An Accidental Pokemon Expert: Contemporary Psychoanalysis on the Autism Spectrum

Abstract

While autism has drawn interest from the beginnings of psychoanalytic theory, our contemporary literature makes limited reference to autism and has not widely embraced it as a psychological condition to be conceptualized or treated. Instead, the medical model has prevailed in recent years, portraying autism as a cluster of specific decontextualized behaviors or a concrete thing that somebody has, rather than an experience one lives. Reducing autism to behaviors fails to capture both what is essential about and what it is like to experience this condition. From a contemporary psychoanalytic perspective, however, we can view autism as something phenomenological, as a condition with core difficulty in the sensorimotor domain, and as an experience of diminished intersubjective relating. The contemporary psychoanalytic canon offers treatment approaches that specifically enhance the development of intersubjective relating, recasting autism as an experience that can be investigated through psychoanalysis.