trainer, the following trainings can be performed, the first is interactive hugging; the second is face-to-face training; and the third is exposure to warm water and sand. All of these trainings are valuable for children with autism. The most difficult aspects of ABA behavioral training are eye contact, making simple requests, and conversation. The content of the training varies depending on the developmental level of the child with autism at different ages. Some children are older or better developed and can have simple conversations, can make buzzing sounds, some can make simple requests to shake hands, etc. But the most valuable part of these trainings for us is the physical contact, and the other things are not very meaningful for the reason that they will not respond much and there is no point in forcing the training. The second common method of autism training is structured education. By structured I mean giving the child closed training, such as showing a picture of Mickey Mouse on a projector and showing the child the picture while telling him what it is, and also playing cartoons for the child to watch and listen to the cartoon sounds. The reason for using structured education is that children with autism who have impaired language function can bring about an overcompensation. Eye visual stimulation is very important to them, and children with autism can be overly sensitive to graphic colors, so visual training for children with autism is especially important. For example, looking at pictures, but these general treatments are effective for some children and not so effective for others. The third common method of training children with autism is play therapy, and the one most used today is sandbox play. Their sand tray games must not be confused with training for children with neurological disorders and attention deficit disorders; their sand tray games are just games. For children with child neurosis and attention deficit disorders involves psychoanalysis, symbols, and we do the same sand tray game therapy for adults. And sandplay for children with attention deficit and autism is actually just playing, not trying to analyze, analyzing symbols doesn’t have much practical therapeutic meaning for them. What is the difference between having an autistic child do sand tray play and having a regular child do sand tray play? Having children with autism do sand tray play try to do it in groups, encouraging them to play with some sand on their own in large sand trays and piles, and several children playing with each other so they can communicate. The main thing in sand tray games for children with autism is to develop their social skills by having each child greet everyone and shake hands in turn, which has a partial effect on them, although not too effective. The training of children with autism should be tailored with a very strong sense of individuality. The three methods described earlier are generic treatment methods. There is a difference between our music psychological training and the generic approach. When we use the ABA behavioral training, we are emphasizing the Winnicott embrace. In structured training, we emphasize ritualization. What to ritualize is what to listen to, what to watch, and what to do every day. Just like we give structured training to adults during military training for college students, what time the bell will ring, what music will play, this structured education is valuable for children with autism for the reason that structure gives the child a sense of stability. In play therapy, our emphasis is on getting children to try to generate some socialization, even if that socialization is unconscious. Below we will describe the musical psychological training we have developed for children with autism. Before that, we want to clarify the idea of the spectrum of mental illness. We believe that there is only a quantitative rather than a qualitative difference between normal and psychiatric disorders, which is called the spectrum. In the spectrum of childhood mental developmental disorders, autism is the most severe, at the headmost segment of the spectrum. Next there is Asperger’s syndrome, Rett syndrome, childhood psychiatric disorders, and developmental disorders, arranged from the most severe to the least severe. Because of this, our psychological training for children with autism can also be used for the mildest forms of childhood hyperactivity, etc. One of the physiological studies on children with autism that caught our attention is that the amygdala of children with autism is larger than that of normal children. The value of the amygdala is discussed in our music group therapy courses and in our psychoanalytic practice training courses. We believe that some complexes are related to amygdala function, and we suspect that the enlarged amygdala in children with autism causes hyper-vigilance, and that being hyper-vigilant to the outside world leads to hyper-attention to the inside world, but not to the outside world. The amygdala is responsible for the vigilance system, and the increased amygdala in autistic children leads us to believe that there is a need to provide autistic children with a greater sense of security. This includes the Winnicott approach that we just described and the bonding technique that we will talk about later. Based on the enlarged amygdala in children with autism, we have developed two targeted approaches: the bonding technique and the Winnicott approach. These methods are also applicable to children with mental retardation, but also to children with cerebral palsy. I have done a case study where I went to the disaster area to participate in psychological assistance during the Sichuan earthquake in 2008 and met a mentally retarded child of 7 or 8 years old who could not speak or write. He cried all night every night when he went to bed, and his cries were very strange screams. I think he was having very strong alertness after the earthquake, which means the amygdala was activated. So we used the Winnicott method on him and we had both this child and his mother undress and regain skin-to-skin closeness. The mother hummed a children’s song that the child used to listen to as a child and patted her hand on the child’s body. This is actually music therapy to restore a sense of security from the early years. The next day, this child cried for only two hours. On the third day, this child stopped crying. We recommend this kind of training for children with autism because of their overdeveloped alertness system. Problems with children’s alertness systems can also be seen in life. For example, children with autism can suddenly become anxious and keep banging on doors, creating an impulse control disorder. This means that the amygdala alert system is suddenly activated and is actually afraid, and this fear is not relieved by anyone. So we suggest that both parents and trainers can do something like this: parents regularly get in physical contact with their children, rocking their bodies and matching their feet to the beat. We all know that children especially like to play are able to shake things, such as the cradle. I used to play with the carousel when I was a child. This is a way to simulate creating an in utero environment for the child so that the enlarged amygdala is not over-vigilant. Musical psychological training for children is a fourth approach beyond the generic approach to training children with autism. We believe that communication is both a prerequisite and a goal of autism treatment, and that if children with autism can communicate, their barriers are gone. Our training for children with autism is based on the premise of communication, and the core technique of communication is the mirroring technique. The mirroring technique comes from Kohut’s theory. Kohut believes that any child needs to be touched adequately as a child, such as physical touch. Many hospitals now teach mothers to touch their children after the birth of a baby. Kohut believed that a child with inadequate touch, whose nerves are not sufficiently stimulated, grows up to touch himself and it becomes masturbation, ego stroking, and then develops into a person with narcissistic personality disorder.