Frances Tustin was renowned for her pioneering work on the psychoanalytic treatment of childhood autism. She was the first to emphasise the central importance of the body for these children, for whom the experience of separateness can feel like physical mutilation. She came to realise that many of their self-protective strategies were similarly bodily based, and that actions that might have seemed symbolic were in fact aimed at generating sensations that allowed the children to feel they continued to exist.
Tustin was born Frances Vickers in Darlington in She trained as a primary school teacher before developing an interest in psychoanalysis. She married twice; her second marriage to engineering professor Arnold Tustin was a long and happy one, although the couple suffered the sadness of stillbirths. In , along with Martha Harris and Dina Rosenbluth, Tustin joined the second intake of the new child psychotherapy training, which Esther Bick had founded at the Tavistock Clinic.
She greatly valued her supervision with Meltzer and shared his views on the importance of sensuality in children with autism, and on their reliance on adhesive identification. After qualifying, Tustin spent a year in Boston, where she was introduced to the work on autism being done by Margaret Mahler, Anni Bergman and their group, to which she often referred.
John, the three-year-old whom she analysed for three years, developed language and subsequently went to university. Tustin returned many times to this material; one of her later formulations b was that John experienced the breast as having a hole in it, so that his mouth, which was equated with the breast, had a hole in it also.
Another patient, whom she described in her first book, Autism and Childhood Psychosis , was year-old David, who constructed a suit of armour to keep himself safe.
