This lecture examines the early embodied nature of psychological development in human infancy, and the role of the neuromotor system as an active generator of conscious experience. The significance of this early embodied agency sheds light on its prospective, future-oriented nature common to all biological action. In human ontogenesis, simple intentional actions create responses that are learned. Arranged in sequences, these prospective intentions grow in awareness and reach, with greater capacities for control enabled by higher cognitive tools of memory, conceptual organisation, and planning. But from the very beginning of life, human infants also co-create meaning in shared, reciprocal, and rhythmic exchanges of affects, interests, and intentions that yield narratives, or shared projects of social meaning. These units of embodied action, whether solitary or social, structure human intelligence underneath and before verbal language. In autism, new evidence reveals a subtle, but significant disruption to this primary embodied motor agency. It thwarts efficient engagement and its learned prospective awareness, creating uncertainty in extension of the self into the world. By tracing early human agency in development and its autistic sensorimotor disruption, this talk will draw out critical paths in ontogenesis that appear to lead to what Tustin identified as the ‘thin skin’ of early autistic experience.