Frances Tustin

Frances Tustin (born Frances Daisy Vickers; 1913) was a pioneering British child psychotherapist renowned for her work with children with autism in the 1950s. She became a teacher and began studying psychoanalysis in 1943 at the University of London.

Following the war, in 1950 she began the child psychotherapy training headed by the psychoanalyst Esther Bick in the children's department of London's Tavistock Clinic, which was chaired by the pioneer in child development John Bowlby.

Psychotherapy career In the mid-1950s she traveled to the US to work at the James Jackson Putnam Center which treated autistic children through what today is seen as behavior therapy and began to extensively study, research and write about autism in what are some of the earliest writings on the condition.