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This is the first book to be published on the work of Frances Tustin, who died in November 1994. Her innovative ideas about autism are widely recognised as having made a central contribution to psychoanalytic work with autistic children and to the understanding of autistic features in adults. Trained as a child psychotherapist at the Tavistock Clinic, she was later made an Honorary Affiliate of the British Psycho-Analytical Society in recognition of the significance of her work.
Spensley’s book is published in the Makers of Modern Psychotherapy series, aimed at making the work and ideas of the ‘makers’ accessible to the non-specialist. Psychotherapists and psychoanalysts will also be interested in this book, as it attempts to link Tustin’s ideas to other psychoanalytic theories about the earliest relationship between physical and emotional life.
A description of Tustin’s childhood and early professional development is followed by an account of the history of approaches to autism and childhood psychosis. Throughout the book, concepts central to Tustin’s thinking are discussed and linked to the contributions of psychoanalysts, particularly of Ogden and Grotstein, as well as to the work of developmental psychologists. Spensley also includes other areas that particularly interest her: the application of Tustin’s ideas to work with mental handicap and learning difficulties, and to religion and myth as containers for primitive anxieties.
Spensley’s work and her thinking owe a great deal to Tustin; she cites numerous clinical examples that illustrate Tustin’s ideas in a way that may speak to the non-specialist. Her examples from work with adult patients, including adults classified as mentally disabled, and from children with learning difficulties, demonstrate the prevalence of autistic ways of functioning. Where behaviour might be seen as, at best, incomprehensible, and at worst wilfully aggressive, Spensley shows how an understanding of the primitive anxieties that autistic