An extremely rich and necessary book on the latest psychoanalytic research on autism.
Tarsia and Valendinova gathered an international group of Lacanian practitioners for this short collection, published by Routledge in 2021 in the CFAR library. The essays turn a critical eye on the behavioural and cognitive frameworks that dominate autism services today, tracing their conceptual and ideological foundations and questioning the deficit model that underwrites them.
Against that backdrop the contributors set out a clinic that reads autism as a subjective position rather than a fault to be corrected. Drawing on Maleval's account of autistic structure and the practice developed at the Antenne 110, they attend to the patient's own inventions: objects, doubles, and islets of competence treated as protections to work with, not symptoms to suppress.
For the consulting room it supplies a vocabulary for staying alongside autistic patients without pressing them toward normalisation, and a sustained argument for why the analytic act still has purchase where standardised protocols stall.
About the authors
Laura Tarsia
Laura Tarsia is a Lacanian psychoanalyst working with adults and young people in London. She is a member and lecturer at the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research (CFAR). With Kristina Valendinova she co-edited Treating Autism Today: Lacanian Perspectives (Routledge, 2021), a collection that sets out a psychoanalytic approach to autism grounded in Lacanian theory and clinical practice. Her work centres on the Lacanian clinic of autism, and on psychoanalytic practice with children, adolescents, and adults.
Kristina Valendinova
Kristina Valendinova is a Lacanian psychoanalyst and psychotherapist practising in London, where she works with both adults and children. She holds a doctorate in psychoanalysis and clinical psychopathology from the University of Paris Diderot and a PhD in History of Consciousness from the University of California, Santa Cruz. A member of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research and of the Cercle Freudien in Paris, she co-edited Treating Autism Today: Lacanian Perspectives (Routledge, 2021) and edits the journal JCFAR.
Laura Tarsia
Laura Tarsia is a Lacanian psychoanalyst working with adults and young people in London. She is a member and lecturer at the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research (CFAR). With Kristina Valendinova she co-edited Treating Autism Today: Lacanian Perspectives (Routledge, 2021), a collection that sets out a psychoanalytic approach to autism grounded in Lacanian theory and clinical practice. Her work centres on the Lacanian clinic of autism, and on psychoanalytic practice with children, adolescents, and adults.
Kristina Valendinova
Kristina Valendinova is a Lacanian psychoanalyst and psychotherapist practising in London, where she works with both adults and children. She holds a doctorate in psychoanalysis and clinical psychopathology from the University of Paris Diderot and a PhD in History of Consciousness from the University of California, Santa Cruz. A member of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research and of the Cercle Freudien in Paris, she co-edited Treating Autism Today: Lacanian Perspectives (Routledge, 2021) and edits the journal JCFAR.
Details
- 2021
- Routledge
- Routledge
- 142
- 9780367369897