Autism as a Controversial Concept. What Kind of Special Educational Needs Can We Find with Autism?

One hundred years after its appearance on the scientific scene, autism finds its place more and more often in the spotlight not only in clinical and therapeutical psychology – in addition to medicine, psychology and neuroscience, today schools and health services also deal with it widely. However, autism as a concept remains controversial as well as a phenomenon not yet well understood. Psychoanalysis can help to understand how the concept arose within psychology and how it has changed up to contemporary times. In most cases – the famous ones as well as ordinary ones – the autistic child who finds himself at school seems uneducable and avoids close contact. What kind of special educational needs can we find with autism? This paper is based on Freudian discoveries in order to offer a direction that gives an answer to enlighten the subjective desire to be human among humans even in the case of autism.