New Publication: “Autistic Rims and Their Vicissitudes”

My latest paper entitled “Autistic Rims and Their Vicissitudes” has just been published in the European Journal of Psychoanalysis. The paper is open-access, so it’s a good opportunity to get updated about my latest developments of the notion fo the rim of the drive.

For those of you interested, here is the abstract:

Lacan states that the rim of the drive is involved in the initiation and preservation of the relationship between the body and language. In the study of autism, a major hypothesis states that the rim of the drive is foreclosed for the autistic subject. This foreclosure causes the drive circuit to short-circuit, thus jeopardizing the preservation of the relationship between the body and language. This paper puts forward the idea that autistic subjects supplement this privation through the construction of secondary rims that enable the “delimitation” of jouissance, giving rise to a unique psychic dynamism. The notion of the rim is developed, and its vicissitudes are presented and divided into three versatile types: protective rims, systemizing rims, and incorporating rims. Each of these represents a particular dynamism in the autistic subject’s engagement with the body, knowledge, and the social bond. Each one dictates a different mode of operation for the subject and, in this sense, necessitates a distinct psychoanalytic position in the treatment and facilitation of autism. In the clinical and theoretical elaboration of the vicissitudes of the rim, several significant notions pertaining to autism are discussed such as: aloneness, sameness, autistic objects, stimming, special interests, camouflaging, and nonbinary gender identities.

Find the paper in journal-psychoanalysis.eu here.