Fluxury by Sergio Benvenuto

On Autism. Responses To My CriticsJan/10/2022


Published on Division/Review. A Quarterly Psychianalytic Forum, 20, Winter 2020, pp. 29-33.


Sergio Benvenuto

1.

First, I apologize for my old-fashioned style of writing. In my paper I used ‘normal’ instead of ‘neurotypical’, ‘autism’ rather than ‘ASD’, and I did not provide an immense bibliography, quoting just the works I considered essential to my argument (but today a large bibliography is the marker of a serious paper). Just imagine; I still use terms like ‘hysteria’, which the DSMs did away with long ago! And I still use the term ‘obsessional’ rather than ‘obsessive-compulsive’! Here I shall make amends and try to conform to mainstream “impact factor” jargon.

Secondly, before replying to my critics I shall try to situate this debate of ours on autism in a wider context. In the last 50 years in hyper-industrialised societies autism diagnoses have increased twentyfold (whilst those diagnosed as schizophrenic have “only” increased fivefold), leading to talk of autistic epidemics. Today the common belief is that there are eight autistics out of every 10,000 children under five – whilst only a few decades ago autism was considered a rare pathology. Surveys assure us that in the U.S. there are six times more autistics than in other western countries! It’s not credible that American society has such a remarkable ability to produce autistic children (assuming that autism is a product of the family and social entourage). The reason is simply that U.S. psychiatrists are too “keen” on autism diagnoses;[1] even though the inclination to diagnose autism more and more hastily is spreading throughout the industrialized world. Greta Thunberg too was diagnosed with Asperger’s during a phase of depressive mutism.

In short, autism is a fashionable pathology. Ian Hacking (2010) spoke of a booming industry of narratives about autism, just like schizophrenia was fashionable decades ago, and hysteria (from which psychoanalysis drew its popularity) in the late 19th century. We should be asking why each era has its own psychopathology and why today it’s autistics we choose to see everywhere. So, our debate too, behind the veil of scientific neutrality, reflects – unconsciously – what’s at stake in this current fascination of ours for autism. Personally, I’m fascinated by autism because it puts into play certain fundamental problems of contemporary philosophy, the difficulties of concepts such as ‘mind’, ‘subjectivity’, ‘other minds’, ‘being-in-the-world’ and so on.

(I will formulate a hypothesis: our age is so interested in autism because there is reason to suspect that we could all be autistic in some way. The same way at the end of the 19th century there was reason to suspect that all women were hysterical. But what does ‘autism’ mean for people who actually have no idea of its meaning? It probably means withdrawal from social life, being closed up in one’s own world, a sort of hikikomori life-style – and perhaps our age is tempted exactly by this. Indeed we have the feeling social life is draining.)

The tendency to see autism more and more often in people has led to the term Autistic Spectrum, which can however be interpreted in two ways. On the one hand as a soft form of the ‘dimensional’ approach to autism, in the sense that we’re all more or less autistic, the same way we are all more or less short, or have better or worse eyesight. I’m prepared to accept such a vision, so I can’t be accused of wanting to isolate autistics in a conceptual ghetto, given that from this point of view autism is a continuum of differences ranging from the thoroughly autistic to those who aren’t autistic at all. The thesis I’m proposing – that autism is an agnosia of subjectivity (and not a lack of ToM!) – can be understood in a dimensional sense: as a minor ability, always relative, of perceiving subjectivity.

The concept of Spectrum can also mean something else: that the forms of autism are so heterogeneous that we find it difficult to include them all in a single syndrome. Hence the saying: “If you know one autistic person, you know one autistic person”. In other words, it would be reasonable to suspect that perhaps there is no such a thing as autism. The idea of a spectrum could become the gateway to the death of the concept of autism: if every autistic person is an individual case, it will become more and more difficult to find a constant trait in all autistics. The paradox is that while the figure of the autistic becomes increasingly popular (and marketed), it seems almost as if psychiatry were about to abandon this category (this is the wish of Timini, Gardner, McCabe, 2011). The category of hysterics has disappeared from psychiatry text books, together with a whole range of other categories (like Asperger’s syndrome), so there’s no reason why autism shouldn’t disappear as well.

Asking why every disorder is not viewed as a spectrum is a good question: no two schizophrenics are exactly the same, nor two obsessive-compulsive individuals, nor two anorexic women… In these cases we don’t talk of spectrums because we think we can see some basic common traits, which instead increasingly elude us with regard to autism.

The spectrum certainly evokes the spectre. Is not treating autism as a spectrum to admit its spectral nature? In The Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels wrote that communism is a spectre haunting Europe. We may say that today autism is a spectre haunting psychiatry (Laurent 2011-12). 

My attempt was therefore to find a structural trait to allow us to continue talking about autism, not only as a spectre. What’s striking about my critics’ texts is that they do indeed reject my description of autism not only without proposing their own definition, but without even mentioning a structural trait to help us recognize autism beyond all the individual differences. It’s hard to understand what an autistic is for them. We will later return on the question of a “structural” approach to clinical diagnosis.

Thirdly, my critics accuse me of not being updated on the current literature on autism. Now, Krass reminds us that around 20,000 citations on the subject appear on Google Scholar. But on Scholar I see they are 1,340,000[2]…Who could ever read all the texts that appear on the issue? The result is that one makes a selection and usually reads the research one is “fondest of”, and only that. It’s also interesting to see that among the texts quoted by my two critics as crucial, not even one appears in either bibliographies. I’m convinced that if a third critic, from another field, had replied to me, he or she would have quoted completely different texts on autism. After all, I could also cite several studies on autism I consider rather interesting (for instance, some Lacanian contributions: Laurent 2007, 2008, 2011-12; Maleval 2009, 2011; Tendlarz 2011; Ansermet & Giacobino 2012). In the track of Critical Autism Studies, an Italian contribution: Valtellina 2016. It’s true that today scientific research is essentially published in English, but not always (for example, in a psychoanalytic perspective, Robert 2018).

 

2.

I think that most of the criticisms from Joanna Lhulier are due to an obvious misunderstanding of the contents of my article. A misunderstanding I’m responsible for, as English isn’t my native language. An essential misunderstanding is her confusion between ToM (theory of mind) and perception of subjectivity, which I distinctly separate and actually counterpose. She writes: “Dr. Benvenuto begins with the idea that autistics lack theory of mind (ToM).  […] there is growing empirical evidence to suggest that the hypothesis that autistics lack theory of mind is false or at the very least subject to debate.” Now, I said quite the opposite: that autistics are such precisely because they resort to a theory of mind, while non-autistics don’t need to. ToM is a sort of prosthesis of the agnosia I see as the source of autism.

The main aim of my paper was to compare the cognitivist approach, according to which we all need to build ourselves a ToM, and the phenomenological vision (adopted by some neuroscientists) according to which we have an immediate grasp of our own subjectivity and that of others (not, therefore, of the ‘mind’). All the counter-examples Ms Lhulier gives do not therefore grasp the question that was essential for me. Of course autistics know that other subjects exist, but to know is one thing, to perceive is another. A blind man knows there’s a table in front of him, because someone has told him or because he’s touched it, yet he does not see it. The hypothesis (derived from phenomenology) on which I based my considerations is that, unless we’re in the spectrum, we perceive subjectivity.

Ian Hacking (2001; 2009b) supports a thesis very close to mine. The difference is that while I turn to philosophical phenomenology, he turns to Köhler (1929) and Wittgenstein (2001) – and I think he did a better job than I did, because Wittgenstein’s theory lends itself more effectively than Husserl or Merleau-Ponty to reading the peculiarity of autism. Hacking writes: “We usually see what a picture is of, and do not infer it. […] Likewise I usually just see that a man is in bad humour (Wittgenstein 2001, p. 153e). I note it, and do not infer it.”  He quotes Ko?hler, who

admitted at once, in 1929, that his account ‘gives us neither an altogether new nor an altogether perfect key to another person’s inner life; it tries only to describe so far as it can that kind of understanding which is the common property and practice of mankind’ (266, italics added). […] Ko?hler pointed to a wide range of phenomena in which we see and do not infer what a person is doing.

With Ko?hler’s phenomena Hacking indicates all these acts where we see the other’s subjectivity, we don’t build hypothesis about it. And “I shall stick to the phenomena. They are familiar to most people, but are precisely what are not familiar, ‘automatic’, ‘immediate’ or ‘instinctive’ for most autistic people.”(p.) In short, autistics are such because they do not have direct access to Ko?hler’s phenomena – but Hacking too, like me, explains why this hypothesis confutes the theory of a lack of ToM. Hacking basically says what I tried to say. But he has never, as far as I know, been accused of offending autistics or stigmatizing them. Perhaps because he wrote in a more philosophical language, whereas I preferred to use a style closer to common language. The only difference, in fact, between Hacking and myself is that he uses Ko?hler’s phenomena to indicate what I mean when I say direct perception of subjectivity.

Krass stresses that the hypothesis of a lack of mirror neurons has been widely disproven. I won’t cry over that. I quoted the example of mirror neurons not because I was relying on it, but because it is how phenomenology-based neuroscience– in particular the Parma School (headed by Giacomo Rizzolatti), which discovered mirror neurons – tried to provide scientific evidence to phenomenology’s (or Wittgenstein’s) claim that our relationship with others doesn’t occur through a ToM but through an immediate perception of subjectivity (Gallese, Rochat&Berchio, 2013).This was the important point for me, not the hypothesis – however interesting – of a mirror neurons deficit. The true issue at stake is whether neurosciences will be able to integrate a fundamental psychoanalytical (and philosophical) concept such as subjectivity – something quite difficult, as even few psychoanalysts integrate it.

 

3.

But what do I mean by subjectivity? Various modern philosophies have elaborated some concepts of subjectivity: that of Nietzsche, Heidegger’s Dasein, Sartre’s being-for-itself, the subject as Lacan’s barred signifier, etc. I myself am not sure how to define the subject – not to be confused with the mind. I hope that autistics will allow us to better understand what this “something” they lack is, and that we, neurotypical subjects, have, without being aware of it. Perhaps it is the fact that we attribute to an “I” – and to a “you” that is in turn an “I” – all the mental processes we have (thoughts, emotions, insights, etc.).

I could represent subjectivity with a torus:

 

 

 

Subjectivity could be that void at the centre of the torus, around which all the mental forms are organized like a toroid, which is a ring-shaped object ordered around a void. My hypothesis is that with ASD the mind is not organized like a torus.

I don’t see how this hypothesis could be mistaken for “hate speech”, which is what Lhulier accuses me of. When something is lacking, often there are other skills that neurotypes lack. Susanna Tamaro (2019), a bestselling writer who was diagnosed with Asperger, explains this well:

Every time nature takes something away, it also gives something back. Not understanding the language of humans is compensated by understanding with absolute and immediate clarity all other languages ??that are not human. Animals talk to us, and we talk to them. We have intense and surprising dialogues with trees and flowers.

In fact, when autistics are able to describe their way of being-in-the world, one is struck and fascinated by their way of relating to things, animal and the inorganic. They reveal a perception of the world that escapes neurotypical individuals.

Lhulier believes that my saying that autistics “skip humanity” is offensive. In fact, I should have written “skip ‘humanity’”, with inverted commas. I was taking for granted that skipping humanity is not what they do, but what they feel. Many autistics doubt they are truly “human” (like Tamaro above), in the sense that they have the impression neurotypical individuals are not very human, so to speak. This is the famous expression that Grandin used with Sachs to describe herself: an anthropologist on Mars. Evidently neurotypicals are Martians to her. She was the anthropologist. (I am tempted to call the book I plan to write on autism: A Martian among the Spectra). Many autistic people use often astronomical similarities to provide a concrete image of how they are different from non-autistics. The autistic Jasmine Lee O’Neill (1998) describes her way of seeing the world as Through The Eyes of Aliens (see also: Hacking 2009a). The autistic author Jean Kearns Miller (2003) talks about Women from Another Planet. Tamaro (2019) writes that “We have landed on a planet of which we do not know the language. The world is there, in front of us, but there is no way we can reach it.”

The identification of Grandin with animals is not a psychoanalytic interpretation, it is what she herself repeatedly speaks of. When she was a child (Grandin 1986) her school organized an exhibition of domestic animals and each child had to bring one. She brought herself, and behaved like her own dog (see also: Hacking 2007). But as a child Grandin did not think she was the “strange” one, she thought all her schoolmates were “strange”, and only when she grew up did she realize that she was “special”.

My impression is that autistic people see us a bit like we see psychotics: as people who use a language that is incomprehensible, ambiguous, inconsistent.

I therefore understand that many autistics are proud of their difference, the same way minorities considered “disabled” are (an elderly friend of mine has suggested we hold a Senility Pride, and says we should call elderly people “diversely young”). I know deaf-mutes from birth who are very happy and proud of their condition, they also betray a certain contempt for those who speak and hear. Everyone has the right to their own narcissism, all the more in the case of autistics who possess extraordinary intellectual abilities.

I do not believe, however, that we are doing a favour to autistic people when we use such an edifying rhetoric, which sounds something like “we are not Martians the same way you are not Martians! We are all the same!”. No, we are not all the same. And it is exactly because of this difference that “aspie pride” makes sense.

There is a contradiction at the heart of political correctness: if the sameness of neurotypicals and people with “disorders” is exaggeratedly stressed, then the pride of the “disordered” no longer makes sense. If deaf and mute people were to claim that they too can hear and speak, what would their pride rest on?

And political correctness risks leading to a form of obscurantism. Scientific and intellectual research should not be intimidated and blamed when it speaks of things that the prevailing ethical and political beliefs perceive as unpleasant. Otherwise freedom of research is threatened.

What I find beautiful about autistics is precisely that they are not neurotypical, that is to say, they speak to us of another way of being human. Autism expands our narrow concept of humanity. We come into contact with the autistic world trying to understand its difference, trying to understand what problems the autistic people face. This is true also if this difference, as claimed by the “dimensional” view, is only relative, if autism is to be understood as being “more or less”.

If it is true that autism consists of a specific agnosia, then it is clear that each autistic person is different from the other, given that everyone has his or her own personality. The personality differences between autistics are the same as between neurotypicals. Also people who were born blind, for example, are very different one from another: there is no typical “blind personality”.

 

4.

Lhulier lists a series of points showing my incorrectness, but I could defend each point with sentences reported by autistics themselves.

Lhulier accuses this sentence of mine: “I would say that an autistic person is a house with no walls, that is, a house that is not actually there.” All I did here, however, was to repeat, in different words, the eloquent title of the famous book by the Asperger Donna Williams (1992): Nobody Nowhere. After all, my paradoxical image of a “house with no walls” was my way of reversing Bettelheim’s (1967) image of an “empty fortress”.

Lhulier cites my sentence “autistic individuals are not able to deceive, nor do they try to impress others. They never manipulate, they never get involved in gossip. They have no sense of ownership, they feel no envy, and they like to give.” To this regard, Tamaro (2019) in the article quoted above says:

When my book Follow Your Heart came out, I was accused of being shady, tricky, cunning, things I have never been able to conceive. A person with Asperger never has ulterior motives, simply because they are not part of his or her horizon. We don’t know what ambiguity is, nor do we have any shady sides, except from the phantoms of our mind.

Speaking of Greta Thunberg, she says:

“Greta is not cunning, she has no ulterior motives, she knows none of the techniques used to manipulate which allow to be at ease in society.”

On various occasions Grandin speaks of how she became angry when confronted with ambiguous situations or things, “an autistic’s way of reasoning is black and white”, she says.

I must confess that my ideas come mostly from what autistic people write about their own experience (I refer mainly to: Grandin198619952005; Williams 19921994; Mukhopadhyay 2000, 2003, 2008; Tammet 2006; Sellin 1996) and not so much from what scholars write about ASD. Autistics, when they know how to write well, never mitigate, and above all they emphasize their difficulties in communicating with other humans. They prefer to “converse” with things.

For example, my idea that psychoses are the opposite of autism was inspired by Williams (1992), although she describes this in her own terms. At first, as a child, she was diagnosed as psychotic, but then, growing up, reading books on schizophrenia, she soon realized that her problems were of a completely different kind. This opposition between autism and psychosis is contrary to a widespread theory in continental Europe, according to which autism is a form of psychosis, as Lacan himself (1989) also argued in a certain sense.

Lhulier says that my way of describing the way of being of autistics is offensive to them, but does not tell us how she thinks the specificity of autism should be described, in a supposedly non offensive way. My impression is that according to Lhulier autism stems from a language disorder. And in fact all text books on autism today start by saying that with autism there is a language disorder.

 But to speak of “language disorder” still doesn’t mean anything, because there are various dimensions of language, and therefore various relationships between language and subjectivity. Also being deaf is a language disorder. Traditionally there is a distinction between the semantic, syntactic and pragmatic dimensions of language. Clinical literature clearly shows that with autism the disorder does not really affect the syntactic function, but the semantic and pragmatic ones. What does this mean? When I say that an autistic tends (certainly, not completely) to think like a computer, or like a mathematician when doing mathematics, it is precisely because computation is a primarily syntactic activity, while the subjectivity I am considering concerns the semantic and pragmatic dimension. As I said, citing a fundamental distinction made in linguistics, an autistic can be very good at understanding énoncés (statements) much less at understanding énonciations (enunciations).

It is no surprise that apparently one savant out of three, the kind that has extraordinary computational abilities, is autistic (on a savant autistic, his son: Gould 1997). The words of an autistic savant such as Tammet (2006) are in this sense very important. For him numbers are real objects, each has its own colour, texture, beauty or ugliness, it is funny or unpleasant – and the same goes for the words of the various languages ??he knows. For example, he is fascinated by the sullen beauty of prime numbers. He sees signifiers as objects, precisely because he does not perceive them in relation to subjectivity.

 Conversely, the Indian autistic Tito Mukhopadhyay (2000, 2008), in his beautiful testimony, tends to see objects, especially mobile or glowing objects, as real texts (“The story behind an object is far more important to me than the object”). From a very early age, his best companions have been mirrors and shadows of objects. With mirrors he is not interested in seeing himself (we cannot speak of a Lacanian mirror stage) but in the fact that mirrors tell stories. Shadows, on the other hand, have the power to interrupt stories. “I believed that the mirror wanted to tell me a story. And I believed that the mirror wanted to tell me a story because I wanted to tell it a story (…) I knew that the mirror heard everything because only when I stood in front of it could I hear the walls and the floor talk. (…) The mirror understood exactly what I was trying to explain. (…) My stories were not meant for human ears. Human ears cannot hear anything other than sounds.” [His are not “human ears”: should this be taken as hate speech against himself? ...] The sky and earth speak to each other.  On the contrary, “shadows never told any story. Many times I waited for my shadow to begin some story. But my shadow never told me any story… I wondered why shadows don’t tell stories”.

It would be a mistake to view this talking and telling world in which Tito lives as hallucinatory. In psychotic hallucinations the signifiers invade the real, they colonize it. Here, on the other hand, the opposite occurs: the real objects rise to the status of quasi-subjects, they possess that subjectivity that Tito does not recognize in humans, objects are like fragmentary oases of subjectivity. Mirrors and shadows have the common trait of being the double of things: it’s as if Tito perceived subjectivity as a reflection of the body, as a double of the body. It is as if the autistic saw the world scattered with pieces of subjectivities, since he or she does not see these pieces coagulate as centres, of him/herself and of the other.

Take autistic echolalia. To say it is a language disorder is merely to apply a label. Autistic people who talk about it say they cannot grasp the sense of the other’s words, they are meaningless sounds. The repetition of sentences is a way of saying “Look, I can enter into a relationship. I too can make noises.” (Williams 1992). That is, autistics often have problems in understanding the meaning, which is always a metaphorical sense of the signifiers, we may say they do not “subjectivize” the sounds they hear. Instead of understanding meaning silently, they are captured by the materiality of the signifier – to its being a sound – replacing subjectivation with the repetition of the signifier itself. It is like saying “April is the cruellest month means April is the cruellest month.” The repetition of the material signifier replaces the going beyond the signifier that we call “being able to grasp the sense.”

Mirrors and shadows, in the case of Titus, echolalia in the case of other autistics, are reflections, a double of things or signifiers that replace a subjectivity which is the blind spot of their relationship with the mind. But because we have said that subjectivity is an empty organizer of the Self and of the world, we may say that autistics are blind to this emptiness. They grasp it in the form of reflection.

From this perspective it is possible to try to understand the reason for certain autistic behaviours that appear to us completely enigmatic. For example, why do they often flap their hands? Not because they are agitated, in fact it is as a gesture and a sound that calms them. My hypothesis is that this gesture symbolizes the meeting-detachment of two parts of their Self, because there is no central void to organize the fragments of their soul. In this sense we could try to understand many other autistic behaviours that are incomprehensible for us. My hypothesis of agnosia of subjectivity is an attempt to make the autistic being-in-the world more intelligible.

 

5.

Krass’s answer is above all a defence of psychoanalytic theories of autism (British in particular). And therefore he disagrees with my claim that, in a certain sense, autistics have no unconscious. He reminds us that according to Freud all human beings have an unconscious. Indeed I used a somewhat provocative term to talk about a certain poverty of unconscious in autistics, but above all to advance the idea that the autistic life form should broaden our original concept of unconscious. Like when I said that autistics “skip humanity”, which angered Lhulier. Autism actually invites us to redefine our notions of humanity and of unconscious. It is not possible to elaborate further on this notion here, but what I can say, very briefly, is that autistics do not possess the essentially metaphorical unconscious of neurotics and psychotics, we may say they lack an “inner” unconscious, that what they have is rather an external one, one emanating from things.

Krass reminds us that today all psychoanalysts accept the neurological basis of autism. However, as I have said, my intent was not to discuss the aetiology of autism. Moreover, if the neurological basis of autism is accepted, why not accept the same for almost all mental disorders, from schizophrenia, to depression, hysteria, etc.? I would even be willing to discuss an aetiology that essentially focuses on the mother-child relationship as the main cause of autism – although frankly I find this explanation unlikely, even though I do believe that the way parents cope with an autistic child can strongly determine the development of the child. But the point that interests me, I repeat, is not this. I criticized the focus on the mother-child relationship to the extent that it does not allow psychoanalysts to grasp what seems to me to be essential, namely the quid, the what of autism. Many psychoanalysts believe that it is the modalities of this relationship that produce the various symptoms, or disabilities, of autism, while I believe it is firstly necessary to identify the characterising features of autism as manifestations of a focal knot.

I believe that one reason my critics reject my theses is due to the fact that, unlike them, I was educated in an intellectual and psychoanalytic environment – France and Italy in particular – where thinking is developed in structural terms. The purpose of my article was to try to clarify which essential structural traits distinguish autism from other life forms. Krass, for example, writes:

people on the spectrum are hard-wired to have difficulties reading emotional expression conveyed in eyes (…) and faces (…), have a tendency to have difficulty habituating to novel facial stimuli (…), exhibit neurological overconnectivity that results in difficulties screening out extraneous sensations, feelings and thoughts (…), and are prone to sensory hyperacuity (…) and that these characteristics may be present at birth (…).

These are well-known traits of autism. The point is that Krass lists all these traits without searching for the structuring element, as if autism were the sum of a series of deficits, somewhat in the style of the DSM, in which each disorder is described by a list of traits with no attempt made to find a structural link between them. Now, my hypothesis (if refuted so much the better) is this: all these traits or deficits are expressions of an agnosia of subjectivity. My hypothesis may well be completely wrong, but at least, let me say this, I have tried to put forward a theory ...

This basic difference, I believe, as to what a good explanation might be, causes various misunderstandings also on the part of Krass. For example, Krass contests my thesis that “neurotypical boys’ circular motion is sexualized and thus does not have sensory functions.” But I wrote that for neurotypical boys the “centrifugal movement is erotized”. The centrifugal, not the circular motion. By “erotized” (and not “sexualized”) I simply meant that especially boys take pleasure from linear movements, without denying that it may also have a sensory function. I simply emphasized the different ways in which autistic and neurotypical children derive enjoyment from movement.

Krass cites studies that question the non-understanding of metaphors by autistics. It is a complex issue that would require to be discussed in detail. Certainly high-functioning Aspergers understand metaphors and can also produce them, but the main point is: what does a metaphor mean for them? My impression is that they take it very literally, and therefore, in a certain sense, they take it much more seriously. Wittgenstein (2001, 152e) wrote that:

“The human body is the best picture of the human soul.”

Hacking (2009) insists on this sentence.

We could also say that the human body is an excellent metaphor for the human soul. But my impression is that for those on the ASD the human body is the human soul. The metaphor draws its own meaning into itself. A bit like the shadows of Tito, that we can take as metaphors of the objects of which they are shadows, but that prevent the objects from “telling stories”, that is, from manifesting the variety that constitutes them.

For this reason many autistic people cannot be touched by others. “If someone touches me, I no longer exist” (Williams 1992). It is worse than rape: by touching the body of an autistic, the other is stealing his or her identity, a sign that the body is not experienced as something that allows a subject to enter into relationship with the world, but as something that takes the place of the subject.

There is a lot more still to be said, but I have already written too much. After all, the aim of my article was essentially to provoke psychoanalysts, like a stone thrown into a pond. For this reason the accurate and passionate way in which my critics have reacted satisfies me, because it means the stone has created some waves.

 

References

 

Ansermet, F. & Giacobino, A. (2012) Autisme: à chacun son génome, Navarin, Paris.

 

Bettelheim, B. (1967) The Empty Fortress: Infantile Autism and the Birth of the Self, Free Press, New York.

 

Cooper, E. et al. (1972) Psychiatric Diagnosis in New York and London, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

 

Gallese, V. & Rochat, M. J. & Berchio, C. (2013) The mirror mechanism and its potential role in autism spectrum disorder, Developmental Medecine & Child Neurology, 55, issue 1, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1469-8749.2012.04398.x

Gould, S. J. (1997) “Five weeks”, in Questioning the Millennium, Harmony Books, New York.

Grandin, T.  (1986) Emergence: labeled autistic, Arena Press; Novato, CA.

Grandin, T. (1995) Thinking in pictures: and other reports from my life with autism, Doubleday, New York, NY.

Grandin, T. (2005) Emergence: labeled autistic. a true story, with a supplement, ‘Looking back 2005’, Grand Central Publishing, New York, NY.

Hacking, I. (2001) Leçon inaugurale, faite le jeudi 11 janvier 2001. Collège de France – Chaire de Philosophie et Histoire des concepts scientifiques, https://www.college-de-france.fr/site/ian-hacking/inaugural-lecture-2001-01-11.htm

Hacking, I. (2007) “Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior”, Common Knowledge, vol. 13, 2-3, Spring-Fall 2007, pp. 456-457.

Hacking, I. (2009a) “Humans, aliens and autism”, Daedalus, Summer 23009, vol. 138, 3, pp. 44-59.

Hacking, I. (2009b), “Autistic Autobiography”, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences, 2009 May 27;364(1522):1467-73. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2677587/

 

Hacking, I. (2010), “Autism Fiction: A Mirror of an Internet Decade?”, University of Toronto Quarterly, volume 79, number 2, spring 2010.

 

Katz M., Sanborn K. and Gudeman H. (1969) “Characterizing differences in psychopathology among ethnic groups in Hawaii, Social Psychiatry. F. Redlich, ed., Williams and Wilkins, Baltimore.

 

Köhler, W. (1929) Gestalt psychology, Horace Liveright, New York.

 

Lacan, J. (1989) "Geneva Lecture on the Symptom", transl. by R. Grigg, in Analysis, Issue 1, p. 19.

 

Laurent, É. (2007) "Autisme et psychose: poursuite d'un dialogue avec Robert et Rosine Lefort" in La Cause freudienne, Issue 66, 2007 16.

 

Laurent, È (2008) "Le chiffre de l'autisme", in Le nouvel Âne, Issue 8, February 2008, p. 16. 15.

 

Laurent, É. (2011-12) "Les spectres de l'autisme", in La Cause freudienne, 78, op. cit., p 56.

 

Maleval, J-C. (2009) sous la direction de, L’autiste, son double et ses objets, Presses Universitaire de Rennes, Rennes.

 

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[1] The same way American psychiatrists used to diagnose schizophrenia twice as often as their European counterparts, in particular the British. See Shepherd et al. (1968); Katz et al. (1969); Cooper et al. (1972); Pichot (1982).

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