Frances Tustin

British child psychotherapist, trained at the Tavistock Clinic, who devoted her career to the psychoanalytic treatment of autistic children. In books beginning with Autism and Childhood Psychosis (1972) she described autism as a protective shell against an unbearable awareness of bodily separateness from the mother, and described the autistic shapes and hard autistic objects such children use to shut out that awareness. She later recognised autistic enclaves in neurotic adults and revised her earlier view that autism is a normal phase of infancy.