Autism and the Ethics of Listening

This talk presents a way of thinking about autism that does not treat it as a disorder to be corrected, but as a particular way of being in the world. Rather than starting from ideas of deficit or dysfunction, it approaches autism as an active and meaningful way of relating to language, to others, and to reality.

A central question of the talk is communication. It challenges the common assumption that autistic people lack communication or empathy. Instead, it argues that autistic people take communication very seriously, but often insist on using it on their own terms. Autistic language is not missing or broken. It is structured differently. This difference requires a shift on our side: not better techniques, but a different way of listening and responding.

Drawing from psychoanalytic thinking, including Lacanian ideas, alongside clinical and lived experience, the talk focuses on the problem of listening. As Lacan observed, the difficulty is not that autistic people do not listen, but that we tend to speak to them from within our own expectations, norms, and ideas of care. We approach them with ready-made models of what communication, development, or health should look like.

From this perspective, autism can be understood as an attempt at a solution rather than an illness: a way of organizing experience, language, and the body in response to the world. This reframing has ethical consequences. It shifts the question from how to normalize or correct the autistic subject to how to encounter them without erasing difference.

The talk is addressed to a wide audience. It is relevant for professionals working with autistic people, but also for family members, partners, friends, and anyone who lives alongside or cares for autistic individuals. It does not assume specialist knowledge. Instead, it offers a way of thinking that speaks to shared questions about communication, misunderstanding, care, and difference, making it accessible to those with professional, personal, or theoretical interest in autism.

Speaker

Dr Leon S. Brenner is a Berlin-based psychoanalyst, researcher, and lecturer whose work spans psychoanalysis, philosophy, mental health, and critical approaches to subjectivity and care. His research engages questions of language, embodiment, love, psychopathology, and sociality, with autism forming one important focus of his work.Brenner has extensive international teaching and lecturing experience across universities and professional institutes in Europe, the United Kingdom, North America, and beyond. He has taught and delivered lectures, seminars, and advanced training at institutions including the King’s College London, Duke University, Ghent University, Duquesne University, and Columbia University, as well as at numerous psychoanalytic and interdisciplinary training institutes worldwide. His work addresses both professional and general audiences and is concerned with how listening, communication, and care can be rethought beyond deficit-based, normative, or purely technical models.