Status Updates From The Autistic Subject: On th...

....surely one should listen to what they say—
on the threshold of language.

"As the name indicates, autistics hear themselves. They hear lots of things. Normally this even leads to hallucination, and hallucinations have always a more or less vocal character. Not all autistics hear voices, but they articulate lots of things … That you have trouble hearing, grasping the point of what they say, doesn’t prevent these people from being rather verbose. (pp. 19–20)"
-Lacan (1989)

"They are simply people for whom the weight of words is very serious and who are not disposed to take their ease with these words. (p. 3)"
Lacan (1975)

In La Bataille De L’Autisme (2012a ), Laurent associates his notion of the void in the real with the Kleinian conception of the autistic experience of the “black hole,” originally associated with Frances Tustin’s (1986) work on autism.

One of the most significant characteristics defining autistic behavior according to Leo Kanner (1943) is “an anxiously obsessive desire for the maintenance of sameness ” (p. 245).

Laplanche and Leclaire also relate the first level of symbolization to the “experience” presented in Freud’s (1920) account of the Fort-da
game (“gone-there” in German).

That is why Lacan argues that “If the neurotic inhabits language, the psychotic is inhabited, possessed, by language” (SIII, p. 250)

The “hole" in the symbolic” is specified by Lacan as a defining feature of psychosis, in the same way that the signifier of the Name-of-the-Father is a defining feature of neurosis (p. 248).

...in Seminar III, Lacan is not oriented at deciphering psychotic symptoms in order to deduce the underlying structure of psychosis. He is focused on characterizing the linguistic mechanism that constitutes the psychotic mode of access to language, in order to structurally explain psychosis and its symptoms.

In his paper “Psycho-Analytic Notes of an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia” (1911), Freud bases his analysis of psychosis on a single literary case study of the autobiography of Dr. Daniel Paul Schreber,
Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1955)

Freud had never provided a fully comprehensive account of the constitu-tive psychic mechanism at the origin of psychosis.

In autism, there is no clear evidence attesting to the functioning of repres-sion, neither primal nor secondary ...

The Name-of-the-Father

Particularly, Lacan associates primal repression with the instatement of the “paternal function,” * operating within the ternary domain of the child-mother-father (p. 268)

*Also called “paternal metaphor”

Repression as Neurotic Defense

Repression is one of the most fundamental concepts in psychoanalytic meta-psychology.

Basing himself on Freud’s notion of the Spaltung, presented in his paper “Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence” (Freud, 1938), Lacan argues that the subject is constituted as fundamentally split between consciousness and the unconscious (SVII, p. 102)

It was Lacan’s followers who began explicitly addressing autism as a mental phenomenon independent from the domain of psychosis

Corresponding with the brutal and inhumane conditions he experienced in the concentration camps, [Bruno] Bettelheim argued that autistic children withdraw from the world because of an early encounter with extreme conditions of living (p. 63). He called these conditions of “extreme help-lessness” ...

Freud never endorsed Bleuler’s use of the term “autism” ....

It is Lacan, in his seminar devoted to the subject of psychosis (1955–1956), who pointed out that Freud disclosed another fundamental constitutive mechanism underlying the psychotic mental structure—foreclosure (Verwerfung ).

"Autism isn’t something a person has, or a “shell” that a person is trapped inside. There’s no normal child hidden behind the autism. Autism is a way of being." (Sinclair, 1993)

While the ever-changing behavioral categorization of autism can be found in the DSM-3–5, the multiple attempts to locate its underlying cause in this way have been unsatisfactory up to this day (Grandin, 2006, pp. 35–36; Wing, Gould, & Gillberg, 2011)

The categories of sameness and aloneness articulated by Kanner can still be found today in a revised or altered manner in some diagnostic manuals.

Autism was initially designated as a distinct psychological syndrome in the mid-twentieth century by two contemporary psychiatrists: Leo Kanner and Hans Asperger.

We must acknowledge the fact that it was a psychoanalyst, Frances Tustin, who introduced the notion of autistic object.

"My concept of dogs is inextricably linked to every dog I’ve ever known."
Grandin* (2006)

In addition to learning grammar and constructing concepts, some autistic individuals can also gain access to affects through memorization.

*autistic author

It should be noted that despite her extreme cognitive deficits, Helen Keller was not autistic. She felt the need to communicate and for this she invented a language of gestures.

"...these individuals are intelligent automata. Social adaptation has to proceed via the intellect. In fact, they have to learn everything via the intellect."
(Asperger, 2008)