Freitag, 2. April 2027

Moderation: tba

«Beyond the Stimulus Barrier: Autism and the Limits of Psychoanalytic Developmental Thinking»

Psychoanalysis, born from the mind of a „nerve doctor,“ has always maintained a fraught and generative relationship with neurology. Few concepts illuminate this tension more sharply than Freud’s notion of Reizschutz (stimulus barrier), which he first formulated explicitly in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). However, its origins can be traced to his unfinished neurobiological manuscript, Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895). Freud uses the concept to describe a protective layer that shields the organism from overwhelming external excitation. It is precisely this concept, and the developmental assumptions built around it, that autism forces us to fundamentally reconsider.

Autism, now widely understood as a neurological condition, poses a profound conceptual challenge to classical psychoanalytic thinking. Neurological research, together with first-person accounts from autistic people, reveals that sensory processing and regulation in autism differ so radically from neurotypical experience that the foundational assumptions of our psychoanalytic theories — about symbolization, object relations, and the development of the drives — can no longer be taken for granted. For many autistic people, stimuli may activate the senses so completely that symbolic meaning has little or no mental space to develop. The autistic stimulus barrier, one might say, does not fail to develop — it develops differently, along a different shore entirely.

This talk proposes that a neurologically informed psychoanalysis can and must engage with autistic experience in an affirming rather than corrective spirit. In autism, primary mental states are not regression, not defense, but a lifelong and genuine mode of relating to the world. The introjection of object relations takes a fundamentally different course: immersion in an undifferentiated mode with one’s objects — human and otherwise — constitutes an important and authentic dimension of psychological life, not a developmental arrest to be overcome.

This reframing has direct clinical consequences. It asks us to reconsider the neurotypical assumptions embedded in our developmental models, and to approach the question of language with particular care. For many autistic people, language is not a more or less natural symbolic medium but a learned and effortful mode of communication — a fact that transforms the very ground on which psychoanalytic clinical practice takes place. Attending carefully to autistic experience may, in the end, return psychoanalysis to questions it has always carried but not always known how to ask.

Arnona Zahavi is a supervising adult and child psychoanalyst at the Tel Aviv Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis and a supervising clinical psychologist in private practice in Israel. She teaches and supervises at various psychoanalytic and therapeutic institutes.

From 2014 to 2022, she served as Director of the Autism Treatment and Research Center at the Ramat Hen Therapeutic Kindergartens in Tel Aviv, where she led a multidisciplinary team providing psychoanalytic, developmental, and neurologically informed treatment for children with autism spectrum disorder and their families. She continues to teach and write on child psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic technique, and autism.

Alongside her clinical and teaching activities, Arnona Zahavi has long been engaged in the intersection of psychoanalysis, social responsibility, and human rights. She is a founding member of Psychoactive, Mental Health Professionals for Human Rights, and a member of Physicians for Human Rights Israel. Over the years, she has participated in and initiated projects supporting Palestinian communities in Israel and the Occupied Territories, including consultation and supervision in the assessment and treatment of young children with developmental difficulties.

Her professional interests also include group therapy, multiculturalism, and trauma. She has taught in the training program for group facilitators at Beit Berl Academic College and has worked as a group therapist with military veterans suffering from severe post-traumatic stress disorder.

Among her publications in English are Becoming the Little Prince: Autism Within a Psychoanalytic Environment (with H. Grinberg, 2020) and Obstacles on Israel’s Path from Trauma and Victimhood to Accountability (2022).

• jeweils von 20.00 – 21.30 Uhr
• im Freud-Institut Zürich
• vor Ort: unentgeltlich
• Bestellung Videorecording der Vorträge, Zugang verfügbar ab einer Woche nach dem Vortrag: CHF 30.–, CHF 15 .– für FIZ-Mitglieder und Gast-Mitglieder des FIZ
• anerkannt von SGPP und PSY-Verbänden, je 2 Credits
• Einheit 8 gemäss Rahmenplan

Öffentliche Veranstaltung im Freud-Institut Zürich, Anmeldung erforderlich: anmeldung@freud-institut.ch