“Anyone who has lived for a long while in an insane asylum where a good number and
variety of individuals and children are confined will have in memory the full spectrum of ritual stances from the various religions, present and past, as if brought to their culmination.

Some see a parody here, since the individuals in question are insane. And for an autistic child, the act of placing one’s hand on a hot stove, without the reflex to withdraw it, can make one think that feeling can be interrupted.

Another individual, growing up, hands joined, gazing at the sky: one would think he had come straight from a painting evoking some mystic from the days of old.

There are strange coincidences here, consistent enough for the insoluble problem of form and content to be posed.

So here we have gestural forms that appear to have no content. Is this possible?

It seems more reasonable to think that, for the same form, there can be several contents.

We know of the rocking that often occurs in mute children, while in certain religions, perhaps most, prayer must be accompanied by rocking; mere language is in some way
surpassed. Whereas for the children affected with what is often viewed as a symptom, it is a question of a vacancy of language. The same attitude corresponds to the same content, the same vacancy, the same lacuna, suffered by some and sought after by others.”