Towards an integrative approach of infantile autism.

The superior temporal lobe is nowadays in the heart of the reflections about infantile autism, psychopathologic disorder which appears to be the deepest failure of access to intersubjectivity (with the impossibility to accept that other one exists as other). This process of access to intersubjectivity seems to involve the superior temporal lobe because of the different functions which are localized in this part of the brain: faces’ recognition, human voice’s recognition, perception of the others’ movements, and chiefly articulation of the different sensorial flows coming out from the objet and giving to the subject the possibility to feel this object as outside from him. At the time where the psychoanalytic approach of infantile autism and the recent cognitive data are converging to consider intersubjectivity as the result of the process of “mantling” or comodalization of the sensorial flows coming out from the objects, recent studies in brain neuroimaging point out anatomic and functional abnormalities of autistic children’s superior temporal lobe. So, a dialogue is now possible between those different disciplines, and lets us hope the mergence of an integrative view of infantile autism where the superior temporal lobe could be placed in a central position, not necessarily as the place of a primary cause of autism, but rather as an intermediate link or as a witness of the autistic functioning itself.