ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates Frances Tustin's idea that autistic retreat is connected with a pathological psycho-physical closeness in the mother-child relationship. Tustin explains traumatic events during pregnancy or around delivery in the lives of the future autistic children's mothers could have an impact on the child's psychic development and reported that all the mothers of her autistic patients had been clinically depressed before or after the birth of their babies. The fact that during prenatal life the child's reactions to an event cannot be observed in a continuous way represents a difficulty if one want to think about fetal experiences. The clinical material of autistic children whose mental development stopped at a very early stage in their life gives one access to a deeper understanding of the most primitive protomental processes. The fact that auditory experience is immaterial, as opposed to tactile perception, increases its primordial importance for the development of the fetus's protomental activity in the direction of presymbolic openness.
