Publication
Originally published in Departamento de Autismo y psicosis, May 2011.
In translation, in Hurly-Burly, Issue 7, May 2012, p193-200
Download, translated by Florencia Fernandez Coria Shanahan, www.LacanianWorksExchange.net /Other Authors A-Z (Tendlarz)
References
P194 Tendlarz, Infantile autism has its history. ln 1943 Leo Kanner introduced the concept of “early infantile autism”. … Kanner’s description of autistic children indicates that they present difficulties: in their relationship with the other [rejection of the gaze, absence of spontaneous behaviour like pointing at objects of interest, or lack of social and emotional reciprocity); in communication [delay or absence of oral language, stereotyped use of [language or incapacity to establish conversations); and in behaviour [lack of flexibility, rituals, absence of symbolic play). He names its essential characteristics “aloneness” and sameness”[l].
[1] Kanner, L., ‘Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact” in Nervous Child, lssue 2,1943, p.249.
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P194 Tendlarz, ln the Diagnostic and Statistical Manuals they are both distinguished from childhood schizophrenia on the basis of the absence of hallucinations, although as Lacan says, autistic children also have hallucinations, whose particularity must be examined.[2]
[2] Lacan, J., “Geneva Lecture on the Symptom”, transl. by R. Grigg, in Analysis, lssue 1, 1989, p. 19. See Geneva lecture on the symptom : 4th October1975 : Jacques Lacan on this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19751004 or Index of Jaques Lacan’s texts.)
P16 of www.Freud2Lacan.com, p19 of Russell Grigg’s translation,
Dr. Cramer*: You said, if I understood you correctly, that it is the mother that speaks to the child, though the child still has to hear her. It is about this ‘though the child still has to hear her’ that I would like to ask you a question.
Dr. J.L.: Yes!
Dr. Cramer: What makes a child able to hear? What makes a child receptive to a symbolic order that his mother teaches him? Is there something immanent there in the human child?
Dr. J.L.: In what I said it seems to me that I implied it. The being that I called human is essentially a speaking being.
Dr. Cramer : And a being that must be able to hear as well.
Dr. J.L.: But hearing is a part of speech. What I mentioned concerning the perhaps, the not yet, other examples could be cited, proves that the resonance of speech is something constitutional. It is obvious that this is linked to the specificity of my experience. From the moment at which someone is in analysis he always shows that he has heard. To be sure, the question that you raise whether there might be people who hear nothing is suggestive, but it is difficult to imagine. Perhaps you will tell me that there are people who hear only a hub-bub, that is, all around them there is chatter.
Dr Cramer : I was thinking of autism, for instance. This would be a case in which the receiver is not in place, and in which hearing doesn’t work.
Dr. J.L.: As the name indicates, autistics hear themselves. They hear lots of things. Normally this even leads to hallucination, and hallucinations have always a more or less vocal character. Not all autistics hear voices, but they articulate lots of things, and what they articulate, it is a matter of discovering where they heard it. Do you see autistics?
Dr Cramer : Yes.
Dr. J.L.: Well, what do you make of autistics, then?
Dr Cramer : That precisely they don’t manage to hear us, that they remain stuck. [p.19]
Dr. J.L.: But that’s quite different. They don’t manage to hear what you have to say to them, in so far as you are caring for them.
Dr. Cramer : But also that we have trouble hearing them. Their language remains something closed off.
Dr. J.L.: That’s precisely what prevents us from hearing them. It’s that they do not hear you. But, in the end, surely there is something to say to them.
Dr Cramer : My question goes a bit further. Is the symbolic—I am going to take a short-circuit—learnable? Is there something in us from birth which makes us ready for the symbolic, to receive precisely the symbolic message, to integrate it?
Dr. J.L.: Everything I said implies this. It is a matter of knowing why there is something in the autistic or in the schizophrenic which freezes, if I can put it like that. But you can’t say that he doesn’t speak. That you have trouble hearing, grasping the point of what they say, doesn’t prevent these people from being rather verbose.
* Probably, Dr. Bertrand Cramer is one of the world’s most respected child and adolescent psychiatrists. With his book “The Scripts Parents Write and the Roles Children Play,” Dr. Cramer delivered breakthrough insights on the power of family stories to influence childhood development. Born in 1934 in Geneva, Switzerland, Dr. Cramer moved to New York City at age 26 and graduated from the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. A pioneer in child and infant psychiatry, Dr. Cramer has maintained a private practice from 1985. He has taught at Harvard University and Geneva University Medical School and currently (2025) lives in Switzerland.
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P195 Tendlarz, However, the clinical subtlety of this question remains, in so far as one can observe a change from childhood to adulthood which shows that not all autistic children necessarily remain with their initial. presentation throughout their lives, nor do their so called “cognitive disorders”, assessed in childhood, persist. The names of the classes, as Ian Hacking says, interact with the individuals involved in them, but are nevertheless insufficient when it comes to accommodating the subjects and their differences.[3] Beyond the fate of the diagnosis, there still remains that which makes each subject unique and impossible to dilute into the norm”.
3 Cf Hacking l., “Madness: Biological or Constructed?” in The Social Construction of What?, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1999, pp. 100-125.
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P195 Tendlarz, Cognitive theories have introduced the notion of “autistic spectrum” which includes both children and adults. [4], 1979 study by Wing and Gould forms the basis of this concept.[4] [4] Wing, L., & Gould, J., “Severe Impairments of Social Interaction and Associated Abnormalities in Children: Epidemiology and Classification” in Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, lssue 9, March 1979, pp.11-29.
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P196 Tendlarz, From a perspective outside of psychoanalysis, the neurologist 0liver Sacks, in his book An Anthropologist on Mars, states that no two autistic individuals are alike: “its precise form or expression is different in every case”.[5] We may add that any two individuals are unalike, autistic or otherwise.
[5] Sachs, O., An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales, Knopf, New York, 1995, p. 250.
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P196 Tendlarz, ln connection with this scandal, François Ansermet has recalled[6] how a 2004 study revealed that a team of lawyers had paid Dr Wakefield to publish the news, and immediately began proceedings against the producers of the vaccines.
[6] Ansermet, F., Siegrist, C.-A., “Vaccin rougeote et autisme, aucune évidence scientifique”, Tribune de Genève, 6 May 2008, p. 33.
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P196 Tendlarz, ln March 2004, The Lancet published a short editorial in which they recanted[7], but the rumor continued to circulate.
[7] The Lancet, VoL.363, No.941 1, March 2004, pp. 823-4.
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P197 Tendlarz, The discrediting of psychoanalysis is correlative to the increasing use of cognitive-behavioural treatments for autistic children, which help spread the belief that psychoanalysts blame parents for their children’s condition. Ian Hacking, in The Social Construction of What?, considers this perspective and mentions how cognitive science currently “rules some roosts”[8] by explaining autism through the “theory of mind”, given the linguistic and other deficits that are met in “autistic children”. This theory refers to the ability to attribute mental states to oneself and others, effectively amounting to an imaginary version of the Other.
[8] Hacking., I., The Social Construction of What?, op. cit., p. 115.
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P197 Tendlarz, Autism is not a calamity, says Jacqueline Berger, journalist, author of the book Sortir de l’autisme,[9] and mother of two autistic children. The bad reputation of psychoanalysis corresponds to the fact that the results it obtains are not measurable according to the quantitative and statistic criteria used by cognitive behaviourists in scientific publications.
[9] Berger, J., Sortir de l’autisme, Buchet, Paris, 2007.
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P197 Tendlarz, Jean-Claude Maleval looks at the diversity of cases involved in the diagnosis of autism, ranging from cases requiring institutional care for life, to cases of high-functioning autists. Some children have “islets of ability” which often make them “savants” in highly specialised domains, even with exceptional skills.[10]
10 Cf., Maleval, J.-C., “Langue verbeuse, Langue factuelle et phrases spontan6es chez l’autiste”, in La Cause freudienne, lssue 78, 2011, pp. 77 -92. (probably available on the internet)
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P197-198 Tendlarz, Sacks examines the characteristics through which they become “prodigies” whose technical prowesses, says Eric Laurent, have shifted the focus of interest that used to be placed on delusion. … Maleval posits that autism is a structure characterised by a rejection of signifying alienation and by a jouissance that returns to a rim. This expression, borrowed from Eric Laurent[11], accounts for the way in which the object remains stuck to the body …
11 Laurent, E., “Lecture critique II” in L’autisme et la psychanalyse, PUM, Toulouse,1992, p. 156.
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P198 Tendlarz, … stuck to the body in such a way that it constitutes an “autistic shell” in its particular libidinal dynamics.[l2] The symbolic disorder generates a dead enunciation that is either displaced, erased or purely technical. It is not a cognitive deficit but a particular relationship to the signifier.
[12] Cf. “La Conversation de Clermont: enjeux d’un débat”, in La Cause freudienne, lssue 78, op. cit.,: p113.
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P198 Tendlarz, This rejection prevents jouissance from embarking on speech, and it returns instead on a rim, together with an object to which the autistic child is stuck: a shell is thus built within a libidinal dynamic. The autistic border is a protective formation faced with a threatening Other, and it has three essential components: the image of the double, the islets of ability and the autistic object.[13] [13] Maleval, J.-C., L’autiste et sa vox Seuil, Paris, 2009, p. 108
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P198 Tendlarz, Eric Laurent shows that the inclusion of the subject in autism implies the functioning of a signifier that stands alone in the real, without any possibility of displacement, a “spare part” acting in such way as to seek a fixed order and a symbolic that is realised without any possible equivocation, a true “cipher of autism”.[14]
14 Laurent, E, “Le chiffre de l’autisme”, in Le nouvel Âne, Issue 8, February 2008, p. 16. Published translated by Philip Dravers, as Spectres of Autism, in Psychoanalytical Notebooks, Issue 26-Autism, 2012, p50-64
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P198 Tendlarz, Not being able to empathise is not necessarily a deficit, rather it allows such children to function without the imaginary obstacles of everyday life. 0n the other hand, Laurent adds, “we must give up the idea of the ‘mechanical child”‘ – alluding to the Joey case by Bettelheim – and “speak rather of the ‘organ child’” since what is at stake is “the montage of the body plus an object outside of the body”.[15]
15 Laurent, E., “Autisme et psychose: poursuite d’un dialogue avec Robert et Rosine Lefort” in Le Cause freudienne, Issue 66, 2007. Published, Autism and psychosis: further dialogue with Robert and Rosine Lefort, translated by Jo Rostron in Psychoanalytical Notebooks, Issue 26-Autism, 2012, p11-26
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