Why should it be that the scene in reality has to have an autistic person or a replacement?

At the beginning the child's world is made of his or her parents. It is obvious that the first object the child identifies is the mother in the form of her breast, which he depends on for his physical and psychic existence (Sigmund Freud, 1905, Melanie Klein, 1988). In other words, in his perceptual world, the mother-breast is the world. Without doubt, the father is also important, not only if he feeds the baby, but I won't address this topic here. For the child, the mother is the world and he will attribute hunger and food to the mother-breast. Melanie Klein's psychoanalytic approach has developed the topic into the bad breast (the one that deprives, for example, food) and the good breast (the one that provides the food). What is interesting to consider is that for the baby there is no absent mother-breast, so if the mother is not present, the child's unconscious scene is one where the mother-breast is present but not giving, thus creating the ill feeling that is hunger. This is why we say that for the baby there is no world outside of the mother and the same goes for child locked into his autism.

Let's go a step further, if the child is in a subjective psychic scene where the world beyond the mother is veiled, then he does not perceive fully outside of the mother nor comprehend that there is a world beyond, leading to consequences in his interactions with the real world. The people that watch these videos or read this article, are able to perceive or imagine the world. In contrast, the world the child perceives has an equal structure to his closed psychic world. He has no dialogue or dialectic with the world, and is incapable of opening to what is beyond the mother. We will return to this idea as I try to explain how a child with autism unexpectedly comes out of autism, at least temporarily, when interacting in a triad robot-human being-child. To do so let's briefly consider the fact that in the world the child is in, he does not express himself as a subject.

Every child is an object of his mother, an object of her desires, and a psychic object that psychoanalysis has studied (Lacan, Freud). The child is an object that fills the void the mother has and satisfies her lifelong desire of having a baby that comes from her body. In a benign case, the baby will be the center of attention of the mother and probably the father, which is referred by Freud (1914) as “her majesty the baby”. It is good that the child is the object of the mother's love, desire and interest, but it's not good for the autonomy of the child to stay as her object. It is also not good to be a concrete object or thing of the mother, especially if this continues over time. We are aware that the word “object” has lost its metaphoric meaning and has become more like a “thing”, without expressing its meaning as an object of love, desire, hate, hopes, fulfilled or unfulfilled promises, and so on. The child with autism only expresses itself as an object, and the words that describe him emphasize him being an object, without stating what he is an object of.

With the assistance of the videos and the difference it makes to have the robot in the scene, we are able to decipher and conclude that it is necessary that someone manifests as a thing (the child with autism) or is replaced by a thing that manifests as “someone” (the robot), which has no real subjective expression.  The formula that needs to be satisfied is one in which the child functions as a thing or the thing is almost someone. The child is similar to the robot in being an object-subject and his identification with robot could play a role. This similarity comes for the ambiguity that exists in the scale from object to subject. Because in the scene there was a robot that is a thing that is programmed to imitate something human, there was an unveiling, replacement or change of the child's role.

If he can do this, it means that the difficulty that held the child back is not physical or neurological, and can be overcome by the role changes in the scene. Maybe there still is an unsurmountable cause of autism that cannot be overcome even temporarily, but maybe not. We don't know in advance if the child is able to step out partially or completely from autism. In our minds, it is important to leave space for doubt and an openness to the possibility that “maybe it's not irreversible”, because otherwise we will be creating our own mental scene that “it is impossible to overcome”. This, in turn, will affect the upbringing, interactions and perceptions of the child and her circumstances.

Empirically we know that when a child with autism is in the company of other children with autism and their contact is mediated by other adults, she/he does not manifest subjective capabilities, in other words there is no emergence from autism. Because the humanoid robot in these experiments has a quality of being an object, a thing and a programmed machine (something the child is not), there is a passing of the baton between child and robot. We should ask ourselves, why isn't another child with autism able function as the robot? In terms of our reasoning, maybe it is because the other child has a degree of subjectivity that the robot does not possess or the robot responds to stimuli in ways that the child with autism doesn't.

The robot and child co-exist in a conceptual zone where the continuum subject-object is fused. In this zone, the child with autism is like a child who has been unconsciously "dressed up" as a robot and the robot is dressed as a human being.  

This cybernetic experience and at least some cases psychoanalytically approached (Jerusalinsky, 1984, 2003 pp. 23-26) show that there might be partial or complete way out of autism, and that if we explore various therapeutic ways, we can discredit the belief that there is no partial or complete way out. The cybernetic trick permits the child to manifest as the subject of his experience and is a linguistic operation because it operates over the subject.

I doubt that solely interacting with a robot will be enough for the child to emerge completely as a subject. There is an unconscious theme that needs to be untangled through the intentional words of a human being, which is not limited by the sensory plane and has human complexity. Actually, the experiences described in this article happened through Ben Robins's therapeutic interventions and were mediated by his clinical knowledge. We have seen that what helps the child to express his hidden subjectivity is the robot and the agent that is between the child and the robot. The videos convey a potential that will impact parents and specialists by allowing them to imagine the child coming out of his autism. To imagine a healthier scene in the mother-child mind can change the equation the child follows, where he is almost an object. It is also important what mental scene the specialist imagines for the future of the child. The prognosis and tests used will have an impact on the child's performance and could lock in the limitations which the child could otherwise have emerged from. (Grosz, 2009)

In psychoanalytical terms, we interpret these cases as the child with autism being the “object” that the mother is missing in an overly concrete way. For the mother of the child with autism and to the extent possible, he is an object in a more concrete way, and has a minimized expression of a being a subject. More than the object of the mother's interest, the child has become an object per se. This is equal to saying that in autism the child is not an “object” in a metaphoric sense, but rather an object in an overly real sense (linguistically, instead of being a metaphor, it is a metonymy of the word “object”). In the case of an autistic child (but not always the case), a woman needs a child and then it is as if someone gave her exactly what she needed: an object. This is not due to an intrinsic fault in the mother because, as a woman lacking something, she will probably have children without autism. But in the case of the mental scene that is created for these children at birth or when conceived, the mother is completed by a child with autism. Of course this is not what the mother wants, but it has crystalized into the response she's received: a child with autism.

So, a child with autism is a concrete interpretation of the child being an object of motherly love and not a metaphor, such as in the case of a mother that wants the child. This would apply to the case of a mother that wants the child. One could question, who is reading it in this way? Who interprets it as needing a child object that does not manifest as a subject? Is the child that reads this? Or is it the mother? Our answer is that it is done by the one that puts up the scene, not a concrete person. Metaphorically, I say that it is the unconscious director of the scene. It's a mental scene that has everyone captive. The child's autistic games, repeated without change, create a conviction that there is no way out of autism.

There are mothers that express the child as an object in various ways, such as having them tied up to a leash as if he was a yoyo that should not escape, or by prohibiting exiting the home and limiting interactions with others.

In this way, autism does not depend on the mother's conscious will, as she wished for the positive development of the child. It is an issue that pertains to a metaphorical level that is different in each circumstance and leads to an unconscious linguistic process that produces a thing and not a subjective child. For example, if in the woman's psychic world and in a particular context, it had been said about the child “what a beautiful thing”, this may lead to an unconscious process producing a child-thing in an almost literal way.

From a linguistic perspective, the cure for autism comes from the emergence of the occult subject. Psychoanalysis finds another way, by getting help from the father who acts as a third person for the mother and child. This idea is described in detail by Lacanian Psychoanalysis and I will not develop this idea here.

The issue of subjects and objects I am addressing here pertains to language. When there is no expression of the grammatical subject, there also is no subjective expression of emotion nor unconscious fantasy. If a girl has echolalia, she does not express the subject behind the words. If her subjectivity emerges, as we observe in the experiences with robots, it could be because the subject is occult but not eliminated.

I should also consider another possible cause for the child with autism manifesting subjectivity in front of a robot and the human agent that mediates them:

Some professionals observing these videos during the presentation said that the child expressed his communicative facet because the robot is not threatening. The following is our analysis of this.

Someone could suppose that in the experiments on video, the child can express himself as a subject while in the presence and action of a robot because humans inhibit him. In this hypothesis human beings, including the mother, are threatening and thus lead to an autistic inhibition observed in all human interactions. Also the robot is less threatening because its behavior is more predictable than with humans. The hypothesis of humans being threatening while the robot isn't, is contradicted by the fact that in the scene there is a third entity that is human. Here the child does not show inhibition and does not act in an autistic way with the man. This discards this hypothesis.

The children observed in the videos are able to differentiate between person and robot, and they speak to the human specifically when in the triad human-robot-child. So the reason the child comes out of autism, definitely or temporarily, is not that he is not threatened by the robot. The supposedly threatening human is not threatening to him. This means that what impedes the child in becoming a subject is not the threatening presence of humans. Moreover, the child is not inhibited but rather programmed in a more or less reversible way to act autistically and this behavior is not a psychological defense. I suppose that in each case there is a limit on to how reversible autism can be, as there may be remains of autism that can fluctuate between none to minimal, compared with their current level. This is not approachable from the three videos and would require a long process.

About the child's interest in the window, which is a hole in the room's ceiling:

At the beginning, for every child the world is the mother (or the undifferentiated unit father-mother or its substitutes, which I will call mother too). For the child with autism, the mother is the world, she is everything. At a certain stage, most children would have found a metaphoric “perforation” in the world-mother and start to sense that there is a world beyond. For the psyche of a child with autism, there is no world outside of the mother. The psychic scene that contains the child with autism, is a cloistered world where he doesn't see himself as a subject. This is witnessed by his apparent autonomy which is expressed by his withdrawal from the world, and generalized disinterest, except for things that move (such as a spinning object, which he identifies with and imitates). The world is closed and he is locked in it. But now, in the accepted interaction with the robot, he is allowed to be a child and, at least momentarily, come out of autism and perceive with interest the bird he sees outside of the skylight, and speaks for the first time in 6 weeks in the laboratory. Would there exist another metaphor as beautiful and poetic as this one? As the child shows expression and communication and emerges as a subject, there is an opening of the exit door of autism, and he then points at a living thing beyond the enclosure he was in. He asks questions and talks to the man that moves the robot and is the interlocutor between them. He shows him what he sees: a hole in the world that permits us access to what happens in the unconscious world, and a hole in the mother-world that had been sealed previously. The communication and social interaction taking place are contingent with this opening and the emergence of the subject are part of that operation.

In psychoanalytic terms, the child with autism becomes the mother's non-transitional object. In other words, the boy is not a temporary object but rather a permanent object that serves as a “perfect” seal to the hole made by what the mother was lacking and, in spite of herself, cannot let go of. On the contrary, the child that does expresses his subjectivity and is a subject, is no longer a concrete object of the mother and becomes instead, the mother's child. Jacques Lacan, French Psychoanalyst, commented on Winnicott's concept of transitional object by stating that it's an object in the world, such as a piece of cloth that the child inverts in a libidinal way (Winnicot W.D , 1971). Lacan presents a problem that is derived from the opposite: what kind of object of the mother is the child? The psychic problem for the child's autonomy is in not being the mother's transitional object, but rather the mother's permanent object. “What is important is not that the transitional object preserves the child's autonomy, but rather if the child serves or not as the mother's transitional object” (Lacan, 2012).

The case of a mother and her child with autism, is just like the case of a child and his transitional object, where he stays tied to his pacifier, blanket or favorite toy. Even though every mother of a child with autism would ask for her child to move in the world and communicate, there is something happening between mother and child that stops this. It could be the child's mental image of the mother, or the mother mental image of the child, or the space between both. Therefore, the children that we have seen come out of their autism, even if temporarily, in triple interaction with the robot clearly show that autism is completely reversible and that, in general terms, there is a way out of it. It will still need to be seen if this is true in all cases, but I think it is possible because each time we see a child with autism manifested as a subject, even if momentarily, we know the potential exists. Maybe it is a transitional phenomenon that can be expanded to be complete.

Sometimes we don't know how to bring the child to have contact with others or to show his or her subjectivity, so instead of recognizing that we didn't know how to, we soothe ourselves falsely by assuming there is no way out of autism, not even partial. No one has to affirm there is no way out, but only that she or he has not seen it or read about the treated cases, such as those using the psychoanalytic approach.

In cybernetic terms, these experiences allow us to suggest that a robot is a frustrated attempt to program a machine with human form to have subjectivity and speech, while a child with autism is programmed unconsciously by a mental space mother-child to act like a humanoid robot without its own speech or subjectivity. Within the interaction between the robot and child that is mediated by an agent, there is a change of roles in the autistic child's imaginary scene, which allows him to act like a child with subjectivity. 

The autistic child is a simulation of a robot, while the robot is a simulation of a child or human. In the game of mirrors involving the child and robot, the boy becomes a child in the world and the world opens up to him, becoming broader than the mother.

On the other hand, those institutions for children with autism that organize their activities under the assumption that autism has no cure, are determining through their actions a program that creates the lack of an exit for autism because it is based on a wrong forecast. They are programed for autism, and not to exit it.