You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
These memorial essays in tribute to Frances Tustin display a depth and meticulousness of discussion, with illuminating clinical examples, enriched by apt
literary allusions (e.g. Rhode, p. 41). Fresh light is shed on ways of responding to unbearable silences and despair (Riley, p. 77; Wittenberg, p. 125). And, far from encapsulation in a private psychoanalytic world, the papers are set in a clear philosophical, existential context where the centrality of thought and language in the formation of identity is affirmed (e.g. Houzel, p. 341). The essays are therefore essential reading not only for those working with designated autistic people, but for any analytical psychotherapist likely to encounter autistic traces in ‘ordinary’ patients. In these studies of autistic states, there emerges a vision of disturbed early development which, according to most of the writers, interferes with progression towards the capacity for feeling, phantasy, projection and symbol formation. It is as if their own intimate knowledge of isolation, of desolation, of terror of both being and non-being allows the authors to confer a poetic intensity and immediacy upon scenes of inner devastation. Paradoxically, the imagery invoked to chart the enclosed and wordless world of autism has a repeatedly cosmic resonance:
It might be said that Tustin's theories speak to the origins of semiotic processes and the relationship to the ‘black hole’ which she defines as a gap or hole in the fabric of one's being. (Introduction, p. xxvii)
Notwithstanding their range and breadth, the papers are impressively cohesive and free of needless repetition. This is because Tustin's ideas (supported, in particular, by the thinking of Winnicott) irradiate the thought and practice of each contributor, with both an expansion of and a divergence from certain of her key postulates. An important unifying theme is the consensus that Tustin eventually modified her earlier belief in a primary autistic stage in normal developmen