You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
As someone who is deeply immersed in scholarship, research and clinical work involving people on the autism spectrum and as someone who is actively engaged in highlighting the ways that psychoanalytic theories and techniques are relevant to our current knowledge about autism, I found Sergio Benvenuto's essay “Autism: A battle lost by psychoanalysis” (DIVISION/Review No. 19, Summer ) to be inaccurate and misleading in both how it portrays autism and how it describes current psychoanalytic approaches to understanding and working with people on the autism spectrum.
First and foremost, the ways that Benvenuto describes people with autism do not square with the understanding of autism that has been developed and increasingly refined by what is, at this point, a massive body of research on autism spectrum phenomena (a search on Google Scholar of the word “autism” brings up 19,800 citations!) and from the clinical experience of those of us who work extensively in therapy and analysis with people on the spectrum (according to PEP Web, 40 papers on autism have been published in psychoanalytic journals in the past nine years). Of concern to those of us who have been working assiduously to integrate evolving knowledge about the features and mechanisms of autism into psychoanalytic models of the mind and of treatment, his portrait of those with autism is based on a number of assumptions that are incorrect and exaggerated because they neglect to incorporate the most current picture(s) of autism derived from both non-analytically and analytically informed data.
To wit, Benvenuto makes assertions based on outdated theories. For example, he states (p. 28) that autism involves deficits in mirror neurons, a hypothesis that was proposed in the 2000s but has largely been disproven (e.g., Dinstein et al., 2010; Ruysschaert, Warreyn, Wiersema, Oostra, & Roeyers, 2014). He also stated (p. 29) that difficulties accessing language in autism are “not caused by cognitive deficit,” a claim that