Gummy bears sit on a sundial

Nipple play

Content: psychiatric abuse

I am thinking about a field. This field is filled with pinwheels. I stim in this field. Hands wrenching, full and swaying body movements, words that are cool and crisp, words like pulchritudinous, all echo-localized, parallelism is repetition but repetition isn’t always parallel, pinwheels, pinwheels, pinwheels.

I am lately working on a book project, a book project about the neurologically queer and how we crip rhetorical traditions. In support of my book project, I’ve had to read a great deal of psychiatric literature. By psychiatric literature, I mean the kind of literature that beholds the mentally disabled as though we are animal crackers. The gaze, the psychoanalytic gaze: Autistics are anthropomorphic cookies, and doctors will probe and digest our body parts, piece by piece.

Somewhere in the field, a pinwheel crumbles under the weight of painful metaphor.

Daily reading, part one. Ivar Lovaas constructs his shock room in the late 1950s. He lines the floor with electrodes. He sends in a child patient, a child patient with a flappy, swaying, stimming body. He flips a switch. The child convulses. She learns a lesson, until she stims again, until she finds her neuroqueer self wiggling and spinning in clinical spaces with shocking gazes.

Pamela, an autistic child, writhes from being shocked
Photo from Screams, Slaps, & Love, 1965, Life magazine

Daily reading, part two. Frances Tustin in 1972 declares that the nipple is an autistic object. I first read Tustin while in the field, my hands roaming, fingers tangled in rubber bands. “The nipple is an autistic object,” she writes. Several years earlier, Bruno Bettelheim analyzed drawings from his “feeble-minded” child patients, in search of nipples. Nipples he found. Nipples, and breasts, black breasts and white breasts, racialized interpretations of autistic drawings, nipples, finger paintings plentiful in nipples, oh, the rhetoricity of the nipple.

A child's drawing. The whole page is covered in dense, thatched black lines, except for an empty spot of white toward the top of the page -- what Bettelheim presumed was a nipple.
From The Empty Fortress. Bettelheim captioned the drawing with the following text: “Drawing probably symbolic of the ‘white’ breast — that is, the good one.”

I am stimming as I read of these things, clinicians and their autistic objects. Tustin suggests that stimming, that autistic gesture writ large, is a kind of psychogenic nipple play. Autistics are always searching for breasts, for that which we supposedly lost. While I ponder Tustin in the field, I channel SAT prep books. Breasts are to autistics as car keys are to neurotypicals. Analogies abound. I imagine Tustin rummaging through a pocketful of breasts, a fruitless search. I look at the dust jacket on my book, where a reviewer in 1995 notes that Tustin’s work is still relevant “today.” How long must we dwell in “today”?

Part three, 1967. Bertram Ruttenberg and Enid Wolf declare that echolalia — the repetition of words and phrases — is a kind of autistic autoeroticism. (Or, is autistic autoeroticism redundant?) Nipple, I mutter to myself. Nipple, nipple, nipple. I think about arousal and the so-called prison that is autism, a prison so-called by breast-obsessed shrinks and the proteges of B.F. Skinner. I think about rhetorical arousal, erotic rhetorics, autistic eros, the electric current that narrates our history and our present. I wonder about the nipple as an autistic placeholder: the meaning in movement, the queering of pinwheels in a field, where autistic objects of all sorts commune.

A field of pinwheels
Sexy pinwheels spin in a field. But maybe these pinwheels symbolize breasts. If they were taller breasts — erm, pinwheels — they might even make electricity.

8 thoughts on “Nipple play”

  1. Been reading some of the same material–in particular the Bettelheim breast thing–gawd, what a travesty! I love this bit of writing, keeping it open and calling on this and other writing of yours as I work on my own stuff. Thanks for being such an inspiration! 😉

    1. Psychoanalysis+autism = very WTF. It’s part of a longer legacy around “refrigerator mothers.” Bettelheim in particular viewed autism as caused by mothers — so, for him and his other contemporaries, they saw boobs in everything (and, in turn, decided that boobs represented mom problems).

      Lovaas moved away from refrigerator mothers as a construct, yet he and the behaviorists who followed him still adhere to a longer legacy of mother-blame. ABA, for instance, has long thrived on the idea that therapeutic interventions are only successful if they capitalize on every. single. moment., and thus they enlist parents (often mothers) as co-therapists. A child’s failure to gain once again becomes a mother’s failure to mother.

      With Tustin, nipples weren’t so much a symbol of a mother’s failure as much a symbol of an autistic’s failure: She believed that something went wrong for autistics during their nipple-rooting baby days, and thus autistics lack the ability to distinguish self from other from object. As a result, Tustin argued that almost every autistic trait is the result of nipples. As in, stimming is symbolic nipple play; echolalia is symbolic nipple play; perseveration is symbolic nipple play; and so on.

  2. Oh. O. Oooooh. Melanie. It’s not just the CONTENT and WHAT you say… but the HOW–the powerful poetic-prosaic raw and poetic-punchiness of your words/sentences/phrases–that zings me throughout this astonishing piece.

    * By psychiatric literature, I mean the kind of literature that beholds the mentally disabled as though we are animal crackers. The gaze, the psychoanalytic gaze: Autistics are anthropomorphic cookies, and doctors will probe and digest our body parts, piece by piece. [crackers! the very sound/sense of the word! and consumption… yes]

    * Breasts are to autistics as car keys are to neurotypicals. [A line to live by! And remember. And P.S. I think it was perhaps just Bettelheim himself who had a Major Major Thing for Breasts?]

    *I wonder about the nipple as an autistic placeholder: the meaning in movement, the queering of pinwheels in a field, where autistic objects of all sorts commune. [And I note–the pinwheels in the field are both nipple-isitic but also quite superbly phallic. Both/And!!! woo hoo}

  3. melanie, i’m reading this again and one of the things that is so impactful about your writing is the juxtaposition of image and text. this essay felt like a punch in the stomach, which mirrors the position the girl is in in the picture from Lovaas’s shock room. I’m really really struck by this piece, viscerally and intellectually, as you re-write this work on autism by non-autistic researchers.

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