Sitting with Invisible Difference: Autism, Neurodiversity, and the Analytic Encounter

Description: This workshop brings together perspectives from disability studies, neurodevelopmental science, and psychoanalytic practice to rethink how autism is understood and encountered in therapeutic settings. Challenging deficit-based and neuro-normative assumptions, the workshop explores autism as a form of difference that has historically been misrecognised—both clinically and socially—particularly when it is treated as a problem to be interpreted, corrected, or adapted to dominant norms.

Participants will be invited to consider autism as an invisible disability, shaped by epistemic injustice and by the tendency for autistic individuals to carry projections of neurotypical discomfort, uncertainty, and vulnerability. Grounded in contemporary neuroscience, the workshop clarifies how differences in brain structure, sensory processing, attention, and information integration fundamentally shape autistic experience, and how these realities are often mistakenly psychologised as resistance, avoidance, or defence.

Bringing psychoanalytic theory into dialogue with neurodiversity, the workshop examines how core analytic concepts—such as countertransference, the frame, narcissism, intellectualisation, and obsession—require recalibration when working with autistic patients. Rather than viewing autistic ways of thinking and relating as defensive or pathological, the workshop reframes them as structural adaptations that make subjectivity possible under conditions of heightened cognitive and sensory load.

Across all three perspectives, the workshop calls for epistemic humility, neurodiversity-affirming practice, and a shift from asking what autistic patients are failing to do, toward asking what their ways of being are making possible. It positions psychoanalytic work with autism not as a corrective endeavour, but as a careful, relational practice of sitting with difference without erasing it.

Learning Objectives:

 1.  Articulate the difference between neurodevelopmental difference and psychopathology when working with autistic individuals.

 2.  Verbalize deficit-based, neuro-normative and ableist assumptions that have shaped clinical formulations, therapeutic goals, and interpretations in work with autistic clients.

 3. Articulate an understanding of the impact of issues as such sensory processing, attention, predictability needs, and cognitive load on therapeutic pacing, structure and communication.

Presenters: 

Clare Harvey is a clinical psychologist, senior lecturer, and researcher in the Psychology Department at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. She has worked in various government and private clinical and educational settings both in the United Kingdom and in South Africa. Clare primarily researches and publishes within the areas of Disability and Gender Studies. Her PhD focused on the subjectivity of mothers when they have a child with a physical disability. She is on the editorial board for the African Journal of Disability and Disability & Society and is Associate Editor for South African Journal of Psychology. 

Tracey Fletcher Davies is a clinical and perinatal psychologist who originally trained as a psychoanalytic and psychodynamically oriented clinician in South Africa over twenty years ago. At the time of her training, neurodevelopmental knowledge was largely absent from psychological curricula—a gap that remains present in many training contexts both in South Africa and internationally. As understandings of the brain and neurodevelopment have advanced significantly over the past fifteen years, Tracey has been at the forefront of integrating these developments into therapeutic thinking and practice.
She has worked as the Head of Psychology for a large, neurodiversity-affirming multidisciplinary practice in South Africa, where she played a central role in driving systemic and clinical change. Her work bridges depth psychology and contemporary neurodevelopmental science, with a particular focus on supporting clinicians to move beyond deficit-based and purely psychologised models of care.
Tracey currently serves in child protection services and works as an associate in live-in care contexts for individuals with profound support needs. In addition, she runs a family practice that serves the neurodivergent community across the lifespan, offering developmentally informed, trauma-aware, and neurodiversity-affirming psychological care.

Nardus Saayman is a clinical psychologist with over thirteen years of experience in private practice, public mental health services, and academic and professional supervision. He trained as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist at the University of the Witwatersrand, where he completed both his Master’s degree in Clinical and a PhD in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy. His doctoral work focused on psychoanalytic psychotherapists’ experiences of working with psychosis.
His research and writing explore the interface between psychoanalysis, neurodevelopment, and subjectivity, with particular attention to psychosis and neurodiversity. His work has been published in Psychosis, South African Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, and the British Journal of Psychotherapy, including recent contributions on psychoanalysis and autism. He is also the author of a children’s book on neurodiversity.
Dr Saayman is registered with the Health Professions Council of South Africa and the Dubai Health Authority, and currently works in private practice and consultation across South Africa and the UAE.

Saturday, May 9, 2026

Via Zoom

11:00 am - 2:00 pm CDT

Cost: $60 General Public - 3 CEs

$20 Student Fee -No CE’s - ICSW Free

**3 CEs are available for licensed social workers, counselors, marriage and family therapists and psychologists in Illinois.

The Institute for Clinical Social Work - 2242, is approved by the Association of Social Work Boards (ASWB) Approved Continuing Education (ACE) program.  Regulatory boards are the final authority on courses accepted for continuing education credit. ACE provider approval period: May 9, 2026. Social workers completing this course receive 3 total clinical continuing education credits.