Other voices - A Different Outlook on Autism by Ivan Ruiz

Autism is often situated within the clinical field of learning difficulties and thus considered as a developmental disorder, a failure to achieve expected developmental milestones. Treatments offered then tend to be programmes of re-education aimed at making up for these supposed deficiencies. Clinical approaches to autism inspired by the work of Jacques Lacan emphasize instead the primacy of the speaking subject situated in the field of language, which lead to a apparently paradoxical ethical bet - to listen to autism. Symptoms associated with autism is then considered in terms of the functional elements that the subject makes use of in order to manage his or her experience of insertion in a world perceived as hostile, threatening or unmanageable. This film is inspired by personal experience of autism and by engagement with Lacanian psychoanalysis.