Autism and the Limits of Language: Perspectives for a New Clinical Approach

Abstract

 This article analyses the centrality of the regime of signifiers in Jacques Lacan's constitution of the subject, linking it to the idea of the unconscious as structured as a language. If Lacan redefines the human as a spoken being, an effect of the signifying chain and symbolic inscription, this conception finds its limits in the face of existences whose relationship with language is interrupted, as in the autistic children Fernand Deligny followed in the Cévennes mountains. Based on this contrast, the text proposes considering modes of existence outside of speech, in which the human is constituted by gestures, rhythms, and plots. The confrontation between Lacan and Deligny shifts the clinical question from the symbolic field to a sensitive, pre-verbal dimension that escapes words and yet expresses itself beyond discourse, through features, movements, lines, and affects.