AUTISM AS A PARADIGM OF ALTERITY: TOWARDS A TERNARY ETHICS OF ENCOUNTER

Abstract

Certain psychoanalytic approaches conceive autism as an absence of the Other, placing it outside the field of language and desire. This article problematizes the binary logic of presence/absence and inside/outside to question how such dichotomies limit work with people diagnosed as autistic. The aim is to propose a ternary reading of the clinical encounter, in which alterity is not opposed to the subject but constitutes its very condition of psychic existence. To this end, a theoretical and conceptual analysis is carried out based on the contributions of Rosine and Robert Lefort, Jean- Claude Maleval, Éric Laurent, and Marie-Christine Laznik regarding the function of the object and the boundary in the treatment of the drive and in the localization of jouissance. Subsequently, this discussion is articulated with Charles Sanders Peirce’s triadic theory and Lacan’s concept of “logical time,” in order to situate the clinician’s position beyond symbolic restitution. In this way, autism appears not as a structural exception but as a privileged point of observation to think the continuous operation of bordering, cutting, and linking that founds subjectivity. This allows us to conclude that a ternary ethics of encounter recognizes alterity as movement rather than lack, orienting clinical practice toward openness to the unpredictability of the subject.