A hypothesis for an autism

Abstract

This proposal aims to deepen the theme of the body of the autistic child as the object of the psychoanalyst’s discourse. Lacan’s seminar, The Logic of Fantasy, identifies the Other with the body, which Lacan associates with the Imaginary. In the seminar Les Non-dupes Errent, he observes that “The Imaginary taken as a means, therein lies the true place of love” (lesson of December 18, 1973). Insofar as in literature and the clinic, we identify the difficulty of the constitution of the Other in autism; we could hypothesize that in autism, the children covering their ears to protect themself from the word, as Lacan suggests with regard to this clinic, do so because the Real and Symbolic are loose, without an Imaginary—precisely what bodies to mediate. Not even in a simple non-Borromean knot, in which the registers are next to each other, do they intertwine because this Imaginary, taken as a medium, which would be the true place of love to give body-consistency, is missing. In order to develop this, it is also necessary to ascertain which love Lacan is talking about. Trying to advance a little with the literature and with what we observe in the clinic when there is the desire of the analyst to take the child as a subject independent of their pathology is not only an attempt to enrich the theory of the psychoanalytic clinic but also, and perhaps above all, to seek theoretical-clinical means to confront the discourses that want to convince us of the generalized child.