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JCPTX 17(1):5-9 (1991)

The Making of a Child Psychotherapist: A Conversation with Frances Tustin

Author: Maria E. Pozzi

Abstract

M.P.: In the last four years during your supervisions and my subsequent regular visits to you in Amersham, I have learnt many things about you and your life, which have both fascinated me and helped me in my own personal as well as professional life. You spent the first supervision in getting to know me: that was the first task you had to accomplish for you to be able to tune in better both with supervisees and with the patient that was going to be discussed. You offered then to give me a “double time” and that was not the only occasion. This was my first taste of your generosity and good-heartedness. You have shown me that your life and your work have never been separate and that they have been a whole and a continuum, just like your supervisions. I would like to ask you something about your early life, your family, your father, your mother and your relationship with them.

ET.: Well, now, my parents were both very religious people. They were engaged in professional jobs in the Church of England. My father was a lay reader, who then became an army padre in the First World War. He was a very fine speaker and a very fine preacher, just like my mother was, but he was a very unconventional man. My father's antecedents on his mother's side had been Quakers. When he was a prisoner in a German prison war camp, he lost his religious faith because he became critical of the Church's attitude to war. He became a pacifist. When he returned to England he left the Church and trained as a teacher. He was very interested in progressive education and in the work of A.S. Neill. On one occasion my father and I visited Summerhill and stayed for a week. Neill offered my father a job which he could not take because my mother was shocked by Neill's ideas. My father then ran a village school, according to the ideas of A.S. Neill, which I attended. So I had my father as a teacher for a time.
My mother came from a much more conventional background. She trained as a Church Sister, a deaconess,

JCPTX 17(1):5-9 (1991)

The Making of a Child Psychotherapist: A Conversation with Frances Tustin

Author: Maria E. Pozzi

Abstract

ET.: Well, now, my parents were both very religious people. They were engaged in professional jobs in the Church of England. My father was a lay reader, who then became an army padre in the First World War. He was a very fine speaker and a very fine preacher, just like my mother was, but he was a very unconventional man. My father's antecedents on his mother's side had been Quakers. When he was a prisoner in a German prison war camp, he lost his religious faith because he became critical of the Church's attitude to war. He became a pacifist. When he returned to England he left the Church and trained as a teacher. He was very interested in progressive education and in the work of A.S. Neill. On one occasion my father and I visited Summerhill and stayed for a week. Neill offered my father a job which he could not take because my mother was shocked by Neill's ideas. My father then ran a village school, according to the ideas of A.S. Neill, which I attended. So I had my father as a teacher for a time.
My mother came from a much more conventional background. She trained as a Church Sister, a deaconess,