Frances Tustin

Sheila Spensley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134872374
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Frances Tustin describes the life and clarifies the work of an outstanding clinician whose understanding of autistic and psychotic children has brilliantly illuminated the relationship between autism and psychosis for others in the field. Sheila Spensley defines Tustin's position in traditional and contemporary psychoanalytic theory and explains how it is related to work in infant psychiatry and developmental psychology. She makes Tustin's original concepts accessible to the non-specialist reader and shows how relevant they are to work in other areas such as learning disability and work with adult patients.

Chapter 1

Growing up in the bosom of the church

Frances Daisy Vickers was born in Darlington in the North of England on 15 October 1913 and her lifetime therefore spans two world wars. She was the only child of two deeply religious people, devoted to their work in the Church of England. Her mother had been trained as a church sister, at the prestigious Chelsea College in London, and outside the family she was always addressed as ‘Sister Minnie’. What impressed the little Frances most was the long heliotrope dress and caped coat which her mother wore, the mark of her college training. The colour remains her favourite, to this day.

It was in the course of her pastoral work as a deaconess that Sister Minnie met the striking young man she was to marry. He had been trained in the Church Army as a Lay Reader, and was an impressive preacher. They shared an intense interest in religious life but came to differ violently about what that meant. Their different understandings of personal relationships and their approaches to the doubts and questions inevitably raised in the minds of intelligent people were diametrically opposed. She was accepting and compliant, a supplicant, while he was a radical and a non-conformist.

George Vickers was fourteen years younger than his bride and this is likely to have added to the difficulties the couple experienced in developing mutual understanding. Their first and only baby was born just before the outbreak of the First World War. She was named after her two aunts; Frances after her father’s sister and Daisy after her mother’s. For George, there was little time to adapt to becoming a father before he had to leave home to become an army chaplain. Frances was one year old when her father left for France. He was taken prisoner there and Frances was five before she was to see him again.

The first five years of her life were spent close to her mother in an atmosphere of smothering devotion to the Church’s teaching. She was a good obedient little girl, the epitome of Emily Shapcote’s idealised Child of God.

Make me Lord, obedient, mild

as becomes a little child

All day long, in every way

Teach me what to do and say.

Accepting all her mother’s beliefs, she was a compliant child, more than satisfying all that was expected of her, but she was also able to sense the insecurity and the hidden terrors which lay beneath her mother’s need for them both to be bright and shining candles, lighting a world of ‘darkness and sin’. An enthusiastic member of the Band of Hope, however, Frances was ever confident that she was indeed a ‘sunbeam for Jesus’.

Mother embraced her baby with a devotion that was as fierce as that with which she clung to the Church. The result, not surprisingly, was that the little girl very early began to be filled with a sense of great responsibility and importance but she also grew to believe that her mother’s need was so great that it seemed it was the daughter who was doing the parenting. One touching memory of this is of the four-year-old Frances feeling that she could guide her mother in the black-out, because she was nearer the pavement and so could see the steps better. Brought up, in many ways, to be a little ‘sister’, she may have perceived her mother as more of a worried big sister than a mother.

It would not have been easy for George Vickers to secure a place again in this family, either as a father or as a husband, where mother and daughter had become so united and where there was also a wife who felt she was wedded as much to the Church as to her husband. To this obstacle was added the change which had overtaken his beliefs and his outlook on life during his sojourn as a prisoner of war. When he did return, he had lost the faith to which his wife so resolutely adhered, having become deeply disillusioned by the Church’s attitudes to war. He became a pacifist and a socialist and, on leaving the army, he took the family to Sheffield where Frances began her school life and Father started to study at the university to begin a new career as a teacher.

For the next ten years, Frances was caught in the desperate and sometimes bitter conflict which developed between her parents. Her first five years had been spent close to Mother in an atmosphere of unquestioning devotion and obedience to the Church. Now, all her mother’s teaching came under the fire of her father’s criticism. The devout deaconess began to fear that her husband had been contaminated by the devil. Contemporary authors and thinkers, like Shaw and Freud and the progressive educationist A.S. Neill, who so fascinated her husband, were considered by Sister Minnie to be wicked and evil.

Remnants of nineteenth-century anarchism, which continued to interest left-wing thinkers after the war and underpinned Neill’s ideas on education, held a compelling attraction for George Vickers, too. Like many others of his generation, he was a young man who became ensnared in a tangle of confusion and personal conflict as a result of his wartime experiences. His sudden exposure on the battlefield to the primitive conditions of life in the raw challenged his acceptance of all the traditionally held beliefs of his religion and training. An internal struggle for reconciliation of his thoughts and beliefs was mirrored in the turbulent conflicts with his conservative wife about beliefs and truths. It was a struggle about allowing thinking and it was a conflict to which an intelligent daughter, caught in the middle, could not be immune.

Frances’s memories of her mother are now coloured with sadness and regret that she could not then appreciate the positive qualities in her attitudes and beliefs. Her own emotional need to separate herself from her mother’s influence led her to collude with her father’s criticisms and she began to feel contempt for the simplicity and naivety of her mother’s thinking. Her own education and her admiration for her father made it increasingly difficult for her to see how she could give a place to her mother’s point of view. Instead, she began to see her mother’s ideas as silly and snobbish and joined with her father in considering her narrow-minded and superstitious. Quite apart from the oedipal dynamic, Father was attractive because he was more fun and he had a strong sense of humour. It was unfortunate that his humour could, at times, be at Mother’s expense.

In due course, after completion of his training, her father was attracted to country schools and soon became the headmaster of a village school, which meant that Frances became one of his pupils. This now bestowed the rather special place in her father’s world that she had previously enjoyed in the earlier days with her mother, in the Band of Hope. As the daughter of the headmaster, she enjoyed the new playground status, and, like her father, she also loved living in the country. If father and daughter were happy about this change of environment, however, mother was not. She much preferred the cultural life of the town which she saw as superior but she was also timid and felt uncomfortable in the country, afraid of cows, dogs and the dark.

She disapproved of her husband’s informality, as rnuch as she did his socialist views. Differences became concretised with Mother dis approving of Father’s cloth cap, whilst he was contemptuous of her penchant for white evening gloves. She loved the theatre, he loved Nature. In the North, Mother had felt she had to protect her London refinements and educate her daughter according to the standards of her own upbringing. Father, on the other hand, was a Lincolnshire man, of farming stock, a man of the people; all the same, equally proud of his forebears. He would often impress his daughter with stories about their connections with outstanding religious leaders of the past. His family had been connected with the Quaker movement and he counted Elizabeth Fry, the prison reformer, among his ancestors. He also included Sarah Crisp, a follower of John Wesley, who, he emphasised, had been the first woman preacher. It was not lost on the young Frances even then that women could achieve great things; at that time she was bent on becoming a naturalist.

Frances remembers visiting Summerhill, the progressive school founded by A.S.Neill in 1921 in a Suffolk village. She and her father stayed there for a week and she thinks he might well have taken a post at the school but for her mother’s intense opposition to Neill and his associates. Neill was reputed to have been analysed by Wilhelm Reich and such activities were condemned by her mother as sinful.

It would seem to have been a lonely life for a little girl, although Frances appears mostly to remember the activity and the earnestness of their lives. Besides, she had always felt herself to be a focus of interest and attention. She was at the centre of her mother’s life and work, she was a leading light among her peers in the Band of Hope and, as the daughter of the headmaster, she enjoyed centre stage once again. A serious-minded child, she nevertheless enjoyed her popularity. It was not undeserved, for she was cheerful, intelligent and kind, and popularity may also have helped to fill many a gap in her childhood experience. The ease with which she could make friends has lasted throughout her life.

Life was unsettling not only as a result of the parental controversies, but also because of the many removals of her home as they followed Father’s career changes. She remembers a brief period of living in Scotland at the end of the war, before she went to school and before they returned to Sheffield. After Sheffield came her father’s moves to different schools in Lincolnshire. Her life must have been full of lost friendships but in retrospect Frances sees all these uprootings as having produced a certain adaptability in her.

When Frances won a scholarship to Sleaford High School at age twelve, they lived so far from a station that she had to become a boarder. She had always loved school and she found the cooler intellectual atmosphere of boarding school a welcome relief from the hotbed of controversy at home. Her enjoyment of boarding school was later to cause some surprise in John Bowlby when he came to be interviewing her for the child psychotherapy training course at the Tavistock Clinic.

One year after her admission to Sleaford, she had to change school again, when her father moved to a different country school, this time within reach of a railway station so that Frances could become a day girl again. She transferred to Grantham High School, an institution now distinguished by another of its former pupils, Margaret Thatcher. It was while she was at this school, thirteen years old and doing well enough to be in the scholarship stream, with her sights on Oxford, that her mother took the momentous decision that they must leave her father. Had Frances stayed at Grantham, it seems likely that she would have gone on to university to study biology, her favourite subject.

It must have been a touching scene as she and her mother and a big black trunk waited in a country lane for the bus to come and take them to a new life. Perhaps her mother thought she was protecting her daughter from the unconventional anarchic and ‘sinful’ views of her father; perhaps she thought she was bringing her back to the civilising influences of the town. What it was that finally proved the last straw in the marriage, no one knows. For Frances, the separation came as a complete shock. It was a severance from all that she most valued: her love of the countryside, which she shared with her father, her school and the hopes of achievements there and, above all, her father whom she did admire and love despite his faults. For a moment, she even wondered helplessly whether there was somewhere to hide, so as not to be torn away in this unceremonious manner. Such a sudden enforced rift with her father was too much to bear and in the interests of soldiering on, and in characteristic fashion, of putting her best foot forward, she quietly supported her mother; during this period of her life, denial was her mainstay. She was seen and saw herself as a confident, cheerful and ‘balanced’ personality but the real impact of this momentous experience was to remain encapsulated and concealed from her, until her analysis with Bion, many years later.

Whatever her mother had in her mind, the outcome was that they travelled round England for a whole year, living with friends and relatives before her mother finally returned to Sheffield to work in a small, rather run-down church. Here they were as poor as the proverbial church mice. In this ‘home’ the intellectual atmosphere was stifled by a Christianity which was narrow, concrete and felt close to superstition, but they were back in town and Frances could go to school again. Her scholarship was transferred and she resumed her education at a teacher-training school in Sheffield. When she finally passed matriculation, it was decided that she should go on to a teacher-training college rather than to university, to save on time and money.

Financial constraints would no doubt have been of prime importance, but Frances’s mother probably also had in mind the strong presence of the church at Whitelands, the chosen High Anglican college in London. Mother would have been reassured in entrasting her daughter to the Whitelands environment rather than to the more open air of a university where she might have encountered some of her father’s ideas. All the same, I think that the canny Frances also saw in the teacher training a quicker route to professional and financial independence and freedom from the influence of her mother.

Chapter 2

Professional development

In 1932 Frances Vickers entered Whitelands Church of England College and it was to prove one of the formative influences in her life. One of the earliest colleges for the training of women teachers, it had a most distinguished history. Its foundation had been supported by Charles Dickens and John Ruskin. The latter took a close personal interest in the life of the college and gave gifts of hundreds of books and pictures. The college had just moved from Chelsea to Putney by the time Frances arrived there. Among the art treasures brought from the college’s Chelsea home to Whitelands were thirteen stained-glass windows by Edward Burne-Jones. The beauty of the college interiors greatly impressed the country girl; the chapel and its windows especially. Its ambience of peace proffered a safe haven at a key time after the rough passage of her childhood home and she still thinks of her stay there as a healing experience.

Not immune to the intellectual controversies of the time, the college took a keen interest in contemporary thinking in all that pertained to education, but its debates were conducted in a spirit of generosity and tolerance that was a revelation to Frances. The quiet benevolent atmosphere of the college and the openness and tolerance of the Christian teaching there were a relief and a pleasure to one who had been torn between the relentless dialectics of her father’s thinking and the imprisoning rigidities of her mother’s beliefs. She found herself much at ease there and remembers with tendemess the evening service, the Office of Compline—‘I shall repose upon thy eternal changelessness…’

There was much to excite the curiosity of the newcomer. The college had taken a keen interest in the new psychology which was beginning to sweep through education in the early twentieth century. The ideas of Homer Lane, the pioneering and controversial educationist, had an unequivocal place in the college curriculum. Lane was one of the first to introduce psychological principles into the education and reform of delinquent children in his experimental reformatory called The Little Commonwealth.

Tucked away in the Dorsetshire hills, Lane attempted to demonstrate the success of a regime based on re-education rather than constraint and punishment. It was a regime founded on his three principles of Love, Freedom and Self-Government, principles which he believed to be universally applicable. For those with an interest in the new ideas of psychology, Lane was an inspiring teacher and therapist, but to conventional and conservative minds, he was a menace, his attitudes and ideas deeply suspect.

Following allegations of sexual misconduct made against him by one of his own pupils, Lane was brought to trial in 1924. It was an early hint of the psychotic entanglements that nowadays would quickly attract the label ‘sexual abuse’. Such perceptual distortions characteristic of psychosis will be discussed below (see Chapters 5 and 10). At the trial, Winifred Mercier, Principal of Whitelands, and much admired by Frances, had been one of those who spoke out in Lane’s defence.

Frances was a promising student and showed, like her father, a natural talent for teaching. Biology continued to be a favourite subject at college but when she completed her training she chose to teach latency children of seven to nine years old. On graduating from the college, she returned to Sheffield to work, in order to be near to her mother who was, by then, in failing health. Like her father, but contrary to her mother’s inclinations, she also became a socialist, and it was in the Sheffield Labour Party that she met her first husband, John Taylor, whom she married in 1938, just before the outbreak of the Second World War.

John was a Town Hall official and with Frances’s teacher’s salary they were able to afford to set up home together in a pleasant leafy suburb of Sheffield. Married life in her new home was not destined to last very long, however. They had a year there together, before her husband was called up into the forces, at the beginning of the war, and for most of the next five years their lives were spent apart, strikingly repeating the earlier pattern of her experience with her father.

Sister Minnie died in 1942 and it was then, after her mother’s death, that Frances felt free to make a life of her own. Her husband abroad, she left Sheffield and returned to the South to take up a post in a progressive boarding school in Kent from where she was able to travel up to London in the evenings, to attend the Child Development Course run by Susan Isaacs at London University. It was at that time, too, that she became a member of Commonwealth, a liberal Christian group led by Sir Richard Ackland which filled an intellectual gap during the political coalition of the war years. Among the members of this group whom she met at that time was Arnold Tustin, the man who was later to become her second husband.

With the ending of the Second World War in 1945, conscripted soldiers everywhere were trying to restore their disrupted family and marital lives. When John and Frances came together again they found, like many others, that they had grown too far apart in the interim. Besides, Frances’s professional and intellectual development in London had become too important for her to give up and return to Sheffield.

The couple finally decided to separate and the marriage later ended in divorce. It was an unhappy time for Frances but one which coincided with the re-emergence in her life of the reassuring influence of White-lands. In 1946, although by this time an agnostic, she returned there to become a lecturer in education.

Two years later she married Arnold Tustin and soon after that, when he was appointed to the Chair of Electrical Engineering at Birmingham University, she left Whitelands and taught at Dudley Teachers’ Training College, near Birmingham.

It was about this time too that she made contact again with her father. This came about, quite fortuitously, when she saw a letter of his in The Times newspaper and wrote to him at the address given. She discovered that he now lived with another partner, Gladys. He had not divorced her mother and the couple did not marry until after Mrs Vickers’s death.

Frances kept close contact with...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Growing up in the bosom of the church
• 2 Professional development
• 3 The discovery of autism and the search to understand it
• 4 Unnatural children
• 5 Encapsulation and entanglement
• 6 Mental cataclysm and black holes
• 7 The frontiers of consciousness
• 8 Of objects: concrete, sensory and transitional
• 9 The keeper of the keys
• 10 Mental handicap and mental illness
• 11 Psychoanalytic perspectives on learning impairment
• 12 The restoration of god
• Glossary
• Chronology
• Publications by Frances Tustin
• Bibliography
• Index