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Autism is neither a disability nor an illness. It expresses the helplessness of a child who has made the paradoxical choice to live outside the economy of the symbolic, meaning he or she short-circuits the drive process, which forces any subject of language to exchange fragments of the body for linguistic signs. This position is one of reticence, in principle expressed by withholding the gaze and the voice. The analyst should respect this withdrawal as vital to the child (a fact which in itself invalidates the behaviorist techniques of forcing) and his aim should be to call the child to him/herself instead of trying to draw him into our own world.