Owlseyes ’s Reviews > The Autistic Subject: On the Threshold of Language > Status Update

....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.