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.
Alphabetical list of contributors: Anne Alvarez, Francis Dale, Susanna Isaacs Elmhirst, Renata Gaddini, James Grotstein, Genevieve Haag, Victoria Hamilton, Didier Houzel, Jo-Ann Culbert-Koehn, Bianca Lechevalier, Suzanne Maiello, Judith Mitrani, Theodore Mitrani, Thomas Ogden, Maria Pozzi, Maria Rhode, Charlotte Riley, David Rosenfeld, Sheila Spensley, Jane van Buren, Isca Wittenberg.
‘You do not need to be limited by your lecturers, teachers, analysts, parents. If you are, then there is no room for growth’ (Bion, 1980) Frances Tustin quoted this maxim of Bion's in her description of her analysis with him, and she acknowledged how these thoughts gave her the courage to think for herself and progress beyond the comfort zone of currently accepted views when the results of her own clinical experience led her forward into new theoretical areas.
This collection brings together the words and the thoughts of an international collection of analytic workers who found themselves profoundly influenced by this lively and unsentimental woman. It is a book rich in powerful clinical vignettes from work both with children and adults: work which continually blazes the trail for thinking to be modified and extended in the intellectually rigorous way that Frances Tustin herself exemplified: ‘Our loyalty should be to understanding rather than personalities.’
And yet, perhaps paradoxically, it was indeed the powerful impression of her personality which inspired those who came after her to ‘go beyond’, as Suzanne Maiello describes in her eponymous chapter which opens the book in fine style, linking Tustin's thinking to her own continuing researches (Maiello, 2000) into the possible prenatal roots of primitive mental states. Such work is beginning to answer Bion's question when he wondered ‘when psychoanalysis would catch up with the foetus’ (Bion, 1978).
Space does not permit me to do justice to the full content of each chapter. Contributors have been led to extend what they received and mak