What Autists Can Teach Us about Social Interactions and How Psychoanalytic Treatment Can Contribute to It

Abstract

This paper aims to bring contributions from psychoanalysis to the debate about autism. We assume that while working with the autistic it is imperative to single out each case and not to seek out a standardized approach, based on a previous knowledge. The therapist oriented by psychoanalysis starts to work from a point of view where stereotyped or seemingly bizarre behaviors are taken as a resource used by the subject to protect himself from the invasion experienced in his relationship with others. The treatment, therefore, would not seek to eliminate such behaviors, but to promote the elaboration, on the autistic part, of a way of his own to belong in the world, as we will be able to follow in the exposition of a clinical case in which the subject makes use of objects in a unique manner to mediate his relationship with the other and promote his social interaction.