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Most of us are familiar with the work of Margaret Mahler and her co-workers who have gathered data on autistic and symbiotic psychoses and who have elaborated from those studies the Mahlerian developmental agenda with which we are all familiar. The work of Bick and of Meltzer and his co-workers, though well-known to Kleinians, is less so to the classical analytic public. Whereas Klein shocked the world of analysis by suggesting that the infant had mental life capable of experiencing and engendering fantasies emanating from persecutory anxiety at approximately three weeks of post-natal age, Bick and Meltzer have suggested that even prior to then there is a stage in which the boundaries of the infant self are very fluid and seek definition, failing which the infant tends to adhere to the surface of mother's body or to other surfaces in order to get a sense of self-definition. They term this phenomenon 'adhesive identity' in its pathological form and relegate it to an aspect of infantile autistic disorder.
Now, quietly from the shadows of her long, steadfast, devoted labour, emerge the contributions of Frances Tustin, who spreads before us the harvest of over thirty years work with the psychoanalytic-psychotherapy of psychotic children. Her thinking seems singularly distinct yet she borrows generously from Winnicott, Mahler, Balint, and others, though her original training was Kleinian and her analyst was Bion. What she spreads before us is a rich explosion of psychoanalytic theory, courteous challenges to present theory, and an extensive exploration into the most basic of all psychopathological disorders to have confronted psychoanalytic theory and practice. Her research into this area of childhood psychosis is all the more pertinent in this day and age when psychobiological science is presenting such a strong claim for psychoses, particularly for infantile autism, schizophrenia, and affective disorders. Tustin's reports have arrived none too soon to help stop t