ABSTRACT
One autistic child, Frances Tustin's patient John Bowlby, called object-related state as the 'black hole with the nasty prick'. This 'black hole' is felt as an awesome force of powerlessness, of defect, of nothingness, and of 'zero-ness' expressed, not just as a static emptiness, but as an agonizingly implosive centripetal pull into a void. The interest of clarification, although Tustin often stated that Bettleheim's notion of 'the empty fortress' was an apt way of describing the autistic protection. Tustin linked a particular class of auto-generated sensation-shapes to the well-known observation that autistic children frequently do not look directly into the eyes of others, instead taking in a great deal by peripheral vision. Consciousness of dependency in the object-related individual is either experienced as the need for and the act of reliance upon an analyst who is separate from the analysand, or it is defended against through forms of manic denial.
