The psychic organ point of autistic syntax

Abstract

This paper deals with autistic syntax and its expressions both in the fully fledged autistic structure and in the autistic zones of other personality structures. The musical notion of the organ point serves as a point of departure in an attempt to describe how autistic syntax transforms what was meant to constitute the substrate for linguistic polyphony into a one-dimensional, repetitive score, devoid of emotional volume. Autistic syntax denies the recognition of the human characteristics of both self and other, turning the other into an autistic object, which blocks, with his or her concrete presence, the hole created by his or her own absence as a psychological subject. The resulting discourse either imprints its forms on the other’s language or rubs against its surface, but never creates a living dialogue. Within the autistic discourse, repetitiveness replaces cross-fertilisation, thereby annihilating the ability to create or to allow anything new. The paper concludes with a discussion of Tustin’s notion of ‘the function of the cross’ within the therapeutic process and its communicative expressions in language.

Keywords:

• Autism
• primary mental states
• trauma
• autistic syntax
• psychic organ point
• autistic dyad
• reclamation of psychic polyphony

Notes

1. Houzel (2004) argues with Tustin on that point, suggesting a more primitive level of bisexuality where masculine elements do not penetrate feminine ones, but simply strengthen the maternal container as buttresses strengthen a building. Houzel emphasises that it is extremely important that the same containing object possesses feminine/maternal and masculine/paternal features in the correct proportions. Any paternal element that is dissociated from the container will be experienced as threatening, persecutory and destructive. The autistic child splits off, very early in life, the component parts of psychic bisexuality, probably because he or she is unable, at that stage, to find enough paternal features in the mother.

2. Music composers do at times use a sustained tone that is not a bass in a way that is identical to the organ point. When an organ point occurs in a voice other than the bass, it is usually referred to as an ‘inverted organ point’. That is not what I mean here.

3. This distinction may also touch upon the difference between autistic and psychotic language (Amir, 2010). While in psychosis internal rules of action take over, autism is marked by the expropriation of both internal and external rules.

4. Polyphony is any musical text in which two or more tones sound simultaneously. It derives from the Greek polyphonia ‘variety of sounds’ from poly ‘many’ and phone ‘voice, sound’. Usually polyphony is associated with counterpoint, the combination of distinct melodic lines. In polyphonic music, two or more simultaneous melodic lines are perceived as independent even though they are related (Benward and Saker, 2003). In the present context – since our thinking, as well as our language and speech, are composed of many different voices, conscious and subconscious, which create texts and subtexts, and since it is the accumulation of all these voices that creates a rich psychic discourse – the attack on psychic polyphony takes place through the creation of a dull discourse that reduces itself to no meaning in order to avoid any encounter with the unbearable.