The Sigmund Freud Museum invites to the now fifty-third Sigmund Freud Lecture.

Freud and Neurodiversity

What would Freud have made of the contemporary concept of neurodiversity and the diagnostic debates around it? With many years of experience in pediatric neurology, how might he have approached the question of autism and the autistic spectrum? Starting with a discussion of Freud's exchanges with Bleuler around the term itself, we move on to the history of the concept in the States after Bleuler's visit there in 1913, and the use that the early autism researchers made of Freud's ideas. How were his notions of defence and conflict modified, and with what effects on psychoanalytic technique? Is his theory of a 'stimulus barrier' helpful in understanding experiences such as hyper and hypoarousal, and should we see Freud's drive theory as an outdated framework or as something still useful in thinking about autism and the sensory issues particular to it?

Darian Leader is a psychoanalyst working in London and a member of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research and of The College of Psychoanalysts-UK. He is the author of several books including: Why Do Women Write More Letters Than They Post? (1996); Freud's Footnotes (2000); Stealing the Mona Lisa: What Art Stops Us From Seeing (2002); Why do people get ill? (with David Corfield, 2007), The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia and Depression (2008), What is Madness? (2011), Strictly Bipolar (2013); Hands (2016), Why Can’t We Sleep? (2019), Jouissance; Sexuality, Suffering and Satisfaction (2021) and Is It Ever Just Sex? (2023).  He writes frequently about contemporary art.

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