Psychanalysis on Autistic: Anyone Have a Clue?

Recently, WebMD (through CBS) made some interesting statements in an article regarding psychoanalysis and autism. Right off the bat, it's an eyebrow raiser; here's AutismVox on the subject.

I've been pretty conditioned not to laugh at autism quackery, because if I wasn't I'd have collapsed my lungs, but I had to here. Noted as a sensitive "translator", the psychoanalyst would theoretically know the motivations of the person through behavior s/he'd only seen somewhat regularly, using a totally different toolset addressing the differences of an autistic, and would be able to even understand somewhat specific details about the person's mind. Somehow, I remember that psychoanalysts had problems understanding much of anyone, less than an autistic one.

It reminds me heavily of an IQ test that was administered to me, supposedly "non-verbal". I don't really remember it (I've seen so many specialists like that in my childhood life that I can't distinguish one thing from another, without the basis of language to make the claim on), but even the details I've heard give me a good idea it was useless; apparently, the first thing they did to me was talk when I got in the room. I'm even told that there were questions I got wrong on the basis of vocabulary (I knew "road", but not "street").


Mind you, they put my intelligence at the mentally retarded, and, despite some attempt to establish the contrary (usually in the lovely statement "But all autistics are mentally retarded!"), that turned out to be wrong. Then again, I was tested later when I could talk to 100, and that gave way as well to an even higher score later. Intelligent communication, rather than intelligence, is necessary to score high on an IQ test.

And, again, that's essentially what would have to happen for this to work. The typical remove for not having mental access becomes triple fold when the person doesn't communicate regularly, and for a non-verbal person it's far more than that, and it really takes some very particular knowledge of that person's life to even get a good understanding (and that's not guaranteed). A psychoanalyst will not, barring psychic powers, be anywhere near good enough.

But it's funny enough idea. I wonder how many interesting labels they'd come up for an autistic person. It'd be fun to look through. But in terms of actual help and education for an autistic person, it'd not exactly be my place to turn.