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ENCOUNTERS WITH AUTISTIC STATES: A MEMORIAL TRIBUTE TO FRANCES TUSTIN. Theodore Mitrani and Judith L. Mitrani, eds. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1997. 414 pp.
This volume, containing twenty remarkable papers from psychoanalysts and child therapists around the world, is a fitting homage to the independent-minded, straight-talking woman who devoted her career to penetrating and understanding the inner world of autistic children. Contributors include students, colleagues, collaborators, supervisees, and friends, who add rich case material and considered theoretical review and extension to revealing memoirs of Frances Tustin herself.
Born in 1913 in England, Tustin came to study at the Tavistock Clinic to become a child psychotherapist. Under the tutelage of Esther Bick, founder of Kleinian infant observation, she also studied with John Bowlby, who originated attachment and bonding theory, and began a 14-year personal analysis with Wilfred Bion. In a time of bitter splits in the London schools between loyalists to Melanie Klein's theories and to those of Anna Freud, Tustin seems to have culled the best of influences from her teachers and is seen by James Grotstein to have matured intellectually as closer to the Independent School, particularly Winnicott, than to either faction. Research led her to the Putnam Center in the 1950s, where she met Margaret Mahler, Selma Fraiberg, and others of the American developmental psychology movement, an offshoot of ego psychoanalysis. She was also an admirer of Bruno Bettelheim's Orthogenic School in Chicago.
Grotstein's essay, titled "One Pilgrim's Progress: Notes on Frances Tustin's Contributions to the Psychoanalytic Conception of Austism," traces the development of the therapist's insights, based on copious clinical observation and orderly inference, and places her discoveries in the context of general analytic knowledge. Tustin concluded that autism was the result of the dyadic failure of a pathogenic mother and...