Who will be the autists of tomorrow?

Abstract

To answer, from the perspective of psychoanalysis, the question of who will be the autists of tomorrow, we first seek to draw lines of how autistic people are in the past. During the nineteenth century, the medical eye could not yet differentiate children with disabilities from children who were probably already developing what we now call autism. But we hear their echoes in reports by authors of that time. To reflect on the present moment, we appeal to two conceptual operators: discourse and genetics, concluding that this new way of being autistic combines today with the new forms of desubjectivation that are emerging. The present times also reveals that autistic children, educated by behavioral methods, lose the chance to live in school the truth of their experience, a peculiar and unique experience. They lose the chance to learn to say about themselves. Regarding the future, it is said that there are many becomings of autists. But there will be a common point to all of them: in them the Freudian subject will not be present, in line with the suppression of the subject in the contemporary world.