Trying to enter the long black branches: some technical extensions of the work of Frances Tustin for the analysis of autistic states in adults.

The author suggests a number of technical extensions/clinical applications of Frances Tustin's work with autistic children, which are applicable to the psychoanalysis of neurotic, borderline and psychotic adults. These are especially relevant to those individuals in whom early uncontained happenings (Bion) have been silently encapsulated through the use of secretive autosensual maneuvers related to autistic objects and shapes. Although such encapsulations may constitute obstacles to emotional and intellectual development, are consequential in both the relational and vocational spheres for many analysands and present unending challenges for their analysts, the author demonstrates ways in which it may be possible to detect and to modify these in a transference-centered analysis.

Bodily centered protections in adolescence: an extension of the work of Frances Tustin.

In this paper, the author discusses the recurrence of infantile, proto-mental functioning in adolescence mainly in the context of the work of Frances Tustin. She demonstrates, through clinical example, how the tendency to resort to bodily centered and sensation-dominated protections is reactivated on a grand scale when the internal and external physical and psychological changes, brought on in puberty, are felt to be potentially overwhelming. She also demonstrates how, when the capacity for adequate mental and emotional development is stultified, sensation and action once again come to the rescue as the adolescent's way of attenuating anxieties unconsciously experienced as resonating with those unmentalized happenings of early infancy and how the psychoanalytic relationship may be pivotal in setting previously derailed mental and emotional growth back on track.

Some technical implications of Klein's concept of 'premature ego development'.

In this paper, the author revisits the problem of 'premature ego development' first introduced by Melanie Klein in 1930. She also highlights several developments in post-Kleinian thinking since the publication of that paper, which can be seen as offshoots of or complements to Klein's work. The author proposes a link between this category of precocious development and the absence of the experience of what Bion termed the 'containing object.