Judith L. Mitrani and Theodore Mitrani are Fellows of the International Psychoanalytical Association, and training and supervising psychoanalysts at the Psychoanalytic Center of California in Los Angeles. They are founding members of the Board of Trustees of the Frances Tustin Memorial Trust, and authors, editors, translators and teachers in the private practice of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic therapy with adults and children in Los Angeles, California.

This book explores some of the ways which Tustin's work has enabled psychoanalytic clinicians to enter into the elemental domain of sensation: what Bion called the 'proto-mental' area of the psyche-soma.

Part I - Prenatality through Latency, The Perpetuation of an Error by Frances Tustin, Stuck Between Two Worlds: Autistic Defenses and the Experience of Premature Birth by Angela Sowa, Prenatal Trauma and Autism by Suzanne Maiello, Further Reflections on the Construction of the Body-Ego by Genevieve Haag, Finding The Wavelength: Tools In Communication with Autistic Children by Anne Alvarez. Part II - Adolescence Through Adulthood, The use of observation in the psychoanalytic treatment of a 12-year-old boy with Asperger's syndrome by Maria Pozzi, 7 Aspects of The Body Image and Sense of Identity In an Adolescent Boy with Autism: Implications for Eating Disorders by Maria Rhode, Long-Term Mother-Child Psychotherapy: Infantile Autism with Cerebellar Anomaly by Bianca Lechevalier, Autistic Phenomena in Neurotic Patients by Sydney Klein , Precipitation Anxiety Precipitation AnxietyIn The Analysis of Adult Patients by Didier Houzel, On the Concept of an Autistic-Contiguous Position by Thomas Ogden, Trying to Enter the Long Black Branches: Some Technical Extensions for the Analysis of Autistic States in Adults by Judith Mitrani, Ghosts in the Swamp: Some Aspects of Splitting and Their Relationship to Parental Losses by Kate Barrows