ABSTRACT
Frances Tustin explains the severe abnormalities of the body-ego that result in the autistic shell through her work on the clinical study of autism. She focuses particularly on the importance of the gaze/attention for the integration of the tactile and auditory components in the formation of the skin, as well as for the psychological 'ownership' of the large axial body joints and the joints of the limbs. At the age of about five months, babies begin to grasp their lower limbs, to pull at them, and to experience them as attached to the body: body unity is centered around the horizontal axis of the pelvis. In normal development, babies observed between ten and twelve months show a new awareness of 'thinking' as being located in the head. The baby needs to come up against the hard 'bottom-floor' in the mother's head to feel that its emotional communication, mediated by visual interpenetration, is received, transformed, and returned.
