ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines some criteria to keep in mind while discriminating autistic states from those more truly object-related states. A familiarity with the concepts of autistic objects and autistic shapes is helpful in this effort as is our sensitivity to the existential terrors inherent in both the pre-mature awareness of two-ness and the ecstasy of at-one-ment. The chapter demonstrates some of the ways in which Frances Tustin’s innovations have and are continuing to open up new possibilities for deepening the analyst’s comprehension of those persons in whom unmentalized happenings have been silently encapsulated through the use of autosensual maneuvers. Tustin discovered that autistic children use ordinary objects not in the course of child’s play as a mode of communication, but for the sensations that these objects engender on the surface of their skin. In contrast, in an autistic state, normal “flickering states of awareness of otherness” are unable to be endured.
