Some Remarks on the Issue of Autoeroticism and Autism in the Work of Frances Tustin
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We examine Frances Tustin’s latest writings, where she explicitly recognized the error in the hypothesis of a stage of Normal Primary Autism, and attempted to highlight the pulsional dimension in its development and in the inscription of an Other as concerns the question of the deadly roots of autism. She also attempted to outline the special place that autoeroticism, stripped of alterity, maintains within autistic phenomena. By studying sensorial processes in intrauterine life as well as their disappearance or inaugural loss at birth (which Jacques Lacan saw as the source of all desires as it replaces the lost organ with a false organ, the libido), we outline how the failure to inscribe an Other in the pulsional circuit leaves this circuit devoid of any attachment, and the very emission of this energy flow becomes both terror and paralysis in autistic development. In the failure of the disappearance/libido/drive association that requires a rhythmic-tactile attunement with the emergence of an Other, we can see a self-sensual withdrawal opposed to the balance between eroticism and autoeroticism. This is the strength of Bleuler’s proposition: autism is autoeroticism without Eros.
Réseaux sociaux