Anticipatory scripting in high-masking autistic adults: a second-order compensation process and its implications for psychoanalytic therapeutic engagement

Background. Autistic scripting, the pre-generation of conversational content ahead of an anticipated social exchange, is a documented feature of autistic communication, situated within the broader literature on camouflaging and cognitive compensation. Whether the same preparatory operation extends into a context where its consequences differ structurally, the psychoanalytic session, where therapeutic work depends on material arriving in a form the patient has not already determined, has not been addressed. Argument. Drawing on a single systematic autoethnographic case, an autistic adult with high cognitive ability in ongoing psychoanalytic psychotherapy, this paper proposes anticipatory scripting as a tentative construct for a pattern of pre-session preparation in which conversational trajectories, provisional interpretations, and affective weightings are generated in advance, organised as conditionally activated variants rather than a single predicted line. The construct is offered as a hypothesis generated from this case, not as an established mechanism, and is differentiated, with allowance for overlap in specific instances, from surface camouflaging, in-session intellectualisation (including a corrected reading of Saayman et al., 2025), psychoanalytic resistance, hypermentalizing, and metacognitive overcontrol. The paper gives explicit weight to the adaptive, regulatory function scripting may serve, drawing on Mollon's (2015) account of self-organisation in autistic adulthood, and frames its clinical hypotheses accordingly as conditional and provisional rather than as intervention recommendations. Method. The paper employs systematic autoethnography with explicit epistemological framing; the author occupies the dual position of autistic patient and independent researcher. Two detailed vignettes, drawn from the autoethnographic record and anonymised, illustrate the pattern across its full arc: pre-session preparation, the analyst's intervention, the patient's response, and retrospective reflection, including affective material reported in the patient's own idiom given a stated alexithymic presentation. The single-case design provides phenomenological depth rather than generalisability, and does not establish prevalence, causal mechanism, or non-redundancy with existing clinical categories, only grounds on which these could be evaluated in future work. Implications. Four recurring features observed in the case are described as sensitising observations, not validated clinical markers; one is reclassified outright as a hypothesis not yet systematically observed. Alternative explanatory models, attachment-based, personality-level, anxiety-based, and iatrogenic or relational, are acknowledged as not ruled out by the present material. Preliminary, case-generated hypotheses regarding conditions under which the pattern might be clinically addressed are proposed as directions for future empirical and clinical investigation, not as a treatment protocol.