Frances Tustin Today

Judith L. Mitrani and Theodore Mitrani are Fellows of the International Psychoanalytical Association, and training and supervising psychoanalysts at the Psychoanalytic Center of California in Los Angeles. They are founding members of the Board of Trustees of the Frances Tustin Memorial Trust, and authors, editors, translators and teachers in the private practice of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic therapy with adults and children in Los Angeles, California.

Frances Tustin is an icon within British Object-Relations psychoanalysis. It is good to have in this book, a sustained tribute to her ideas and to their significant and enduring contribution. Her tradition of learning fundamental truths from autistic conditions remains lively, productive and inspiring.. Tustin's work sustains one of the founding principles of Object-Relations work – that the depth of psychoanalytic ideas is enhanced by rigorous work with children. As that long-held view — going back to the innovative work of Anna Freud and Melanie Klein — has weakened over time, granting a more exclusive place to work with adults, it is important to have this book to redress that imbalance.This collection draws us back to the fundamental questions about working with another mind. How can one conceive of the object relations of a mind that can barely sustain the possibility of relating to others? It is commonplace to regard psychoanalysis as a body of knowledge derived from what goes wrong, but what can be learned about a mind that has gone so radically and despairingly wrong?It is evident from the wide range of papers presented here, that indeed much can be learned from the work with children, contributing that which is not accessible in the work with adults alone. This book is a celebration of clinical and therapeutic confidence from those who have actually persevered in the presence of severe autism, those who have managed to form a joint venture with their suffering young patients, both large and small. - Bob Hinshelwood, Professor, Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex

• Part I – Prenatality through Latency, The Perpetuation of an Error by Frances Tustin, Stuck Between Two Worlds: Autistic Defenses and the Experience of Premature Birth by Angela Sowa, Prenatal Trauma and Autism by Suzanne Maiello, Further Reflections on the Construction of the Body-Ego by Genevieve Haag, Finding The Wavelength: Tools In Communication with Autistic Children by Anne Alvarez. Part II – Adolescence Through Adulthood, The use of observation in the psychoanalytic treatment of a 12-year-old boy with Asperger's syndrome by Maria Pozzi, 7 Aspects of The Body Image and Sense of Identity In an Adolescent Boy with Autism: Implications for Eating Disorders by Maria Rhode, Long-Term Mother-Child Psychotherapy: Infantile Autism with Cerebellar Anomaly by Bianca Lechevalier, Autistic Phenomena in Neurotic Patients by Sydney Klein , Precipitation Anxiety Precipitation AnxietyIn The Analysis of Adult Patients by Didier Houzel, On the Concept of an Autistic-Contiguous Position by Thomas Ogden, Trying to Enter the Long Black Branches: Some Technical Extensions for the Analysis of Autistic States in Adults by Judith Mitrani, Ghosts in the Swamp: Some Aspects of Splitting and Their Relationship to Parental Losses by Kate Barrows