It is probably impossible to watch Sophie Robert's extraordinary compelling documentary The Wall: Psychoanalysis Put to the Test for Autism, and not be outraged. Robert's brilliantly crafted polemic, released in France last year, exposes the plight of a person with autism in France today: first they are dubbed "psychotic", their symptoms are "on the side of madness", they might, perhaps, gain something from treatment in psychoanalysis – the talking cure for children who don't speak.

When asked to elaborate on their aims in the analysis, some of the most revered shrinks in the world offer responses that could not be made up. Robert: "What can an autistic child reasonably expect from an analytic work in terms of results?" Laurent Danon-Boileau: "The pleasure of taking interest in a soap bubble. I can't answer anything else."

The reaction I had to the film is probably quite standard: smiling disbelief, then long sighs and then the tears come. It is not at all surprising that the French prime minister, François Fillon, immediately declared his own outrage and his intention to make autism his cause of 2012. And so too, it is not at all surprising that the video has sparked widespread public debate in France around this subject.

The film has had one immediate and probably irreversible effect: the demonisation of psychoanalysis in France. In particular, Lacanian psychoanalysts are now seen by many as cruel, pompous buffoons.

I am a person with a diagnosis of autism, and I am also a scholar of the work of Jacques Lacan. I would immediately admit that psychoanalysis is probably not the best therapy for many of the children seen and referred to in the film. In respect of my Asperger's, I have been in analysis with a Lacanian shrink and I have had cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) with an NHS psychologist. The CBT is better when dealing with practical issues – in my case, work on, say, my notorious social bluntness. I work to improve my "social skills" because it is a problem I have identified, and CBT works pretty well to enable me to build up my "coping strategies" and recognise social cues better.

On the other hand, in the psychoanalytic session, what you want or demand consciously is of no real consequence: psychoanalysis after all, is the narrative of the unconscious. Except that, if you are a Lacanian, the autistic person does not actually have an unconscious, they are instead, Lacan said, "spoken by the real, possessed by language". From this one example we can see that the insistence of the Lacanian on psychoanalysis as a kind of insoluble existential crisis could be understood as brave, extremely liberal and even subversive: for the Lacanian, what society wants just fades away, it has no currency.

This explanation also implies that such a deeply intellectual position is really not going to be useful to little Jean, who at age six is not yet speaking and doesn't play with others. It is likely that Robert's documentary will change France's attitude to psychoanalysis forever and herald moves to a system of care similar to what is on offer in the UK which focuses on quantifiable goals and outcomes.

But is the way we deal with autism in the UK completely flawless? Tens of millions pounds of UK taxpayers' money are spent annually on research that seeks to isolate the DNA combination for autism so that the NHS can eventually offer prenatal screening for autism, much as they do now for Down's Syndrome. Current estimates assume this research process will require the same level of investment for the next 50 years in order to achieve this aim. And so we blithely strive for greater choice, greater freedom to choose whether terminating an autistic pregnancy might be appropriate.

Perhaps this is the point where we should begin to see some point to the framework that Alexandre Stevens, Danon-Boileau, Eric Laurent and others were filmed struggling to articulate in The Wall: being born is already socially coded. And how must a newborn child respond to life in this world? Is that to be socially coded too? Does the autistic child have a right to silence? As a revered speaker at a recent autism conference offered: "No one wants to be loved for being 'normal' – everyone wants to be loved for whatever is unique to them."

Perhaps with those qualifications in mind, we should watch The Wall one more time, to see if those who initially appeared pompous and cruel are actually expressing some of the ethical and philosophical issues around autism that will never be resolved during the current confusion.