Rethinking Autism and Communication

Rethinking Autism and Communication: Listening Differently in Educational Contexts

This talk presents a perspective on autism that approaches it not as a pathological condition to be corrected, but as a distinct mode of being in the world. Rather than viewing autism primarily through deficit-based or medicalized frameworks, it proposes understanding autistic experience as an active and meaningful way of engaging with others, language, and reality.

Drawing from psychoanalytic thinking, alongside clinical and educational experience, the talk challenges the widespread assumption that autistic people lack empathy and communication. Instead, it argues that autistic individuals take communication very seriously, but often insist on using it on their own terms. From this perspective, autistic language is not absent or deficient, but structured differently, requiring us to learn how to listen and how to respond within its logic.

A central focus of the talk is the question of listening. As Jacques Lacan once remarked, it is not that autistic people do not listen, but that we tend to speak to them in ways shaped by our own expectations, norms, and desires to care. Autism, in this sense, confronts us with the ethical demand to accept the other in their radical alterity, without immediately imposing predefined models of development, health, or “appropriate” functioning.

The talk suggests that autism can be understood as an attempt at a solution rather than an illness: a way of organizing experience, language, and the body in response to the world. This shift has significant implications for educational and clinical practice, inviting practitioners to reconsider how care is offered and how educational, therapeutic, or supportive environments can become spaces of encounter rather than normalization.

The talk aims to open participants to a sensitivity that is crucial for anyone working with autistic young people across diverse fields, including education, art, movement and dance, cooking and everyday skills, psychology, psychiatry, and allied professions. Rather than offering techniques or protocols, it proposes a different orientation toward listening, speaking, and relating, one that places respect for difference at the centre of care.

Speaker biography

Dr Leon S. Brenner (Ph.D) is a psychoanalytic practitioner (Heilpraktiker für Psychotherapie) and psychoanalytic theorist 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/Springer publishing in 2021. He is a founder of Lacanian Affinities Berlin (laLAB) and Unconscious Berlin.