Sex on the Spectrum: Sexuality's Potential to Free Up Autistic Subjectivity

Autistic adults are scantly written about psychoanalytically, and when they are, their difference is acknowledged as deficit, a deficit which diminishes their subjecthood and potential and therefore also sexuality. This article will investigate the way that sexuality in its creative and transgressive potential can free up autistic pleasure, agency, and connection in transformative ways that resist the pathologizing meanings imposed on autistic bodyminds by allistic projections. Autistics have the right to their libidinal strivings and the freedom to constitute their subjectivity through their own search for meaning. Our work is to facilitate the process of authentic becoming or autopoiesis that may have been stalled by social trauma and stigmatization and allistic society's lack of mentalization of autistic experience. I will discuss barriers in both analyst and analysand to this process and illustrate the challenges I had to overcome in order to empathically enter my autistic patient's lived experience and see his sexual strivings through a new and now shared perspective, which in turn allowed him to engage in meaningful psychic work.