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Throughout her work on the clinical study of autism, Frances Tustin described the severe abnormalities of the body-ego that result in the autistic shell. This was the case in the children she called ‘crustaceans’, who show a total encapsulation in this autistic shell of which she emphasized the two-dimensional nature, as well as in those children whom she called ‘segmented’ (Tustin 1981). As a corollary, at the beginning of her paper ‘The development of “I-ness”’ (Tustin 1984c), she states how this pathology exists as though ‘to demonstrate the importance of the body image in the process of becoming an “I”’ in parallel with the growth of insight into pathological mechanisms.
We are learning more from children who are in the process of recovering about normal processes involved in the construction of the body-ego. This work takes place at the interface of many lines of investigation: of work with autistic children at a particular stage of their development, of infant observation, of the analysis of neurotic and borderline children and adults.
Tustin (1984a) described child patients ‘who felt skinless and disembodied. The skin has been replaced by the “armour” of his autistic practices which help him to feel protected from the terrors of falling, of dissolving, of spilling.’ She described an aspect of the psychotherapeutic process which I have called the ‘boucle du retour’, which means literally the ‘returning loop’, and which involves the transformation of primitive states in which drives may be experienced as water that overflows, fluids that burst out, and gases that explode. I quote: ‘As they (the autistic children) feel that the uncontrollable “waterfalls” and “volcanoes” of their impulsivity are received, processed and understood by another being who has both sensitivity and robust common sense, their body image begins to feel more substantial and intact. They begin to feel that they have an inner structure’ (Tustin 1986a: 235).
The autistic children whom I have tr