Response to Benvenuto's Response to Krass

It is worth considering the extent to which the discourse between Benvenuto and myself parallels, or in the language of field theory, was infected by the topic at hand, that is, whether or not psychoanalysis as a field has been successful in approaching the essence of the nature of autism or, as his title bluntly states, it is a “battle lost.” The main thrust of his comments, as I read them, are that I have misunderstood a great deal of what he wrote, not on its merits, but on the fact that we do not speak the same languages: Italian vs. English, Lacanian vs. Bionian, Winnicottian, etc., psychological vs. philosophical; phenomenological vs. descriptive, American vs. Continental, “old-fashioned” vs “politically correct.” And certainly, one of the bases for my critiques of his essay was the way he used language to describe people on the autism spectrum as well as to talk about the phenomenon (or phenomena) that falls into the category that we call “autism.” This was language that I found to often be othering and overgeneralizing.

In parallel, the challenge of applying psychoanalytic theories to understanding people with autism is often impeded by, to borrow Ferenczi's (1949) phrase, a confusion of tongues. Autism is fundamentally a neurobiological phenomenon. Thus, the way that, for those with autism, mind is expressed is qualitatively different from the way mind is expressed by those whose mind has evolved by channeling through and around a typically functioning neurobiological system. The field of psychoanalysis as a theory of development, as a theory of intra- and interpersonal functioning, and as a theory of therapeutic action has, I believe it is fair to say, primarily been formulated with the typically developed and typically functioning brain as a background context.

Thus the tendency to make assumptions that are incorrect because the assumptions are based upon data that follows rules developed from experience with and by people with typically functioning brains