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.
This book is a companion volume to Tustin's previous book, Autistic Barriers in Neurotic Patients and includes some revised papers previously published.
The first chapter describes the development of thinking about autism from Kanner in 1943 through to the present day and covers the ideas of psychoanalytic writers as well as writers with other theoretical constructs. The second chapter outlines the understanding gained from studying autistic children in the therapeutic situation, whilst Chapters 3, 4 and 5 concentrate on psychotherapy. Chapter 6 presents detailed material from Tustin's clinical work with David who, she says, taught her about “autistic encapsulation”; whilst Chapters 7 and 8 open the field to the exploration of the “autistic capsule” in adult patients and seek to demonstrate how the findings from therapeutic work with autistic patients have wider applications in our work with neurotic patients, children and adults. Chapter 9 returns to John, a patient about whom Tustin has written before, who taught Tustin about the “black hole”. The clinical material presented here is from later sessions to illustrate the progress in psychotherapy. Chapter 10 is based on the work of three Chilean psychoanalysts who give clinical material from an adult male patient to illustrate how the patient's rich language was not in the service of communication but was, rather, like the autistic child's use of autistic objects. Chapters 11 and 12 are brief concluding statements.
The stated focus for this book is the protective function of autism in children whose autism Tustin terms “psychogenic autism”: that is, where psychogenic factors seem to have been most operative. Tustin's present position is that autism may arise in several different situations but it is where the autism is a reaction to what is experienced by the child as a traumatic situation where Tustin has felt able successfully to offer psychotherapy. The children whom Tustin describes have experienced “unbearably