Autistic States in Children

Rating:
Summary: disturbingly wrong view of autism as the parent's fault
Review: Avoid this book! Tustin again goes down that dusty trail of blaiming the parent for the child's autism, this time for the parent being too needy and clinging.

Rating:
Summary: Just plain wrong ...
Review: Prospective readers should be aware that this book promotes the long-discredited psychoanalytic view of autism as an emotional disturbance. Full of bizarre interpretations which have remarkably little to do with the subjective experience of autism as described in first-person accounts such as those by Temple Grandin. Interesting enough in its way, but nothing to do with autism.

Rating:
Summary: A Profound Psychoanalytic Thinker
Review: Tustin writes about the infantile experiences and fantasies of the child in his or her relationship to the mother. She understands autism as a response to the traumatic experience of separatenss. The child cannot tolerate the perception that he/she is not "at one" with mother's body. This perception brings with it intolerable anxiety and a sense of loss, the experience of what Tustin calls a "black hole." The child experiences separation from the mother's body as the loss of his/her own body. In order to avoid the experience of a mother that is separate from the self, the child "blocks out" the perception of the mother, drawing into a shell. It is this "shell" or refusal of the external world that constitutes the autistic response. Autism is a clinically defined form of psychopathology. However, all human beings possess autistic tendencies. We all wish we did not have to abandon our infantile fantasy of paradise.Reality shatters our dream, but it is never entirely abandoned. Each of us can bear only so much reality.