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Chapter Two Part One – Literature review - Page 46
Joseph, Hannah Segal and Esther Bick (all psychoanalysts in the Kleinian group of the
British Psychoanalytical Society) (Hahn, 2005). Hahn notes the importance of Meltzer’s
works ‘The Kleinian Development’ (1975), three volumes based on a series of lectures
at the Tavistock Clinic where Meltzer exercised a much appreciated influence on the
profession of child psychotherapy, and ‘A Psychoanalytical Model of the Child-in the-
Family-in-the-Community’ (1976), commissioned by the United Nations and co-written
with his then wife, the psychoanalyst Martha Harris, who was for many years the Head
of Training for Child Psychotherapists at the Tavistock Clinic.
A contrasting but nonetheless important feature of Meltzer’s interaction with Bick-
Tavistock Infant Observation Method is his departure from relationship with established
formal structures within psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic training, and his focus in
the latter part of his life on teaching more informal groups of colleagues in various parts
of Europe and the Americas. According to Hahn (2005), Meltzer’s discontent appears to
have focussed on the establishment of the Kleinian group and of the British
Psychoanalytical Society of which it is a part, and in particular the concentration on
professional politics in which those bodies were engaged. In my view, this conflict over
differing foci and priorities has strong parallels with the debate between Green and
Stern reported above, whereby what Green calls the spirit of psychoanalysis can face
threats from science and from other sources of power and influence.
Conclusion
In order to conclude this part of the literature review, I would like to draw together
some of the threads in these various streams of ideas.