Autism in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy - Dr Leon Brenner

[@TheColourAwesomer]

Thank you to Leon. I have many autistic traits, and I find these discussions very interesting. I have found that through self awareness I have been able to engage with the world in a less alientated way.

[@InExcelsisDeo24]

Everyone has autistic traits.

[@Stanley_Ellis]

You really have the gift of words to explain things. Thank you.

[@monicaprazeres]

Fascinating...thank u so much for making such a complex study easier and accessible to understand. Really appreciate.

[@kerycktotebag8164]

I've always seen language as an incredible responsibility and was chronically selectively mute throughout childhood and even in spurts to this day. i used to speak very idiosyncratic, which matched more of what i read and wrote than what anyone attempted to teach me, and since my reading level was collegiate by the time of 4th grade (but i couldn't read books due to stimulation and eye tracking), my idiosyncratic language was also stilted and i couldn't understand less verbose more "collapsed"/loaded speech very well and still struggle with that. i actually went extremely mute for about a year after high school, in order to then only speak (and think) in less verbose speak. it was incredibly traumatizing but i can express myself to more kinds of ppl now, but it also always feels like a second language. luckily, this only amounted to assimilation, and i ditched the associated masking after i got used to talking differently. when ppl try to complete my sentences (say, if i seem to be struggling to find a word) with colloquial turns of phrase, it didn't help except maybe to provoke my brain to translate a little faster back into my idiosyncratic speech

[@sammyjo8035]

Similar experience with same result to my communication style. Even the last line, yes, I have to translate vague summations back to my own conceptualizations to know if that's even what I was intending to convey. My brain just forms technical explanations automatically, and it's hard to translate for social and emotional communication but I cant small talk without scripting, which isn't very socially fulfilling for me. I've only mastered what pragmatic communication I have through logical means though, breaking down a social/emotional summation to its bare bones to see that the concept/word encompasses the same meaning as my phrasing. I just speak a quilt of jargons in lieu of pragmatic and social/emotional concepts. Doesn't make for the best social experience either when people assume pretension, or even mania...

[@animanoir]

hey I found you in another video

[@kerycktotebag8164]

​@@animanoirpsychoanalysis is a fork of my longtime special interests in language, psychology and phenomenology, so you might see me a lot on these channels

[@user-bd5pl5id9l]

Fascinating!!! Thank you

[@xxxMujTubexxx]

The neurodiversity paradigm is all organized around language and splitting and offers means to approach neurodivergence which are very compatible with psychoanalytical and humanistic concepts and theories. To go from the more general “neurodivergence” framing back to “autism”, which the psychoanalytic tradition describes as different things at different times, is nothing but a regression and unnecessary splitting. To reduce the subject to autism is an act of splitting committed by the big other. Castration needs to be the key theme in autism from the Lacanian perspective, as it focused on symbolic and pre-symbolic experience, where a significant portion of experience is not symbolized and will remain as such and needs to be / is contained as such, outside the realm of the symbolic language.

[@sisifa.cansada]

Great presentation

[@Mzwmwlzdkwnz]

Thank you, it's very interesting. Maybe you could tell us about the drawings of people with autism from the point of view of psychoanalysis? Hello from Russia 😊

[@sisifa.cansada]

I have felt domesticated my whole life. Always Ctrl+C Ctrl+V This year I broke free 🎉 and I am feeling like Venus of Willendorf

[@metatronheraldofthealmight3968]

What did you do to break free?

[@Ambisextra_]

Thanks Leon!!

[@xmrtn810]

The YT video is called "In My Language" and its by user silentmiaow

[@vahid7251]

Why is that part when Leon asks the audience to turn on their camera censored?

[@psychoanalyticthinking153]

Not sure, we edit out parts to make it shorter and flow, was there something in that part you wanted to see I can check.

[@vahid7251]

Usually, when Leon starts to talk, first he asks the audience to turn on their camera so he can see their faces, but here this part is censored.

[@Dayglodaydreams]

He did not say Autism Researchers should go back to Leo Kanner and his awful theory about Refrigerator Parents (specifically refrigerator mothers).

[@nightoftheworld]

He said Kanner provided some “interesting meta-psychological categories such as sameness and aloneness.” We’ve all appreciated others specific ideas yet don’t accept everything they thought. Like how Heidegger had great concepts such as Dasein, which elaborated on our condition of engagement/entanglement with our world as creatures of history and culture-yet ended up supporting Hitler.

[@turtleanton6539]

😊😊😊😊😊🎉

[@amakoochuloo]

It is very speculative to suppose that an autistic subject, so to speak, is so because of aversion to enunciation. What evidence is there to prove this? It is also a bit suspect, given that it assumes the autism is a function of a part of psyche assessing the utterance as not whole. Do we think that is what happens to a 9 months old that does not hold a mother's gaze or respond to her name? At that age, an infant can barely tell what is whole or hold an enunciation. Perhaps Lacan's theory alludes to a certain type of autistic subject that doesn't really map with what we call autistic in contemporary psychology.

[@jiminy_cricket777]

Or perhaps you need to ask yourself what it is to react to something. A fetus is apparently alive, is it not possible that it can respond to stimuli in ways that are atypical? Don't get me wrong, I suspect that there is some role for biological endowment here, but I think it's rather too simple to reduce etiology to that. The developing fetus is always and already in relationship to another, and comes into awareness (first unconscious, self-consciousness comes years later) more and more through that relationship (and others, especially after birth of course). Such that the relation is constitutive of the DNA expression, and vice versa - a dynamic, two way process that never happens quite the same way twice.

[@amakoochuloo]

@@jiminy_cricket777 that is a good thought. I agree that reacting to something is always there from fetus stage. But the theory that Brenner elaborates hinges on part of the psyche enunciating utterance because it feels/ utterance makes it un-whole. Unless there is a fundamental relational issue in the parent, the organism's affect/ feel that connecting makes it un-whole is most likely organismic- not psychological- isn't it? I remember the moment my 3 month old reached out from its' depths and made an utterance to connect to me. It followed by a crooked smile of achievement.

[@kerycktotebag8164]

enunciation in the context of this theory (lacanian) is sometimes translated to "utterance" and that itself is basically felt in infants as a kind of desperation to do something about needs prior to knowing much about how to deal with anything, let alone something as big as needs.

[@erickrick3901]

The basic theory is that autism is a trauma reaction to the idea that we both: are not able to directly share our subjective experience with another, so we are completely alone in our subjectivity, and also a loss of the illusion of solipsism and that we are not seperated from the world, from mom, etc. The richness of sensory experience is so poorly communicated by verbal language, and we understand in a visceral way that language is cheap in comparison to sensory experiencing and thought. It sort of makes sense out of absolutely everything feeling threatening and fake because it is. Language is the overlay in which most understand reality and it is seen as an adequate form of communication. At the same time, they are developing their own way of understanding the world, and feel that this artificial language intrudes on their pristine conceptualization of reality. So their individuality is lost, they lose direct connection with sensory experience, they lose the possibility of ever being unified with the world or mom again, and they realize they are completely alone, and they are like, “damn, how the hell did I end up here?”

[@RhiannonRaven]

I thought autism was about how the brain is wired and so has nothing to do with any of this navel gazing stuff? (I commented this previously but my comment seems to have gone)

[@zamplify]

This ain't exactly science, Lacan was thrown out of the Academy. But it opens up a space of consideration.

[@Zarathustran]

Very obvious that echolalia begins as the child's attempt to flatter his mother into a game of Simon says. Further, breaking eye contact is a natural response to an antagonistic or aggressive gaze but also makes sense in the context of seeing no delight on his mother's face. Kid doesn't refuse language LMFAO he might abandon it though if his mother isn't responding. My parents never said anything to me the three times I got the highest yearly class average in English or Spanish, and I only even realized it had been a big deal to win the spelling bees in previous years because the year I finally lost the auditorium gasped. My parents didn't even ask what word struck me out (out of the question they'd have been actually THERE). So I very much admire Dr. Brenner's ability to be diplomatic about this but I think it's unfortunate the only person willing to say what he won't is some random guy on the internet who only knows his Asperger's diagnosis was withheld from him in a deliberate attempt to turn giftedness into a disability because 40 years later I got a 130+. Probably pretty obvious to anyone who actually has an IQ over130 that if they were reliable enough to brag about north of about 135 scores beyond two to three standard deviations from the mean would not be the exclusive province of pediatric IQ instruments. G(r)ifted kids too often skates the line of being a racket foisted onto them in lieu of actually providing meaningfully differentiated advanced education. The same kind of parent who's going to pay extra for some pseudo real 190 IQ score pretends a dozen years after the sequencing of the genome what's clearly behavioral heritability within families is somehow "genetic". As if 🙄. If it were congenital then incidence among monozygotic multiples would be strongly differentiated according to chorionic and nonchorionic births. Which it isn't.

[@kerycktotebag8164]

There's not an unwillingness to say that. It's one of the most common speculations about autism, referred to as "refrigerator mother" hypothesis and he told us why that doesn't work (plenty of absent parents end up with non-autistic kids, plenty of engaged parents end up with autistic kids).

[@drachnae]

Not only are you parroting an explanation for autism that has no good evidence, you are also implying that one cannot both have a high IQ and be disabled, which is flatly false. I would advise that you look into the neurodiversity paradigm and the social model of disability, I think you would find them very enlightening.

[@Zarathustran]

@@drachnae maybe your own disability is causing your irrationality because there's no way I would have implied something like that -- I'm a 130+ and am disabled. Also not advancing any theory of autism, working from my own lived experience (and observation). AAMOF anyone who gives it enough thought can figure out Freud was articulating the framework to understand HIMSELF with no intellectual peer in his immediate circle off of whom to bounce ideas when he figured out what caused his autism in very much the same way I figured my own out. He was a 19th century intellectual thinking from the perspective of his classical education ... so the oedipal construct made sense. I think he'd have seen Bleuler coming to steal credit for his work on that if he had not been autistic. And he probably would not have gotten used by Jung either, but having invested too much in the first place was very autistic of him. Intelligence outside the normal range in either direction is a disability just by virtue of the bi-directional inability to conceptualize accurate theory of mind for people from whom we are separated by two or more standard deviations of iq. If you don't think the neurological changes that became higher or lower IQ were the result of being toyed with buy a primary attachment figure then probably you've been diagnosed and treated. Because as you might have noticed the treatment brings IQ into the normal range. Which explains why you may not have noticed the vast majority of people who are aware of your autism will never stand a chance in hell of figuring out where it came from.

[@MishaSkripach]

@@kerycktotebag8164 This cannot be checked, what goes behind closed doors is not known to scientists. I have not yet met a single good mother of an autistic child. They all (mums) are inadequate, and it is quite clear why their kids behave as they do.

[@tashagolding]

Neurodivergent folks: This needs a warning on it about objectification/medicalisation of autistic people and use of functional labels. My experience of psychoanalytical perspectives on my neuro type continue to be dehumanising.

[@medicalinterpreter]

It is quite outdated, indeed, and that's what I found it disappointing about this video. The bloke is not up to date with the newest understanding. I've got a practical experience in psychoanalytic psychotherapy, though, as an autistic patient, which was nowhere close to this dehumanising perspective.

[@acrb_3275]

Do you think you could elaborate on your point? To me it seems that Leon is doing much better in this regard than the rest of the psycho-therapeutic community. Directly affirming the identity of autistic subjects, condemning finding a "cure" for autism and emphasizing the uniqueness and difference within every patient. Maybe the attempt to "account" for the existence of autism and theorize its emergence could be seen as problematic (The problem of diagnosis possibly). Im trying to learn about this topic so your view on the matter would be greatly appreciated.

[@tashagolding]

@@acrb_3275 not sure if the question was for me or other commentor. I note your protection of the author and request for me to do the explanation labour. The elaboration of my point is researchable online. I would signpost you to Aucademy and Autistica.

[@elzabethmcarthur3154]

Yes, he should listen to actually autistic people, he has a very warped, antiquated, opinions. And he's wrong!

[@p3p3pepe]

Which part is de-humanizing? Which statement?

[@SkodaUFOInternational]

I find it very hard to trust this man.

[@nightoftheworld]

Why is that UFOinternational?

[@tofuman9526]

Read and learn with passion, be critical, and depict your own conclusions. Don’t take anyone as 100% correct on anything. I read object relations theory religiously now, yet, I try to remain as critical as I can be Klein has probably missed on a lot, but certainly provided a ton as well. I don’t dismiss everything she said. I wanna do the same with Dr Leon here as the topic is very important to me professionally speaking.

[@SkodaUFOInternational]

@@nightoftheworld During my practice I've seen that neurodevelopmental disorders are much better explained and treated with neurobiological approaches than with psychodynamics. This is in line with the recommendations of all major mental health organizations. Having said that I wouldn't consider my primary approach cognitive/neurobiological. This video is an example of bad psychoanalytic theory.