Storytelling and Judgment LQ 142 : 27th January 2012 : Éric Laurent

Circulated in French on New Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis’s messager (www.amp-nls.org/messager) as [nls-messager] 321 – 2011/2012 LACAN QUOTIDIEN N°142 : on 28th January 2012 : Available at www.lacanquotidien.fr : See http://www.lacanquotidien.fr/blog/2012/01/lacan-quotidien-n142-storytelling-et-jugement-par-eric-laurent/

Circulated in English translation by Francine Danniau and Victoria Woollard as [nls-messager] 396 – 2011/2012 LQ Translations – a selection from Lacan Quotidien 142 : on 15^th March 2012

Available www.LacanianWorksExchange.net /Laurent [Note: the French precedes the English translation]

Extract:

We can summarize as follows: Using a procedure that misled trust, a so-called documentary reduced the diversity of positions of the psychoanalysts that were interviewed to a ridiculous argument: the cause of autism is parental failure, especially of the mother. This reduction on a Procrustean bed was established by means of amalgamations and distortions. Once this was established, and the parents had been “made to feel guilty”, their honor incriminated, the thesis could only be effaced by the fiercest denunciation of such an approach. To this end, anything could be denatured and made use of in order to support the cause.

Backing up this operation was a recourse to science. Science would affirm its ability to account for the phenomena through strict biological considerations, regardless of the relationship the subject has with the world; a sectioning, which the appearance of some autists can lead us to believe thinkable. And yet, the public health drama posed by these subjects brings to the fore the way these symptoms are taken up in a discourse. Even if the surprising increase in the number of cases can be explained by statistical artifacts, we still need to explain why clinical observation is detecting these symptoms better. What’s more, it is the only mental “disorder” where the metaphor that reduces the disorder to a “chemical imbalance”, as in the case of depression for example, has been refused.