A Martian Among the Spectra: Autism, Subjectivity and Philosophy

1. Autistic Times

When writing about mental disorders, we need to keep up to date. In the subtitle I have used the term “autism”, but today we say “autism spectrum disorder” or ASD. So I will try to conform to the prevailing jargon. I will, however, continue to use the term “autistics” in order to avoid having to say “person with ASD”, for simplicity.

Dealing with autism as a whole is a desperate mission.

The literature on the subject is endless. When you search ‘autism’ in Scholar, it returns 1,340,000 results. So, we make a selection and usually read the research papers we find more congenial, and only those. That is, we read the texts that adhere to the lines of thought and research we feel we belong to, whether psychoanalytic, cognitivist, behaviorist, phenomenological, neuroscientific, etc.[1]

The sheer volume of publications reflects the staggering rise of autism spectrum diagnoses. In the last fifty years, in hyper-industrialized societies, autism diagnoses have increased twenty-fold—while diagnosed schizophrenics, for example, have increased “only” five times. This is why there has been talk of an autism epidemic. Today, the common belief is that there are eight autistics out of every one thousand children under the age of five—whilst only a few decades ago autism was considered a rare pathology.

Something that has led many to consider that this huge quantitative increase makes autism the paradigmatic pathology of our time, just as hysteria was at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, or schizophrenia in the middle of the last century. Our epoch is, supposedly, autismogenic: it produces more autistics than ever, as an expression of certain fundamental contradictions of our times, just as in the past these fundamental contradictions were expressed by other “disorders.” Today, in addition to autism, the disorders we see all around us are eating disorders, drug addictions, and gender dysphoria—until few years ago, today we say transgender.

I believe autism is actually paradigmatic of our time not because our society produces more autistics than in the past, but because today there is a preference for diagnoses of autism. That is, each epoch develops certain attractor–concepts, in psychopathology as in many other fields. A magnet concept causes more and more cases to fall under that particular concept, hence the impression of an epidemic. Each epoch has had its darling mental disorder—in Europe, sleepwalking in the first half of the 19th century, hysteria in the second half, schizophrenia in the first half of the 20th century.

Psychiatry’s fascination at any given time with a specific disorder produces what Hacking (1995) called a looping effect: a self-reinforcing effect with a dynamic that is at once evident and mysterious. The recipients of psychiatric attention increasingly end up presenting to specialists precisely those disorders they are captivated by, and in the modes those specialists most expect to see confirmed. I therefore cannot rule out, though it is very difficult to prove, that autistic symptomatology may indeed have spread in response to the eager expectations of psychiatrists.

We wonder why each era has its own psychopathology, and why today we want to see autistics everywhere.

It is said that Japan and South-Korea, the countries with the highest number of autistics, in 2021 had a rate of 1.450 per one hundred thousand, but China, which is close, has only 638 autistics per one hundred thousand.[2] It is hard to believe that Japanese and Southern-Korean societies and/or genes have such a remarkable ability to produce autistic children. The reason is that Japanese and Southern Koreans psychiatrists are quick to diagnose autism,[3] in a context in which autism diagnoses are spreading throughout the industrialized world at a faster rate. Greta Thunberg, for instance, was diagnosed with Asperger’s because some years ago she fell into a state of mutism caused by depression. (Today the term “Asperger’s” is used to indicate a mild form of autism that does not hinder good social adaptation.[4])

In short, autism is basically a rather fashionable pathology. Ian Hacking (2010) has spoken of a booming industry of narratives around autism. However, instead of specialist books on autism, we seem to be keen on reading how autistic people describe themselves.[5]

2. Autistic Trees

The tendency to see more and more autistics has led to the adoption of the term autistic spectrum, which can be interpreted in two ways.

In the case of autism, mainstream psychiatry shifts from a categorical paradigm to a dimensional one. A categorical approach considers each disorder a discontinuous category, it implies a binary opposition between health and sickness. Instead, a dimensional approach sees everything as a plus or a minus. In this sense also autism tends to become dimensionalized. Someone can be more or less autistic in the same way they can be taller or shorter, or have a higher or lower IQ. Thus autism is no longer a pathology (whatever the term may mean) but a way of being more or less. So, today by autistic spectrum we mean a continuous series of nuances.

This leads us to ask: what is the opposite of autism, in the way that high is the opposite of low? As we shall see, for many, the polar opposite of autism is empathetic capacity. Empathy—a concept drawn from phenomenological philosophy—is understood as the ability to feel emotions similar to those experienced by the people we engage with. This is the modernized way to refer to “a good person.” And since various studies and observations suggest that women are generally more empathetic than men, we may conclude that men are more autistic than women. And as a matter of fact, autism is diagnosed more frequently in males, with a ratio ranging between 3:1 and 4:1 compared to females.[6] Conclusion: women have more heart than men.

I am willing to accept a dimensional vision of this kind. It allows us to stop isolating autistics in a nosographic ghetto, since autism is instead a continuum of differences. The thesis I will put forward here—that autism is an agnosia of subjectivity—can be understood in a dimensional sense: as a reduced ability, however relative, of perceiving subjectivity.

The concept of spectrum can also have another meaning: namely that the various forms of autism are so heterogeneous that it is 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, a suspicion lurks that there is no such thing as autism as a single entity The idea of spectrum could indeed become the gateway to the demise of the concept of autism. Because if every autistic is an individual case, it will become increasingly difficult to find a common trait in all autistics. The paradox is that as the figure of the autistic person becomes more and more mainstream and marketed, it almost seems that psychiatry is starting to abandon the category.[7] Hysteria has disappeared from psychiatry textbooks, as have several other categories (like psychoses, gender dysphoria, etc.), so there’s no reason why autism shouldn’t disappear as well.

In fact, a good question is why do we not consider all disorders on a spectrum: no two schizophrenics are alike, nor are two obsessive-compulsive people, nor two anorexics, etc. In these cases, we don’t talk of a spectrum because we think we can see several basic common features, which instead increasingly elude us when speaking autism.

The spectrum evokes the spectre. Is not treating autism as a spectrum to admit its spectral nature? In The Communist Party Manifesto Marx and Engels wrote that communism is a spectre haunting Europe. Today we could say that autism is a spectre haunting psychiatry (Laurent, 2011).

My attempt will therefore be to find a structural trait allowing us to continue to talk about autism not only as a spectre or spectrum. What too many texts on autism lack is not a definition, but mention of structural traits to help us recognize autism beyond all the individual differences. It’s not clear who, according to these authors, is actually an autistic person. It is as if these authors had lost themselves in the various aspects that describe an autistic, but without ever putting these together to make a whole—an essence, as we would have said once. Lots of trees, but no forest.

Generally specialists on autism list traits: that people on the spectrum (a) have an innate difficulty in reading emotional expression conveyed by the gaze and by facial expressions, (b) they tend to have difficulty getting used to new facial stimuli, (c) exhibit neurological overconnectivity that results in difficulties screening out extraneous sensations, feelings and thoughts, (d) are prone to sensory hyperacuity, finally (e) these characteristics may be present at birth. But all these traits are listed without looking for a possible common thread, as if autism were a sum of deficiencies, with no attempt to find a structural link between them.

Let us suppose that a diagnostic manual characterized a particular condition listing the following traits:

• The subject, when walking without a cane, will bump into any object situated in front of them;
• If a person walks into the room the subject is in, without speaking, they will not recognize this person, even if they are a close relative;
• It is impossible for the subject to read a book or any other type of text, the text needs to be read out loud for them;
• If the subject is in bed with their partner, they will notice that the latter is naked only by touching their body.

The reader will of course have quickly realized that all these traits define blindness. It would have been much easier to say “a blind person is someone who is unable to use eyesight.” Now, it is the identification of this lack of a specific function that is mostly absent in descriptions of autism (as in many other DSM-type disorders). I have no difficulty admitting, however, that recognizing blindness in a subject is much easier than recognizing what is missing in a series of autistic behaviors.

Now, I will advance the hypothesis that all autistic traits are ways of expressing an agnosia of subjectivity, in the same way the hypothesis that blind people lack the ability to see explains so many of their behaviors.

3. Cognitive-Behavioral Subjects

In recent decades, however, clinical analysis has grasped something important. Many clinicians have in fact understood that autistics are cognitive-behavioral subjects. Not only in the sense that autistics, when approaching clinical theory, almost always believe in today’s cognitive and behavioral theories, but in the sense that the functioning of the autistic mind more or less coincides with the way behaviorists and cognitivists conceive the mind in general. Put another way: if the cognitive-behavioral theory of the human mind were universally valid, we would all be autistic. We could say that the “pathology” of autism is cognitive-behavioral.

Put very succinctly: autism, in its more or less severe forms, seems to be a particular form of agnosia, a kind of psychic blindness to something in particular. There are various agnosias.[8] According to cognitivists, autism is a blindness to the mind of others. In other words, autistics lack a Theory of Mind (ToM), both with regard to themselves and to others. The proverbial awkwardness of autistics in their relationship with others is a sign that they fail to comprehend what goes through the minds of others, whereas for most of us, even if we lack any particular psychological intuition, this process is rather straight-forward.

One of the greatest physicists of the last century, Paul Dirac, was an Asperger’s autistic. As Carlo Rovelli (2017) recounts:

During one of his lectures, a colleague said to him: “I don’t understand that formula”. After a short silent pause, Dirac continued, as if nothing had happened. The moderator interrupted him, asking him if he would like to reply to the question. Dirac, sincerely astonished, replied, “Question? What question? My colleague has made a statement” (“I did not understand that formula” is a statement, not a question…) It wasn’t arrogance: the man who could discover the secrets of nature which had eluded everyone else could not understand the implicit meaning of language, could not grasp its non-literal usage and took every phrase at face value. (pp. 101-102) [9]

In this case, Dirac had failed to grasp the dimension philosophers of language call the performative nature of words[10] : the fact that language is not simply a series of statements, and that we act with language. In the above case, Dirac’s colleague had posed a question, and when someone poses a question the other is forced, in one way or another, to offer a reply; even by simply saying they’re not going to reply.

To use a distinction drawn from the linguist Benveniste (1966), that between “énoncé” (a statement, independent of context) and “énonciation” (an enunciation, the act of stating something), we can say that autistics understand énoncés but fail to grasp énonciations. The statement is the literal phrase, the enunciation is the subjective act of enunciating something, the meaning of which depends on the context and unexplained intentions. A vivid example of the difference between statement and enunciation is offered by a famous joke, told by Freud (1905):

Two Jews meet in a railway carriage at a station in Galicia. “Where are you going?” asks one. “To Cracow,” replied the other. “What a liar you are!” objects the first. “If you say you’re going to Cracow, you want me to believe you’re going to Lemberg. But I know that in fact you’re going to Cracow. So why are you lying to me?” (pp. 59–60)

Here is a language game that an autistic person would have serious difficulty understanding. After all, if there’s one thing autistics have no access to, it’s a sense of humor.

But if the opposite of being tall is being short, and if the opposite of being intelligent is being stupid, what is the opposite of being autistic? As we will see, nowadays many tend to believe that the opposite of autism is the capacity for empathy.

4. Hugging Machines

Now, the classical cognitivist theory of autism—as a lack of a theory of mind[11]—has been refuted by neuroscientists inspired by philosophical phenomenology, and in particular by Vittorio Gallese (2006), one of the discoverers of mirror neurons (a member of the Parma team). According to these neuroscientists, we directly perceive the intentions, allusions and implicit metaphors of others not because we have built a theory of mind over time, as the cognitivist model claims, but because we directly perceive the subjectivity of others. In the physicist’s statement “I don’t understand that formula” we all perceive—rather than interpret—that a question to Dirac is being posed. In short, autism is the agnosia of a ‘very particular object’ that cognitivism fails to delineate and conceptualize: subjectivity, both our own and that of others. The autistic, not perceiving subjectivity, perceives only cognitive minds, in which the function of metaphorization is actually flawed.

This situation is well described in a Hungarian film, On Body and Soul (2017) by Ildikó Enyedi. The female protagonist is a well-integrated autistic woman and an employee at an abattoir, but she has difficulty grasping the sense of desire for a man and the desire of a man for her, because desire is the fundamental expression of subjectivity. A libido deficiency is also the specific trait of Temple Grandin.

Grandin is possibly the best-known autistic subject in the world.[12] She has written several essays on autism, she is a renowned specialist in the problems of animal breeding and teaches Animal Sciences at Colorado State University. She also invented a slaughtering system that makes the process much less traumatic for the livestock. Her autobiography, published in 1986, Emergence: Labeled Autistic, was a bestseller.[13] A brilliant polemicist, she attacked the psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim’s vision and argues—as do all learned autistics—for a purely neurological explanation of autism.

It should be noted that Temple lacks any sort of erotic desire, sexual feelings are completely incomprehensible for her. Temple built a famous mobile machine that massages her, which she says gives her a great sense of well-being. Her friends have always described it to her as a hug machine. Temple cannot make any sense of the sensual embrace of a man or a woman, but she can make sense of the embrace of a machine. On the contrary, a hug from a human being would put her in a state of anguish; she would feel invaded. In this case, the feeling of well-being turns into discomfort. This autistic scientist has difficulty in seeing how a human embrace is related to a mechanical embrace.

In the non-autistic experience of an embrace, even in the absence of any sexual attraction for the person embracing us, at least three different dimensions converge, that need to be distinguished. One is the physical dimension of the massage, which in itself is pleasant, hence the various professional massage practices of today. Another dimension is that of symbolic, we might call it, signification: by embracing us, the other metaphorically includes us in him or her, becoming the place that welcomes us, “internalizing” us in a corporeal way, as if eating us with his or her arms. And there’s a purely affective dimension linked to the other, an embrace as a bodily way of feeling loved by someone else. Now it seems clear that for Grandin only the first dimension of the embrace is present, the physical one, while the other two do not appear. And this makes it possible for her to replace another human being with a machine.

The delicate question is: is this very intense soothing pleasure, which the autistic person draws from a mechanical massage, only physical? Or does the physical experience translate an experience with another subject, and one of signification, in which both are “reified”? It is as if a mother took pleasure in continually feeding her toddler despite not feeling any affection for it: where the pleasure of feeding the child mechanically might be the surrogate of an unperceived love. This would most certainly be the case of an autistic mother.

5. A House Without Walls

Everything we have said so far should help explain why autism should not be confused with psychosis. I would say that autism is actually its opposite. Indeed, we call people psychotic—schizophrenic, paranoiac, manic-depressive—when we believe they attribute an excess of signification to the world, especially to the human world. That is, they perceive and understand far more signification than there actually is, and we say they are delusional; also, they produce far more signification than necessary (according to us), like in disorganized speech (Ideenflucht). In the typical flow of signifiers, subjects “rant”, so to speak, say things that for us have only a faint connection, as if the subjects’ words were racing to catch up with extremely fast thoughts that they themselves struggle to keep up with.

The main pathognomonic trait of all psychosis is hearing voices. For psychotics the world is far more talkative than it is for us. Psychosis always has an excess of signifier—which in no way means an excess of sense! These voices can be pressing, continuous, pervasive, but entirely nonsensical. With regard to interpretation, delusion among paranoid subjects, we’re convinced that they read too much signification in real events that for us are irrelevant or casual. In other words, we speak of psychosis when a subject inhabits a world that is too signifying compared to “our” world, and this regardless of whether the psychotic person finds sense in this excess of signification (as in systematized paranoid delusions) or finds no signification at all.

Conversely, the world inhabited by autistics appears to us as too poor of signifiers. Autistics see the other and themselves as sets of behaviors, but they find it difficult to see a subjectivity that signifies itself behind these behaviors. The world of the autistic is anti-hermeneutic, it is a purely ontic world: signs are similar to stones or rivers, they are not something that signifies. It is incorrect to say that autistics live in a world of their own: on the contrary, they are completely plunged inside the real world, but in this world any metaphorical ambiguity, any subjective fissure, has been removed. Their being-in-the-world has been stripped of its skin, hence the horror caused by strong sensations, certain noises, particular gestures. The “skin” in question is our subjectivity, which wraps and cushions our relationship with reality, which makes the reality outside us less brutal.

It is perhaps thanks to autism that we can infer the sense of what here we call subjectivity, an extremely volatile concept. Indeed, subjectivity is not consciousness or self-consciousness—an autistic person is very conscious—nor is it mind in the cognitive sense. We could say that, thanks to its lack or absence, autism helps us grasp something about our own subjectivity: i.e. that subjectivity is a void around which the world neatly rotates.

We are never be completely exposed to reality in its full insignificance, we always modulate it subjectively, both with our thoughts, and by reading the thoughts and feelings of others. Subjectivity seems to be the equivalent of a film soundtrack, which loads images that are provided with meaning, helping us metabolize them. An autistic is not an empty fortress—The Empty Fortress is the title Bettelheim (1967) gave to his main book on autism. Autistics are somewhat void of subjectivity, but not because they have withdrawn from the world by building a defensive barrier around themselves. If they have built one, it is secondary compared to their feeling of being “lost” in a world of non-autistics. Instead, for them the social world, the world of human relations, is incomprehensible—and therefore threatening—because they do not have the ability to “read” the subjective and signifying side of the world. As the patient of a psychoanalyst said: “From an early age I felt isolated because I could see other children were talking with their eyes. But I couldn’t understand them.”

I would say that an autistic is more like “a house without walls,” a house that isn’t actually there. And so they defend themselves from the outside world however they can, by curling up into themselves.

In the most severe cases autistics have no access even to articulated language. But this lack of access to language is not due to a cognitive deficit, the inability to use symbols insofar as they are abstract signs. This lack of access is rather their extreme difficulty in accessing the subjective dimension of language, the fact that speaking is not merely putting words together, but manifesting something subjective through words. For autistics language is something abstract, disconnected from subjective expression. Language for them is only a formal object, similar to the language described by Chomsky’s transformational grammar.

A common trait of autistics is that they look not into the eyes of others as they speak, but at their mouths. Very young “normal” children, even before the age of two, look at the eyes of adults before anything else. This is a crucial difference. We consider the eyes the “mirror of the soul” even though nothing comes out of them, and only very subtle ocular variations tell us what the other person is feeling; the eyes lead us to something immaterial, i.e. to the supposed location of subjectivity, which seems to be hidden beneath them. The “inner hole” some call it. On the other hand, from our mouths it is material sounds, material words, that come out, and an autistic is, so to speak, a born materialist, sensitive to what comes out of the subjectivity of others, not to the subjectivity in itself. The eyes of another lead us back to a function that mirrors our own: the other looks at me just as I look at her or him. But a mouth is not specular: the other speaks, so my mouth must stay shut. The difference lies in the assumption of the subjectivity of others.

This is why I find it inexact to speak of autism as a developmental disorder.[14] It suggests that every child goes through an autistic phase, the exception being that autistic children stay in this phase and do not progress. But I am unaware of any autistic stages in children, unless they already are autistic. Or unless we take “autistic” in the completely different sense given to the term by Bleuler (1911), who, however, was thinking of psychotics. We may say that autism today is a developmental disorder, just as we may say that a child who is born blind cannot develop eyesight. Blindness from birth, however, is not a developmental disorder, and neither is autism.

It is not true—Gallese (2006) claims—that autistics have failed to build a theory of mind for themselves, as the cognitivists argue: on the contrary, they can come into contact with others only because of a theory of mind they have built, not thanks to the immediate intuition of the other’s subjectivity, which renders our relations with others fluid and meaningful, at least to a certain extent. Autistics do build ToMs, quite accurately in many cases, in the same way we construct theories on chemical elements or galaxies. Except that we don’t speak to chemical elements or to galaxies, which is why we need theories. It is as if the other, in the eyes of an autistic, were an object of objective investigation, not a being-with-me or a being-against-me. The other’s subjectivity does not manifest itself in what the other says or does.

This helps us understand why autistics are skillful, sometimes more skillful than average, in mathematical tasks, calculations, memory operations, or purely logical tasks. Mathematical signifiers require no subjective premises. Autistics are skillful like computers, and can be excellent at using them, because of the analogy between them and computers: that of not perceiving subjectivity. Most of us don’t think that the computer they’re using, even if it speaks to them—as Siri or Cortana do—has a mind. In purely formal operations, in fact, it’s best not to show anything of our subjectivity or of someone else’s. A computer program reveals nothing about the subjectivity of the person who created it. Software is not subjectivity.

Autistics particularly like to perform centripetal movements; for example, swirling a rope. Many of them love spinning in a rotor in amusement parks, an attraction where people are crushed, so to speak, inside a swirling cylinder. It is what I would call the autistic passion for the spinning top. How might we explain this attraction?

The reason—I suppose—is that our subjectivity is like a center which somehow structures the surrounding world like a whirl around it. This is what is meant when we say that every “ego” is the center of the world. The world is ordered by subjectivity, which is first of all centralization, in the sense that it makes everything rotate around our “I”, like the Ptolemaic Earth. Now, if autistics lack this central subjectivity, a certain terror of being transported by things, of drifting away with them, ensues. In a certain sense, they are “Copernican” subjects. They are afraid of being sucked into reality because they cannot give it meaning through our precious subjective angularity. For this very reason, when in the physical world they come across something their mind lacks—a centripetal nature, for example—they are seduced by it. In circular and concentric shapes they see a solution to an intrinsic difficulty of theirs, intrinsic to their being-in-the-world. Hence the familiar tendency of autistics to repeat the same things over and over again, to be ultra-conservative, so to speak: it is how they defend themselves from the threatening fluidity of the world.

Likewise, their tendency to rock seems to be aimed at reproducing a pivot, that is, the ideal fulcrum that each one of us thinks we have or that perhaps we are, around which our body, but also our thoughts, unfold. It is as if the autistic person continuously tried to re-form, in the real, a sense of centrality or axiality as a subject, a centrality and axiality that for us are not spatial but mental.

6. Autistic Ontology

In any case, not even the neuro-phenomenological theory, which views autism as a lack of empathic ability—perhaps due to dysfunctional mirror neurons, as Gallese (2006) claims—is enough. There is a lack of empathy in autism, true, but only to the extent that empathy is the affective function, so to speak, that accompanies the perception of our own subjectivity or that of others. For example, those who tend to reduce autism to a lack of empathy find it difficult to comment the famous Sally-Anne test.[15]

This test shows two girls in the same room. Sally has a basket next to her and Anne has a box next to her. Sally puts a marble into the basket and leaves. Meanwhile, Anne takes the marble from the basket and puts it inside her box. At a certain point Sally comes back and asks the person being tested: “Where does Sally think the marble is?” It’s quite remarkable that most normal children, and even those with Down syndrome, come up with the right answer, whereas the majority of autistics—in the same way as many young children under the age of four—respond that Sally will look for the marble in Anne’s box. This is supposedly proof of the fact that autistics lack a ToM.

The difficulty encountered by the theory of autism as a lack of empathy stems from the fact that the wrong response by an autistic person does not seem to be related to an empathic relationship with the other, but to something even deeper: in autistics we find a primacy of the ontological dimension over the epistemological. What matters is the state of things, not who considers the state of things. Knowing or not knowing tends to be irrelevant to autistics, because knowledge implies a disconnect between subjective function and extra-subjective reality. I would readily bet that if an autistic person were to become a philosopher, they would never be a Kantian philosopher: for them, noumena and phenomena, the thing-in-itself and the things as they appear to us, would necessarily have to coincide. Autism is realism incarnate. The lack of empathy of autistics is therefore a consequence of the fact that not only do they not perceive the subjectivity of others, but also lack a perception of their own subjectivity.

In short, autism, because of the lack that characterizes it—the non-perception of subjectivity—can return to us a precious image of what we have termed subjectivity, an entity which both of the philosophies that prevail today—cognitivism and phenomenology—struggle to conceptualize. Cognitivism deals only with the mind, which is essentially a cognitive mind, and therefore cannot see subjectivity, which is an instance beyond or within the mind. Phenomenology instead reduces subjectivity to something integrated with our being-in-the-world, always situated in the relationship with other subjects, but never described as such. Perhaps this is where psychoanalysts would have some work to do, because psychoanalysis is a research program that thematizes subjectivity, even though it has trouble describing it.

7. Poor Unconscious

From everything we’ve said so far it appears that working therapeutically with autistic subjects represents quite a daunting problem for psychoanalysts. For the simple reason that if autism is a form of agnosia of one’s own subjectivity and that of others, the inevitable conclusion is that the autistic person practically has no unconscious, at least not of the kind psychoanalysts can perceive in neuroses and psychoses. It is true that today a certain psychoanalytic tendency claims that modern humans have increasingly become beings without an unconscious. Perhaps. But if there is no longer an unconscious, psychoanalysis may as well also close up shop; psychoanalysis without an unconscious is inconceivable. In a sense, this “unconsciousness current” claims that practically everyone is now autistic, which seems a little excessive. And this has come to coincide with the dimensional vision of autism: that we are all more or less autistic.

We can safely say that while in psychoses the unconscious makes itself manifest, that subjects are overwhelmed by their unconscious, in autism, on the contrary, they seem to have a poor unconscious. Autistics would need a far greater degree of unconscious to enter into a meaningful relationship of exchange with others, insofar as our unconscious is where our ability to understand others is rooted, through it we make others significant. Freud described psychoanalytic work in analogy with the Dutch Zuider Zee, as a drying up of part of the sea of the unconscious. But in the case of autism, we have too much arid land, we would rather need a drastic irrigation of the Es, the “it”. The Freudian unconscious is a surplus of signifier (and of drives) that our ego, the part of subjectivity that controls and organizes, cannot control, use or metabolize. For Freud, the unconscious is not just repressed drives: it consists of impulses that continuously signify, and the ego—the cognitive functions of the human being—is often threatened with being subjected to this plus-signification, which makes us signifying flesh. Flesh in the ancient sense, which is not the extended body, but the sensitive body, which suffers or enjoys. The “I” is enriched by these impulses too, which make it creative, if “I” is able to handle them.

In autistics the opposite happens: their subjectivity is impoverished by a minus of signification. This certainly does not mean that they have no affections and emotions; these may in fact be so strong as to overwhelm them. But autistic emotionality is wanting in subjective signification, it consists of emotions without an “I”. Of course, autistics express joy, fear, anger, etc., but they are not in tune with social expectations. In fact, it is in dealing with social emotions that autistics are incompetent, because social emotions imply the recognition of the subjectivity of others, and the fact that one’s subjectivity is recognized by others. This is why they often feel they’re “animals”, not in the sense that they are stirred by beastlike appetites, but in the sense that they do not feel entirely human. They’re somewhere between animals and computers, bypassing humanity.

In fact, autistics don’t know feelings like modesty, shame, or guilt. They do not understand the reason for social taboos and therefore do not understand the social hypocrisy that regulates our relationships. Hence their famous gaffes. Many learn to live in society so well that their diversity is hardly noticeable. For instance, they know that if they’re introduced to a child they need to say “oh, what a beautiful child!”. But if a child is horrible and malformed, we can’t say to the boy or his parents “what a beautiful child!”. And this is exactly what autistic people tend to do. They do not understand that common social hypocrisy needs limitations, otherwise it exposes itself as such. One aspect of social hypocrisy is to understand when it cannot be applied.

That is to say, autistics do not know how to deceive, they do not attempt to impress others. They never manipulate, they never engage or take an interest in gossip. They have no sense of ownership, they are envy-free, and they like to give. In short, they are devoid of the whole range of affections, even despicable ones, that confer depth to our being with others. Because being-with-others means not only to empathize with others—as a sugar-coated narrative would have us believe today—but also to find them obnoxious or hateful, to envy them, to compete with them and surpass them, to punish them, etc. Our being with others always also implies being against others. In this sense, Asperger’s autistics are ideal humans according to a certain vision of social relations I would call irenic.

This does not mean that autistic people cannot feel compassion for people or animals who suffer. Grandin, for example, felt pity for the pigs: she would accompany them to the slaughterhouse crying. But autistic compassion is devoid of empathy, as we said. Empathy doesn’t mean having sympathy for others, nor does it mean to pity them: it is to feel that the suffering of others is also (a little) our own. Compassion for another is feeling that the other is being harmed; but we empathize, I would say, with the very existence of the other. It is the existence of others that moves us, even when nothing terrible happens to them. We can therefore say that the autistic is certainly capable of compassion—we can feel pity even for an object—but not empathy. Some children cry out of compassion for a broken object, but we can’t say they empathize with it! This is Gallese’s (2006; 2013) thesis: due to a (likely) lack of mirror neurons, autistics are incapable of empathy. But I believe this lack of empathy is the corollary of a deeper agnosia.

8. Köhler Phenomena

Autistics obviously know that other subjects exist, but to know is one thing and to perceive is another. A blind man knows there’s a table in front of him, because someone has told him or because he has touched it, yet he does not see it. My hypothesis is that, with the exception of autistics, we all perceive subjectivity.

Ian Hacking (2001; 2009b) supported a very suggestive thesis, based on Köhler (1929) and Wittgenstein (1953/2001). Wittgenstein 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 mood. I note it, and do not infer it” (Wittgenstein, 1953/2001, as cited in Hacking 2001). Hacking (1975) quotes Köhler, 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” [italics added by Hacking] … Köhler pointed to a wide range of phenomena in which we see and do not infer what a person is doing. (pp. 161-162)

Hacking calls Köhler phenomena all these acts in which we see the subjectivity of others and do not simply construct hypotheses around 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” (Hacking, 2009b, p. 1469). In short, autistics are such because they do not have direct access to Köhler phenomena—and Hacking also explains how this hypothesis refutes the theory of a lack of ToM in ASD. In fact, Hacking calls Köhler phenomena what I call the direct perception of subjectivity.

I think Hacking’s reference to Wittgenstein is even more insightful than the Parma team’s reference to philosophical phenomenology.

Today, the theory that explains autism through the “broken mirror hypothesis” (that is, as a dysfunction in the mirror neuron system) is the subject of wide debate among researchers, and several alternative models have been proposed.[16]

That said, I mentioned the mirror neuron hypothesis not because I’m betting on its truth, but because it represents the way neuroscience inspired by phenomenology attempts to provide scientific support for the claim—advanced by phenomenology and Wittgenstein—that our relationship with others does not occur through a ToM but through an immediate perception of subjectivity (Gallese, Rochat & Berchio, 2013). This is the important point for me in the hypothesis of mirror neuron deficiency in autistics. The real bet is whether the neurosciences will be able to integrate a fundamental concept such as subjectivity—which is difficult, considering also many psychoanalysts have not managed to integrate it.

In practice this means: will we ever manage to simulate an autistic form of life on a computer or in a robot? Computer simulation of various human mental activities is always, in fact, outside the concept of subjectivity: a computer program consists in instructions that have no subjectivity in themselves. If, as I believe, the (merely philosophical?) concept of subjectivity cannot be simulated using a mechanical system, then is there something non-mechanical in the human being? Even though autism can be seen as a human way of reducing subjectivity to the mind, i.e. to calculable operations. We do not have space here to address the fundamental question of whether what we call subjectivity in human interaction is in some way connected to the brain’s non-deterministic processes.

9. From Another Planet

But what do I mean by subjectivity? Various modern philosophies have developed concepts of subjectivity: Nietzsche’s, Husserl’s intentionality, Heidegger’s Dasein, Sartre’s being-for-itself, the subject as Lacan’s barred signifier, etc. I’m uncertain myself as to how to define the subject—which is not to be confused with the mind. I am hoping that autistics will help us better understand what this “something” they lack could be, and that we neurotypical individuals don’t know we possess. Perhaps it is the fact that we attribute to an “I”—and to a “you” which is, from their point of view, an “I”—all our mental processes (thoughts, emotions, insights, etc.).

I could represent subjectivity with a torus:

Here subjectivity is the void at the center of the torus, around which all mental forms are organized like a toroid, i.e. like a doughnut ordered around a void. My hypothesis is that in autism the mind is not organized like a torus.

But is this not a way of implicitly discriminating against autistics as failed human beings, sub-humans, or non-humans? I don’t believe it is, whatever sense we want to assign to the term “human beings.” In fact, lacking certain traits can lead to the development of other abilities that neurotypical individuals may not possess. Susanna Tamaro (2019), a highly successful author diagnosed with Asperger’s, 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. (p. 85)

In fact, when autistics manage to describe their way of being-in-the world, we find their way of relating to things, both animal and inorganic, quite striking and fascinating. They reveal a perception of the world that neurotypical individuals lack.

When I say that autistics shy away from humanity, I am not referring to what they do, but to what they feel. Many autistics doubt that they are truly “human” in the sense that they find neurotypical individuals not very human, so to speak. The expression Grandin used to describe herself to Oliver Sacks is famous: an anthropologist on Mars. Evidently for her neurotypical individuals are Martians. And she is the anthropologist.

The autistic Jasmine Lee O’Neill (1998) describes her way of seeing the world as Through The Eyes of Aliens (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” (p. 86). The metaphor of the “other planet” often recurs in autistic literature.

As well as an identification with aliens, there is also an identification with animals.

Grandin’s identification with animals is not a psychoanalytic interpretation of mine, it is what she states herself more than once. For instance, when she was a child, her school organized an exhibition of domestic animals and each child had to bring a pet. She brought herself, and behaved like her own dog (see also: Hacking, 2007). But as a child the same Grandin thought she was by no means “strange,” she thought all her schoolmates were “odd,” and only when she grew up did she realize that she was the one who was “special.”

My impression is that autistic people see us a bit like we see psychotics: as people who employ a language we find incomprehensible, ambiguous, inconsistent. Perhaps we would understand a little of what autistic people experience if we imagine ourselves living in a land where almost everyone is psychotic.

I perfectly understand that many autistics are proud of their difference, the same as members of other minorities considered “differently-abled” (a common term in Italian for ‘disabled’). I know individuals who were deaf and speech impaired from birth and who are very happy with and proud of their condition, who do not hide a certain contempt for those who can speak and perceive sounds. Everyone has the right to their own narcissism. All the more so in the case of autistics with extraordinary intellectual abilities, and who are also savants, who possess formidable abstract calculation skills.

I don’t believe, however, that we would be doing autistic people a favor by lathering them with this edifying rhetoric, which sounds something like “we’re not Martians, in the same way as you’re not Martians! We’re all the same!”. No, we are not all the same. And it is this very difference that can confer meaning to “Aspie pride”.

There’s a contradiction in political correctness: if an equality between neurotypical individuals and the “disordered” is stated too strongly, then the pride of the disordered no longer makes sense. If deaf and speech impaired people were to claim that they can perceive sounds and speak too, what would their pride be based on?

In this way political correctness risks lapsing into a form of obscurantism. Scientific and intellectual research needs to be free, in the sense that it should not be censured and intimidated when it states whatever the prevailing ethical and political beliefs may find disagreeable. In this way freedom of research would be under threat.

What I find quite 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 too narrow concept of humanity, because even ways of being human that appear restricted just because of this specificity actually enlarge the possible field of humanity. We come into contact with the autistic world trying to understand its difference, trying to understand the problems autistics need to deal with. Even if this difference, as a “dimensional” vision claims, were only relative, in the sense that we are all more or less autistic.

If it is true that autism consists of a specific agnosia, then it’s clear that every autistic person is different from the other, given that everyone has their own personality. The differences in personality between autistics are the same as those between the neurotypical. People blind from birth too, for example, are very different one from another: I have never heard of a typical “blind’s personality.”

10. The Silence of Shadows

A specialist reproached me for my analogy, whereby an autistic person is “a house with no walls,” i.e. a house that practically doesn’t exist. This too was viewed as being not very politically correct. But the expression wasn’t mine, it was my way of paraphrasing the eloquent title of a famous book by the Asperger’s Donna Williams (1992): Nobody Nowhere. This paradoxical image of a “house without walls” was my way of overturning the image of the “empty fortress” evoked by Bettelheim (1967).

As Tamaro (2019) says in the aforementioned article:

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’s never has second 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. (p. 84)

Speaking of Greta Thunberg, also diagnosed with Asperger’s, she says: “Greta is not cunning, she has no second motives, she knows none of the techniques used to manipulate, which allow to be at ease in society” (p. 84).

On various occasions Grandin speaks of how she became angry when confronted with ambiguous situations or objects. According to her an autistic’s logic is “black and white.” (Grandin 1996, p. 45)

Autistics, when they know how to write well, are never sugar-coated, and above all they emphasize their difficulties in communicating with other humans. They prefer to converse with things.

Some psychoanalysts have criticized my idea that in certain ways autism is the opposite of psychosis. This opposition between autism and psychosis is contrary to a widespread theory in continental Europe, which states that autism is a form of psychosis, as Lacan himself (1989) also argued in some way.

But this idea that psychoses are the opposite of autism was advanced by Williams (1992), even though she describes her difference 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.

Every standard textbook on autism begins by saying that autism is a language disorder.

But to speak of “language disorder” still amounts to saying nothing, because there are various dimensions of language, and therefore various different relationships between language and subjectivity. Being deaf and speech impaired is also a language disorder.

The classical distinction is between the semantic, syntactic and pragmatic dimensions of language. Clinical literature clearly shows that in autism there is no disorder of the syntactic function, but only of the semantic and pragmatic ones. What does this mean? When I say that an autistic tends (not completely, of course) to think like a computer, or like a mathematician when calculating, it is precisely because computation is a purely syntactic activity, while the subjectivity I am considering concerns the semantic and pragmatic dimension. As I said, autistics can be very good at understanding statements, much less so at understanding enunciations. For them language is weakly performative.

It is no surprise that one savant out of three (of those with extraordinary computational abilities) is autistic.[17] The testimony of an autistic savant like Tammet (2006) is precious in this sense. He considers numbers actual objects, each with their own color, texture, beauty or ugliness; some are agreeable, some obnoxious—and the same goes for the words of the various languages he knows.

For example, he is fascinated by the “sullen beauty” (Tammet 2006, p. 5). He sees signifiers as objects, precisely because he does not perceive them in relation to subjectivity. But this is the very reason why autistics have access to a material perception of signifiers, let’s say to their aesthetic side, one which is largely precluded to neurotypical individuals.

Dirac too was a savant in physics, and he said that he saw all quantum calculations and equations as geometrical forms: he saw the shapes of calculations.

Conversely, the Indian autist Tito Mukhopadhyay (2000; 2008), in his own beautiful testimony, tends to see objects, especially mobile or glowing objects, as actual texts. “The story behind an object,” he writes, “is far more important to me than the object” (2008, p. 75). From a very early age, his best companions were the mirror and the shadows of objects. When looking at a mirror he is not interested in seeing himself—we cannot speak of a Lacanian mirror stage—but in the fact that it tells 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. (Mukhopadhyay, 2008, pp. 6-7)

“The sky and earth speak to each other” (p. 7). On the contrary, “my shadows never told me 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” (p. 9).

It would be a mistake to view this speaking and storytelling world in which Tito lives as hallucinatory. In psychotic hallucinations signifiers invade the real, they colonize it. Here the opposite occurs: the real objects rise to the status of quasi-subjects, they possess the subjectivity 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 is as if Tito perceived subjectivity as a reflection of the body, as a double of the body. It is as if autistics saw snippets of subjectivity in the world, since they cannot see them coagulate as centers of themselves or of the other.

Take autistic echolalia, when autistics simply repeat what the other says. To call it a language disorder—as many psychiatrists do—is merely to apply a label. Autistics who talk about their echolalia say they cannot grasp the sense of the other’s words, which simply come across as meaningless sounds. For them repeating the other’s sentences is a way of saying: “look, I can enter into a relationship. I can produce the same noises as you” (Williams, 1992, p. 77). In other words, autistics often struggle to grasp the signified, which is invariably a metaphorical interpretation of the signifiers; they do not “subjectivize” the sounds they hear. Instead of apprehending the signified in silence, they cling to the materiality of the signifier—to its being sound—replacing subjectivation with the repetition of the signifier itself. This is akin to saying “April is the cruelest month means: April is the cruelest month.” The repetition of the material signifier replaces the transcending of the signifier that we call “grasping the sense” of something.

Mirrors and shadows for Tito, echolalia for other autistics. These are reflections, doubles, of objects or signifiers that take the place of a subjectivity that is the blind spot of their relationship with the mind. But, as we said that subjectivity is an empty organizer of the self and of the world, we can also say that autistics are blind to this emptiness. They grasp it in the form of reflection.

Along these lines we could try to understand the reason for certain autistic behaviors that seem utterly enigmatic to us. For example, why do they often clap their hands? Not out of agitation, but because the gesture and the sound calms them. My hypothesis is that this gesture symbolizes the meeting-detachment of two parts of their self, because there is no central void that organizes the fragments of their soul.

Many psychoanalysts disagree with the claim that, in a certain sense, autistics lack an unconscious. According to Freud all human beings have an unconscious. Mine is in fact a rather provocative expression to speak about a certain poverty of unconscious in autistics, but above all to put forward the idea that the autistic form of life should help broaden our Freudian concept of the unconscious. Like when I say that autistics “shy away from humanity.” Autism actually beckons us to redefine our notions of humanity and unconscious. There is no room here to develop this notion further, but I can add in a very rudimentary manner that autistics lack the essentially metaphorical unconscious of neurotics and psychotics. They don’t have an “inner” unconscious but an external one, as if it emanated from things.

Today all psychoanalysts accept the neurological basis of autism. If we accept the neurological basis of autism, why not accept the same for almost all the other mental disorders, from schizophrenia, to depression, hysteria, etc.? I would even be willing to discuss an etiology that essentially focuses on the mother-child relationship as the main cause of autism—I frankly find it an unlikely explanation, even though I do believe that the way parents cope with an autistic child can strongly determine the development of this child. But this is not the point that interests me.

I criticize the focus on the mother-child relationship—so pivotal for so many analysts—insofar as it does not allow psychoanalysts to thematize what seems to me the essential element, the quid of autism. Many psychoanalysts believe that it is the modalities of this relationship that produce the various symptoms or disabilities of autism, whereas I believe that first of all it is necessary to identify the characterizing features of autism as manifestations of a central node.

Today many actually question the non-understanding of metaphors by autistics. It is a complex issue that would require a detailed discussion. High-functioning Asperger’s individuals definitely do understand metaphors and can also produce them, but the point is: what does a metaphor mean to them? My impression is that they take it very literally, and therefore, in a certain sense, take it much more seriously. Wittgenstein (1953/2001) wrote that “the human body is the best picture of the human soul” (p. 152e).

Hacking (2009a) insists on this proposition 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.

This is why many autistics cannot bear to be touched by others. “If someone touches me, I no longer exist” (Williams, 1992, p. 22). It is worse than rape: by touching the body of an autistic person, the other is stealing their 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 that subject. For the autistic, the body coincides with their being. For them, like for the ancient Stoics, everything is body.

11. Mother Versus Brain

For some time now, in many countries those who revile psychoanalysis have been riding autism as their battle horse to launch a violent attack on psychoanalysis. They say: autistics should not be put in the care of psychoanalysts because the psychoanalytic theory on autism has turned out to be flawed. Better to resort to other techniques of the cognitive-behavioral kind, rehabilitation systems such as ABA (Applied Behavior Analysis).

Premise: I’m a practicing psychoanalyst. I believe psychoanalytic theory to be very powerful and unjustly underestimated by psychologists and psychiatrists today. I believe that an analysis, if carried out correctly, is an effective cure. I also believe, however, that so far psychoanalytic theories on autism have been a flop. Amicus Freudus, sed magis amica veritas.

The opponents of psychoanalysis focus specifically on the psychoanalysis of autism and not on other psychoanalytic approaches—for instance on neuroses, psychoses or perversions—because they realize that autism is the Achilles’ heel of psychoanalysis. And that psychoanalysis does not adequately protect this heel. Just as in any war, they attack the enemy’s weakest flank.

In my opinion the fragility of psychoanalytic theories on autism developed so far doesn’t so much depend on the weakness of its etiopathogenesis, as its detractors think. It is not so much a matter of what mainstream psychoanalysis invokes as the essential cause of autism, an “inhuman” mother-child relationship—the “refrigerator mother” theory, which inspired the explanation of autism for decades. The weakness of psychoanalytic theories consists rather in their vision of the specificity of autism. On this point, I think cognitivist approach is ahead of psychoanalysis.

Those who want to support the current psychoanalytic approach to autism at all costs limit themselves to attachment theory (which derives from psychoanalysis through John Bowlby): to the idea that the mother-child relationship basically explains everything, from schizophrenia to autism, from perversions to sociopathies. However, the great thinkers of psychoanalysis, from Freud to Lacan via M. Klein, never advocated a similar theory, that the mother or the earliest caregiver are entirely to blame for any psychopathology. All subjects bring their own contribution, also to their relationship with essential adults. We are not entirely the product of our mother. The difficult thing is to determine the nature of this contribution that each subject gives to the relationship.

The psychoanalytic approach to autism rather lacks an understanding of what autism really is. Because first of all we need to ask: “what is it essentially?”

Now, it seems to me that a large part of psychoanalysis—starting from Bettelheim—confuses the “autism” Eugen Bleuler spoke about with the autism later described by Kanner and Asperger, i.e. with autism as we understand it today. For Bleuler (1911) autism was the core symptom of schizophrenia, i.e. the psychotic mode of withdrawal from the world and from relations with others, but it had nothing to do with what we refer to today as the autistic spectrum.[18] In short, psychoanalysis has continued to believe that autism is a specific form of psychosis, and therefore that it can be explained in the same way as other psychoses.[19]

Unfortunately, however, it doesn’t seem to me that most analysts have grasped this specificity of autism as an agnosia of subjectivity.

Hence I cannot subscribe to the campaign that several analysts in various countries have launched against the non-psychoanalytic approach to autism. Theirs is a whining attitude, and one ultimately inclined toward failure, because adopting a defensive stance amounts to confessing your weaknesses. At its peak, in the ‘60s and ‘70s, psychoanalysis never defended itself, it attacked; this is how it was able to call into question traditional psychiatry, the psychiatry of asylums and purely nosological psychiatry. Psychoanalysis should indeed treasure what other research has clarified, completely reformulating its hypotheses on autism. Following a possible line of research that I will try to outline.

The defense strategies of psychoanalysts aim at a clear opposition between two etiopathogenetic theories: the “relationship with adults (especially the mother)” on the one hand, and “organic cerebral constitution” on the other. This rigid opposition—relationship versus state of the brain—is however a trap psychoanalysis should not fall into. Suppose the discovery is made that certain organic (cerebral) predispositions are needed to develop hysteria: would this ipso facto falsify all that psychoanalysis has said and understood on hysteria? Not at all. Everything we speak of in terms of psychic language can, at least in theory, be given a cerebral equivalent—these two languages are incommensurable, but not incompatible.

Good psychoanalysis has never rejected constitutional factors or cerebral predispositions a priori. The point is what subjects, and those around them, will make of these predispositions. Indeed, some organic predispositions and subjective stories are so intertwined and fused that we can’t split “intersubjective relationship” from “state of the brain” with the stroke of an ax. I do not at all rule out that a certain relationship established by a mother with her autistic child may be an essential factor in the evolution of autism; but the problem I pose here is not in fact etiopathogenetic; it concerns the essential structure of autism.

Today a modernized form of the old “soul versus body” opposition prevails, only that today the soul is an inter-soul, an “us” more than an “I.” This relationalist conversion of many psychoanalysts (the soul as “us” or “you and me”) stems from an assumption which is often spelled out: analysis as a sort of second instance of mothering, the analyst as a second mother, this time a good enough one, who will allow the subject to undergo that evolution that the first mother, who was not good enough, prevented. Since in this view analysis is a second maternage, the cause—but actually the blame—of autism needs to be attributed to the first mother. But all of this is a huge simplification. I do not believe that analytical reconstructions, and even less so analytical therapies, are simple corollaries of an etiological theory. A psychoanalytic therapy is above all an ethical option, a certain way of addressing inhibitions, symptoms and anxieties.

12. Transplant of Subjectivity

According to Freud the unconscious is not made up of emotions, which are always conscious—except the most essential one: die Lust, which means pleasure and desire. The unconscious is the network of significations that make certain emotions possible in certain situations. The unconscious is the other side of our relationship with others in that they are recognized as subjects, a condition underlying the fact that other subjects may in turn recognize me as a subject. The recognition we live in a subjective world, the possibility of weaving a subjective sense, is the basis of all psychoanalytic work.

But how then should autistics be treated analytically? Analysts, even when not interpreting, make everything an analysand says resonate as metaphorical, as signifying something different from what an analysand says or does literally. The analyst brings out the signifying plethora of the subject. This is what is commonly referred to as “listening with the third ear.” This third ear is the capacity to find significant things that do not appear meaningful, or that seem to have only a plain, literal meaning. But this is not possible with autistics precisely because they are unable to listen with this third ear: they see the human world, including themselves, as poor in signification. Dirac did not grasp the fact that his colleague was asking a question, because it was difficult for him to read the interrogative meaning. For him, his colleague was only describing his own mind, he did not show his question,[20] i.e. his desire to understand better.

Does this mean that only cognitive-behavioral interventions are possible with autistics? Probably not. I think certain mothers and fathers, despite being slandered by psychoanalysis, instinctively know how to find surrogates, prostheses of subjectivity, so to speak, to help their autistic children understand a little about the subjectivity of others and about their own. It is likely that Grandin’s mother was very good not at healing her daughter—it is very unlikely that anyone can heal from autism, in the same way no one can “heal” from being a dwarf or a giant—but at compensating for her deficiencies to the point that her daughter became a star writer and public figure. And anything analysts think they might do, they should start from recognizing the true specificity of autism: the scarcity of unconscious. But is it possible to graft a certain amount of unconscious into someone else?

I wouldn’t be able to offer much advice to analysts grappling with autistics. But I think they could achieve something by reversing the typical strategy of analytical listening. The analyst cannot listen to the autistic’s unconscious, because it is wanting—frozen. The analyst should rather speak in a way that will enrich the autistic’s ability to perceive the subjectivity of others. With autistics, more than listening, the analyst should talk and act, even move, in ways that are relevant and interesting to them. Now, listening to or reading what analysts who successfully grapple with autistics do today, it seems to me that they act in the way I describe here.

Here too, the opposition with psychosis appears decisive. With psychotics we tend not to interpret at all, because—as we said—psychotics are already far too interpretative on their own account: they over-signify the world. If we interpret a delusion we risk fueling it, like pouring oil on fire. Psychotics actually consider many analytical interpretations persecutory, because for them words are always acts. And for them acts are always also words, albeit words manipulated by the Other.

Analysts should expose the autistics to experiences that will help the emergence in them of a recognition of something that purely cognitive and affective beings such as them are cannot perceive: subjectivity as signifying. By being active in this way, analysts would actually be doing the opposite of what they always do. Because it is not only what they say that counts, but also what, by means of what they say or do not say, they show. And what shows itself is their subjectivity, which can never be reduced to what is said. Ultimately, therefore, a cure for autism could be seen as something like a transplant of subjectivity.

Postface

When I finished writing this study on autism, I was not yet familiar with the work of Jean-Claude Maleval, a Lacanian psychoanalyst.[21] In fact, he had already argued—before I did—for the fundamental difference between autism and psychosis, thereby breaking with a psychoanalytic tradition of thought, even within the Lacanian movement.

According to him, the autistic person is a subject, not a collection of deficits. For this reason, their care cannot be reduced to therapeutic techniques of normalization. What is required instead is to recognize and value the creativity of autistic individuals and their particular way of organizing their subjectivity.

Those who have read this study will object that, for my part, instead I describe autism as a form of life that organizes itself around a deficit—namely, a non-perception of subjectivity—and I have compared this to blindness. But…

As it happens, today a number of pride movements have emerged among people with disabilities. All these movements argue that what appears as a deficit to the non-disabled person is, for them, simply a difference—a difference of which they are proud. In any case, the difference is not denied; on the contrary, it is affirmed and valued.

Pride in what one is, in fact, implies the recognition of the difference of which one is proud.

In the case of the deaf, for example: the hegemony of a form of training in which the deaf person had to learn to read what hearing people say from the movements of their lips has been replaced by the appreciation of sign languages, which moreover vary, like spoken languages, from country to country. In short, deaf people communicate perfectly well among themselves; it should be the hearing who learn deaf language if they truly wish to communicate with them, not the other way around.

Like Maleval, I also maintain that autistic people are right to claim their dignity, not because there would be no difference between those who are autistic and those who are not. As we have seen, the difference is more one of degree than of essence. And the way autistic people cope with this difference in a world composed largely of people who do not bear it is extremely interesting—indeed, fascinating—for those who do not believe themselves to be autistic

Maleval seeks the autistic difference at the level of the Freudian drives, particularly of the scopophilic and the auditory objects, voice and gaze, whereas it seems to me more important to consider the general structure of the relation between the autistic subject and the world. What matters, however, is that both of us see autism not as a special sub-type of psychosis, but rather as a form of being-in-the-world with its own specificity and originality.

All these people-with-disabilities pride movements seem, as I understand it, to converge on one fundamental claim: that the task of their existence need not be to adapt to the world of the non-disabled people, trying to blend in with them as much as possible; rather, it should instead be the “non-disabled” who adapt—if they wish—to the world of the disabled ones.

It seems to me that the Aspie Pride movement moves in the same direction: the burden of adaptation changes direction. All this forms part of a broader, epochal movement to re-evaluate “minor” forms of life—from deafness to autism, from physical disabilities to intellectual impairment, and beyond.

I have nothing to object to in this need. But this does not exempt us from studying difference itself, from refraining from assimilating it to other forms of “minority,” and from understanding clearly its structure and its absolute uniqueness.