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The contribution of Meltzer
Chapter Two Part One – Literature review - Page 45
Consideration of Donald Meltzer’s work highlights many links to the threads of ideas
developed in the thesis. As a successor to the tradition of Freud, Klein, Winnicott and
Bion, he was extremely influential from the 1960’s until his death in 2004, both through
his clinical work, and also through his writing and very extensive teaching. In his
introduction to one of his major works, The Claustrum, he notes (Meltzer, 1992, page 3)
that,
The thrust of psychoanalysis has moved relentlessly from a simplistic
explanatory hypothesis and an optimistic aim to cure mental illness towards a
state of bewildered description of mental phenomena.
Later (on the same page),
This book is an attempt to bring together my clinical experiences of projective
identification as seen in the consulting room, and from this to extrapolate a view
of it as a mental phenomenon of significance in the development of the
individual and in the evolution of the society that each person both inhabits and
in some measure helps to form.
Meltzer is important as a representative of the generation after Bion, for his elaboration
of his predecessors’ theoretical advances, through his own clinical work and his
contribution to that of others, through his teaching in relation to clinical work, and
through his exploration of the processes of being, teaching and learning. In relation to
this research, which can be seen in the same tradition of ‘bewildered description’, his
contribution is important both for what he has drawn together, and also for his parting
company.
Meltzer’s work very much intersects with the Tavistock-Bick Method of Infant
Observation, having had his second analysis with Melanie Klein, and supervision of his
adult cases from Hannah Segal and Herbert Rosenfeld, and of his child cases from Betty