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Studying the clinic with autistic children and the texts of Freud and Lacan, Marie-Christine Laznik has formulated the hypothesis that the third phase of the drive circuit is absent in autistic children. Testing this hypothesis against home videos of babies on the path to becoming autistic, she was struck by a surprising disparity amongst these babies, usually withdrawn but capable at times of entering into successful interactions. Immersed in the works of psycholinguists, she has put forward another hypothesis: that of the importance of motherese in interactions with this type of baby. Motherese, displaying, in the voice of the mother, the pleasure and fascination evoked in her by her baby, returns to the third phase of the drive circuit. The babies are eager for this from birth, without the support of any object of need. The acoustic analysis of home videos of babies who have become autistic, and that of therapy sessions with a baby at risk of developing autism, has shown that these babies are able to respond to the call of this invocatory drive, when an adult is capable of this type of prosody. However, this remains rare because these babies do not play their part in this interaction with the adult.