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Autism has had two meanings. The first, historically associated with schizophrenia, refers to the investment of a person's psychic energy in his or her own delusions, which prevents the person from investing in the outside world. The second refers to an absence of development of communication with others beginning in earliest infancy.
Frances Tustin has emphasized a fantasy of discontinuity, which the autistic infant experiences physically as the tearing away of a part of its own substance. So long as it lacks the experience that makes possible symbolization, an infant would seem to require the illusion of continuity between its body and the object upon which its drives are satisfied. The autistic infant imagines a catastrophic rupture in this continuity that takes the form of a fantasy of mouth-tongue-nipple-breast, experiencing a damaged breast and torn-off nipple that leaves the mouth a black hole inhabited by tormenting objects. To protect itself from the pain caused by this black hole, the autistic infant constructs the delusion of merging with the environment that abolishes any separation or space, any difference or alterity. To maintain these delusionary autistic objects, concrete objects are not manipulated for use value or symbolic value, but solely for the surface sensations that they offer, giving the illusion of continuity between body and environment. By means of his or her own secretions (tears, saliva, urine, feces) and autistic objects, the subject creates what Tustin called "autistic forms," which are cutaneous or mucous with nebulous, unstable contours. The autistic subject procures these as a salve to minimize pain and as protection from the exterior world. But these autistic forms cannot be shared with others or identified with objects in the external world. The autistic child uses sensitivity to stimuli to protect himself or herself from the external world; Frances Tustin calls this "perverse self-sensuality."
==See Also==
* [[Adhesive identification]]
==References==
<references/>
# Freud, Sigmund, and Jung, Carl G. (1974a [1906-13]). The Freud-Jung letters: the correspondence between Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung (William McGuire, Ed.]]* [[; Ralph Manheim and R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). Princeton: Princeton University Press Press.
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