An introduction to the work and thinking of Donald Meltzer - Artlit

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Living in the genital chamber results in greed, possessiveness and miserliness. Livingin the rectal chamber results in tyranny – a sadomasochistic situation which causesharm to the internal babies, likely to be reinforced by harm to external babies in theshape of other people in society.Living in the head-breast results in pseudo-maturity. This chamber is intolerantof ignorance – it is a substitute for awareness of the Socratean or Bionic space ofabsence of memory and desire. Meltzer first described this in a paper on the ‘delusionof clarity of insight’. It is a particular danger for the psychoanalyst, and results in theinability to trust in the process as aesthetic object. Although it has similarities withwhat is sometimes called an ‘as if’ personality, it is actually more tyrannical, since itspolitical aim is to manipulate other people. Living in this chamber is liable to blockthe capacity to view each session as a new situation. It is an impediment to observationand to feeling the countertransference. The tiny changes that carry the stirringsof mental life go undetected in these glaring headlights – the opposite of what Bioncalls a ‘beam of darkness’.Although all these forms of psychopathology are wellknown and may be dealtwith under the traditional heading simply of projective identification, it is the conceptof retreat from aesthetic conflict that illuminates the illusory quality of the superficialvitality of the Claustrum. [something that Bion also constantly stressed - vitalitybeing a necessary requirement for conducting an analysis.] Meltzer also maintainedthat the door to the Claustrum was ‘always open’; and the way out is through engagingwith the aesthetic conflict. This is equivalent to ‘lighting fire’ in the patient’smind and is the analyst’s prime task – not the moralistic goal propounded by establishmentKleinian theory, which falls prey to adaptation and respectability. Meltzerwrote that he had not come across any patient who had never had any glimpse of ‘thedazzle of the sunrise’.A wonderful illustration of this contrast may be found Shakespeare’s King Lear,which sets the mania of Edmund against the apparent passivity of Edgar. They representfalse and true aspects of the personality, aesthetic versus claustrophobic. Edmundbelieves he is outrageous and dynamic because he is illegitimate – which he interpretsas being born of a passionate combined object; but his hollowness is revealed. Edgarappears to be mad and helpless but he is the vital force: he fuels the steady progressionof the old men, Lear and Gloucester towards their death. Lear is associated withthe great fire of rage; Gloucester with the little fire of eyesight. Their death is really aform of rebirth - Bion’s catastrophic change into a new state of being - expressed byEdgar becoming the new king.Dream life and symbol formationThe great symbolic structure of King Lear suggests our route back from the Modelof the Mind to Meltzer’s views on dream life and symbol formation. Dreams andsymbolmaking lie at the heart of his picture of mental vitality. In line with Freud’s ownwww.artlit.info - writings and artwork © Meg Harris Williams/ Introduction to Meltzer 10
definition of psychoanalysis, Meltzer once said that the only talent he ever discoveredin himself was that of reading dreams. ‘The dream is my landscape’ he once wrote ina letter. It is where his interest in psychoanalysis began, continued and culminates.Meltzer was much interested in the philosophy of symbol-making, particularlythe tradition of Wittgenstein, Cassirer, Whitehead and Langer. This is the traditionthat is particularly concerned with the distinction between ‘presentational forms’ and‘discursive forms’, showing and saying - the limitations of conscious meaning versusthe richness of unconscious meaning. It was in the context of this tradition that, inDream Life (1983), he said he was trying to ‘formulate an aesthetic theory of dreams’(p. 29) that departed from Freud’s day-residue theory of dreams, and that wouldbring psychoanalysis more in line with traditional art forms – both their methodologyand their focus on dream-symbols.Individual dreams may vary greatly in their aesthetic quality. However they alwayscontain infinitely more meaning than the patient, or the analyst, can verbalise. Ofthis aesthetic containing power Meltzer wrote:It can be seen that a number of central formal structures are being drawn up into juxtapositions tocreate a space scintillating with potentiated meaning. Sometimes words and visual forms are seen tointeract… At other times spaces are being created as containers of meaning. At other times the movementsfrom one type of space to another, and the emotional difficulties of making such moves, aremade apparent. (Dream Life 148).Dreams are authentic manifestations of the drama of part-objects that is the stuff ofpsychoanalysis, with aspects of the internal combined object acting as protagonists ina ‘theatre of phantasy’ – a key phrase expressing Meltzer’s spatial view of mental life.(He felt in fact that some analysts had lost touch with Melanie Klein’s own stress onthe psychic reality of the part-object figures of the inner world and with the psychicspace or spaces which they inhabit).A special feature of Meltzer’s theory of dreams is his view of dream-life as a continuum,in which meaning is continuously generated by internal objects, rather thaninvented by the self. Psychoanalysis, he wrote in his book of that name, offers a‘privileged sampling’ of this most creative level of an individual’s mental functioning.Indeed, this is the only functioning that is truly ‘mental’; everything else is eitherprotomental (in Bion’s term) or discursive – that is, it ‘says’ rather than ‘shows’ things,and what can be ‘said’ is inevitably much less complex than what can be ‘shown’ indreams or other symbolic modes such as art forms. Dream-life is the place in whichmental growth occurs: ‘growth goes on in the quiet chrysalis of dream-life’ (p. 177).It occurs (or is stunted) whether or not we are privileged to observe it, and whether ornot we can find a reasonably correct interpretation for the dream. In dreams, mentallife happens and – as Keats would say – ‘the creative creates itself’.Dream life is itself a presentational form, and we need to receive its manifestationsin a congruent way, through the language of communication rather than the jargon ofexplanatory diagnosis. For this reason Meltzer preferred to speak of ‘dream exploration’www.artlit.info - writings and artwork © Meg Harris Williams/ Introduction to Meltzer 11
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An introduction to the work and thinking of Donald Meltzer - Artlit

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