The ‘Real’ and the ‘Unreal’: Performatives in Psychotherapy with Autistic Spectrum Children

Defining characteristics of the Autistic Spectrum Condition (ASC) include difficulties with social interaction, language and creative imagination. Yet ASC children are often highly emotionally sensitive, inventing unusual thought patterns to regulate THEIR experience of distorted social and physical realities. This paper presents a Speech Act analysis of psychotherapy with autistic children, drawing on Derrida’s critique of Searle’s proposition that understanding literal language is a precondition for fictional usage. Derrida demonstrated that language’s ‘iterative’ qualities, its repetition in different contexts, are essential to relative fixedness of meaning. One implication is that fictional use may be necessary to defining linguistic application. The presentation focuses on two children whose communications initially involved repetitive reciting chunks from children’s stories acquired wholesale, or re-enacting TV programmes. It describes how the therapist’s connecting with the children’s emotional experience underlying their fascination with the stories enhanced their capacity to communicate and relate in the conventional sense. Conclusions propose that Health and Educational agencies should underline meaningful and functional aspects of ASC children’s behaviour rather than its deficiencies.