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Frances Tustin introduced the idea of black holes in her Autistic Barriers in Neurotic Patients (1986). The term was chosen by analogy with ideas in modern astrophysics, which has discovered zones of extraordinary density in the universe that are probably related to the condensation and fusion of several stars. Once formed, such hyperdense zones are thought to exert a sort of attraction upon other stars, which are thus at risk of plunging into the core of these vast concentrations of matter, which swallow them up and strip them of all individuality. It is not hard to see how the metaphor of a "black hole of the psyche" can help explain, or at least help us picture what happens at the core of the psyche of autistic children.

Indeed Tustin had already elaborated on a notion first proposed by Sydney Klein (1980), that of "autistic islands." And, most significantly, in her first book, Autism and Childhood Psychosis (1972), she had painstakingly recounted the case of John, who had described to her, on emerging from autism, what he himself called "the black hole w/the mechant piquant." What John was striving to verbalize in this way was all the pain and suffering he had felt on the occasion of far too brutal and premature a separation between the breast and the nipple, this at a time when nipple and mouth are inextricably conjoined (as described, albeit in a different way, by Piera Aulagnier, with her "complementary zone-object"). Naturally it is less a physical separation that is involved here than a mental one—or even, to be quite precise, the inscription in the psyche of the process of separation.

If, for one reason or another, this process turns out to be impossible or impeded, the child is liable to feel as if a part of him- or herself has been cut off.

This traumatic organization of the psyche leaves its mark in the shape of "autistic islands" which fail to become integrated into the cycles of deferred effects and historical time: Their massiveness and their intensity, in autistic children, are an obstacle to their becoming part of mental functioning, and they end up serving as pathological poles of attraction for a whole variety of psychic elements which accrete within their sphere of influence and thus become incapable of dispersing in a manner at once orderly and differentiated.

In the wake of Frances Tustin, the post-Kleinian tendency in psychoanalysis has made wide use of the concept of the black hole, extending it to nonpsychotic subjects in whom autistic islands are possible even if in such cases they are less significant and less serious in their implications.

BERNARD GOLSE

See also: Autism; Autistic capsule/nucleus; Breakdown.