“AUTISM” – Seminar

The great success of the ‘autism spectrum’ as a diagnostic category – autism diagnoses are exploding throughout the so-called Western world – is accompanied by increasingly sophisticated psychiatric-philosophical reflection, which also leads to sharp theoretical and ethical divides.

There is a psychoanalytic current (which in fact includes almost all analytic schools) that tends to see autism as a specific form of psychosis, and thus to bring autistic subjectivity back to precise analytic theories of psychosis. Some insist on the primary mother-child relationship (‘the anaffective mother’), others on the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father (lacanians). There is a cognitivist current, which is currently hegemonic in the world of the clinic and treatment of autistics, which interprets autism as an effect of the lack of a Theory of Mind (ToM). Autistics would be living ‘behaviourists’ who do not recognize the mind, their own and others’, as such. Finally, there is a more magmatic, less structured current that poses the question of autistic subjectivity, referring either to phenomenology, or to Wittgenstein. This current interprets autism either as an inability to empathize (Vittorio Gallese) or as an agnosia of subjectivity (Ian Hacking).

These three theoretical approaches extend into different clinical approaches. It is therefore a question of reading the various clinical approaches – including the markedly cognitive-behavioural ones – as applications or corollaries of a certain view of autism.

What is essentially autism?
How does recognition of the very essence of autism involve different treatment strategies?
Why is the diagnosis of autism so popular today?

The seminar, organized in video conference Zoom by the Psychoanalytic Institut for Social Research – IPRS Ets, the Advanced Studies in Psychoanalysis – ISAP, the Italian Society of Psychiatry, the Institute of European Research in Psychotherapy – IREP and the ASL – Salerno, will try to answer these questions.

Introduction:

• Giulio Corrivetti – Director of Mental Health Department ASL Salerno, vice-president Italian Society of Psychiatry

Speakers:

• Liliana Dell’Osso – Psychiatrist, President Italian Society of Psychiatry
• Leon S. Brenner – Philosopher and psychoanalyst
• Marie-Christine Laznik – Clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst
• Sergio Benvenuto – Psychoanalyst and philosopher, president Advanced Studies in Psychoanalysis – ISAP
• Carla Urbinati – Psychoanalyst

Moderator:

• Raffaele Bracalenti, Psychoanalyst, President Psychoanalytic Institut for Social Research (IPRS Ets)