Lack is not a psychic defect to be repaired but the condition through which subjectivity, speech, and desire persist when the impossible intrudes. In clinical work with people facing bereavement, suicide, sexual violence, war, community and gun violence, child abuse, forced migration, and self-injury, trauma routinely outlives therapeutic promises of cure. When trauma is regarded as healable, patients and clinicians are drawn into a restless hunt for the “right” remedy—another modality, another provider, another level of care, a new art therapy directive or medium, a different medication—only to meet the persistence of what does not resolve.

This paper theorizes that impasse through Lacanian psychoanalysis and Mari Ruti’s existential Lacanian ethics. Lacan situates trauma as an encounter with the Real: an excess over the edge of language that cannot be fully symbolized and therefore returns as remainder. The imperative to “heal” risks reinstalling a fantasy of wholeness that disavows structural lack and constricts desire. Following Ruti, I treat lack not as a deficit to eradicate but as the ground of ethical becoming and freedom within constraint.

Treating the aesthetic act in art therapy as an existential confrontation with trauma’s incurability, I argue that creative responses are necessarily partial: they cannot fully name the pain, fill psychic voids, or transform what exceeds meaning. Their partiality is generative, sustaining desire and opening a space where meanings and possibilities emerge unpredictably. Living with trauma becomes possible through an ongoing, deferred process rather than a final resolution.

In contemporary societies, refugees increasingly belong to those deemed undesirable, whose dehumanisation and disenfranchisement appear legitimate within political discourses that foreground deterrence. Against this backdrop, my activist, performative, and participatory research with refugees addresses how intersubjective articulation, recognition, and understanding can be conceptualised and enacted under conditions marked by structural violence and epistemic injustice (Brunner 2020). This endeavour is crucial, as the articulation of suffering often unfolds beyond therapeutic spaces, which remain insufficient or inaccessible, and beyond asylum hearings, which grant recognition only within narrowly defined legal frameworks.

Following suggestions from my research partners, we refrain from relying solely on interviews and instead engage in multimodal and artistic modes of articulation. Through drawing, collective music-making, and performative readings based on literary testimonies of former prison inmates, we explore the possibilities and limits of creating spaces of articulation and resistance vis-à-vis ‘total institutions’ (Goffman 1973), autocratic regimes in Iran and Syria, and experiences of racism in Germany. My research partners provide crucial insights into life under authoritarian rule—what suffering they endured, what forms of resistance they developed, and what sustains them in exile.

By theorising articulation (Jung 2009) as an intersubjective, multimodal, and multimedial process, my research conceptualises “spaces of articulation” as dynamic, relational encounters where suffering and resistance can be negotiated. Such theorising asks how articulation can be understood not merely as an act of verbal expression, but as a situated practice of knowledge production that challenges dominant narratives and opens transformative horizons for translocal solidarity and learning.

Why people support political-economic ideologies that contradict collective socio-economic interests associated with their position in society, is a long-standing conundrum. System justification theory explains this paradox “false consciousness” through a palliative function of ideology, serving individuals to regulate negative affect and maintain coherent worldviews by reducing dissonant cognitions and appeasing epistemic, existential, and relational motives. Drawing on this literature, this study examines psychological functions of neoliberal ideology among socio-economically disadvantaged persons. Semi-structured interviews with nine individuals in precarious life situations and long-term unemployment in Austria and Germany were examined using thematic content analysis and hermeneutic interpretation. Respondents endorsed neoliberal logics of individualism, competition, and instrumentality by verbalizing meritocratic explanations for poverty and success, opposition against redistributing wealth, internalized inferiority, and economic utility as indicating human worth. Structural analyses showed how these beliefs served psychological purposes by reducing cognitive dissonance, justifying the status quo, and appealing to epistemic needs for simplicity, structure, order, and predictability of the social environment. Emerging themes were xenophobic stereotypes and group-based enmity. Perceived existential threats of economic crisis were projected onto immigrants, scapegoated for lacking self-reliance, illegitimately appropriating resources, and insufficiently contributing to the host economy. Results demonstrate how neoliberal ideology captures epistemic and existential motives to reproduce social inequalities and tensions in the belief systems of those deprived of status and resources. Amalgamation of free-market ideology with proto-fascist themes explains the widespread rise of right-wing populism in advanced neoliberal societies, leading to a crisis of democracy reminiscent of other dark times in human history.

Autistic people often compare their experiences to what it would be like to be extraterrestrial visitors on our planet. I propose that we take this metaphor seriously, and give it primacy. I provide nine reasons why all of us should support and encourage the widespread, default, and friendly use of this serious (but non-literal) visitor metaphor when describing many people currently described as autistic. Here are some glimpses of them.

First, "visitor" is not a label. It is a metaphor. Labels can be harmful, and can cause negative effects. Metaphors are much more playful, and are less likely to do any harm.

Second, "visitor" is the very best kind of metaphor, the kind that restores one's senses of authority and self-determination. "Are you autistic?" is a big question. "Are you a visitor?" is an easy question! If you feel like the word "visitor" applies to you, and if you like that it applies to you, then it does. No one else's opinion is required, or even relevant, because you are not just a perfect authority on this. You are the only authority.

Third, "visitor" is the perfect metaphor to prepare us for the stunning discovery that autism has been profoundly misdescribed. Though this is still widely believed, and widely repeated, autistic people do not actually have a mind reading problem. It turns out, instead, that all human beings have a mind reading problem, and it is the same mind reading problem. Autistic and non-autistic people make up two approximate groups. Members of each group are very good at reading the minds of members of their own group, and terrible at reading the minds of members of the other group. In other words, being a visitor is not just how this experience feels. It is also how it seems.

Fifth, being "visitors" helps us have a sense of humor about at least some of our problems, which makes it a lot easier to stop ruminating about them, and start mitigating them. [I discuss, in detail, the examples of having sleep difficulties, being picky eaters, having difficulty making friends, and having difficulties with eye contact. For all of these, the visitor metaphor completely transforms how we see these problems, and makes them much easier to overcome.]

Last, and most importantly, "visitor" provides a marvelous mechanism for protecting autistic people from a variety of risk factors associated with a heightened vulnerability to suicide. The suicide rates of autistic and possibly autistic people are far higher than average, and this heightened risk has been found to be associated with a number of risk factors. [I describe these risk factors in detail, and I explain how remarkably helpful the visitor metaphor is with transforming and mitigating each of those risk factors.]