Autism and psychoanalysis in the French context*

As is the case in Western countries as a whole, the application of psychoanalysis in France to the treatment of autistic children has been subjected over the last few decades to more or less violent criticism, and even to obstacles of various kinds, which make it increasingly difficult. This takes on, of course, different colourings from one country to another, depending on each country’s history, culture, traditions, and the current organisation of psychiatric and psychotherapeutic care. This article aims to describe these particular features in the French context. With this end in mind, it is necessary to take into account the evolution not only of the notion of infantile autism but also of psychoanalysis, as well as of their interface.

The advent of infantile autism in France

As much as French psychiatry had played a pioneering role in the history of psychiatry, the descriptions of Leo Kanner and Hans Asperger were only heard of relatively late in France. In an authoritative work, the child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Jacques Hochmann (2009) emphasised the similarity of the descriptions of those who discovered infantile

autism in the twentieth century with certain descriptions made by French authors in the nineteenth century.

This similarity is particularly apparent in the descriptions of the famous feral or “wild” child, Victor of Aveyron, first by Abbé Pierre Joseph Bonnaterre (1800), then by the doctor Jean Itard (1801 & 1806). The adventures of this child made a deep impression on people, traces of which can still be found in the French child psychiatric tradition. Victor was found naked in 1799 in a wood in Aveyron, a region located to the south of the Massif Central. He was eventually captured in 1800 after he had taken refuge with a dyer during a particularly harsh winter. Placed initially in the care of the Abbé Pierre Joseph Bonnaterre, a professor of Natural History in Rodez, he was then transferred to Paris on the orders