The Voice of Autism: Contemporary Psychoanalytic Perspectives

“What binds me to the Other is the voice in the field of the Other.” (Miller, 1989, p. 184)

The voice of the mother (i.e. the caretaker) is the vehicle that introduces the infant to language from the very beginning. Through the first babbling, the voice is able to convey the infants demands and needs. However, the voice does not only introduce meaning into speech but also addresses the musicality of language: a nonsensical dimension of language that precedes sense-making. This dimension is at stake in psychoanalysis, a libidinal dimension that ties the body and language together.

In this talk we will discuss the unique autistic relationship with the voice. We will explore the psychoanalytic notion of the voice and its important role in establishing one’s enunciative position in a community of speakers. We will try and understand why many autistic children and adults establish a clear linguistic proficiency but do not engage in its enunciation. In doing so, a contemporary psychoanalytic approach to autism will be presented.

The Speaker

Dr. Leon S. Brenner (Ph.D.) is a psychoanalytic theorist and psychological counsellor from Berlin. Brenner’s work draws from the Freudian and Lacanian traditions of psychoanalysis, and his interest lies in the understanding of the relationship between culture and psychopathology. His book The Autistic Subject: On the Threshold of Language, is a bestseller in psychology in Palgrave publishing in 2021. He is a founder of Lacanian Affinities Berlin and Unconscious Berlin and is currently a research fellow at the International Psychoanalytic University Berlin and the Hans Kilian und Lotte Köhler Centrum (KKC) at the Ruhr Universität Bochum.