About Donald Meltzer (1922-2004)

Donald Meltzer was born in New York in 1922, third child of Jewish parents; his father’s family had emigrated from Lithuania. He married three times, had three children and three stepchildren. He studied medicine at Yale, then practised as a psychiatrist in St Louis, where he read the works of Melanie Klein. This motivated him to go to England in 1954 to have analysis with her; he stayed and later took British citizenship. He joined the British Psychoanalytic Society and became a training analyst, though ultimately, disagreements with the Society’s mode of training and selection led him in the early 80’s to withdraw. Meltzer favoured an ‘atelier’ system of selection and workgroup discussion for the profession.[i] He was considered an inspired teacher and thinker by his widespread atelier-style groups of supervisees, who currently thrive in many countries.[ii]

About his analysis with Melanie Klein, Donald Meltzer has written:

It makes me think about my own life experience and what lies behind the one talent that I have discovered in myself, that is the ability to read dreams, and how it came about as the result of falling in love with Melanie Klein and approaching her like an arrow from the bow, determined to have analysis with her. Not a matter of desire – a matter of life and death. (lecture on Weltanschauung in Talks and Fragments)

She was even in her 70’s a handsome woman, fond of big hats and dressing well. She lived alone with a maid and a visiting secretary and her cat in a fair sized first floor flat in Hampstead, on a hill with views. With me, a patient, she was very formal but not cold, attentive and observing and talking quite a lot, always to the point and full of her observations. At time of collapse, catastrophe or misery she seemed very strong and fearless. I knew from public situations that she could be aggressive and contemptuous but she was neither with me in the sessions. She seemed immune to seduction or flattery but could be very ambiguous about personal feeling for the analysand. The result was that through years of analysis I never really felt that she liked me nor should. She played the piano and had a grand in the waiting room which it took me some years to see. Her cat occasionally came in to the consulting room which annoyed me. She was punctilious about punctuality, about her bills and holiday dates. Her memory seemed remarkable to the end. (letter to a friend)

Meltzer worked psychoanalytically with both adult and child patients (the latter initially supervised by Esther Bick) and always sought to perceive the child within the adult, regarding psychoanalysis as a form of parenting. He practised in London and Oxford until his death in 2004, and taught regularly in Europe and South America – for many years, together with his third wife Martha Harris (1919-1986). Harris was also a psychoanalyst who worked closely with Klein and who developed the child psychotherapy training course at the Tavistock Clinic in London, founded on the infant observation methods of Esther Bick. As a result similar courses were established in Italy, France and South America. The regular visits of Harris and Meltzer to those countries and to Spain, Germany and Scandinavia, resulted in the convening of longstanding workgroups of psychoanalytically oriented professionals. Meltzer and Harris were also both admirers of Wilfred Bion’s work on groups and on the nature of thinking, and encouraged his return to England toward the end of his life. Meltzer’s original and seminal analysis of Bion’s theories in relation to their roots in those of Klein is documented in Studies in Extended Metapsychology (1986), an account of work with colleagues that demonstrates the clinical relevance of Bion’s abstract concepts; and in The Kleinian Development, originally a series of lectures delivered to Tavistock students, that traces the model of the mind used in clinical psychoanalysis from Freud through Klein to Bion. Like Roger Money-Kyrle, his other main mentor, he saw psychoanalytic thinking as inherently logical in its progression, and as essentially concerned with the improvement of human values.[iii] He described Klein’s vision as ‘theological’ owing to her view of the concreteness of the inner world and its objects, and maintained that much was implicit in Klein that only later became explicit in post-Kleinian theory.[iv]

Meltzer is considered to be a leading ‘post’ or ‘neo’ Kleinian in the sense of the term that refers not simply to the later followers of Klein but more specifically to the emergent focus on the aesthetics of the thinking process and its therapeutic value, rooted in an internal relationship between mother and baby. In particular he brought out the positive and beneficial qualities implicit in her discovery of the ‘combined object’ which in her own theoretical writings can appear overshadowed by her recognition of its overwhelming impact on the child. Meltzer’s own acuity as a theoretician was first established with his seminal paper ‘The relation of anal masturbation to projective identification’ (1965) which pointed to the differentiation of types of projective identification, one of the core features of Kleinian theory. These ‘intrusive’ types of projective identification were further developed in his last book The Claustrum (1992), where he demarcated the three areas of mental claustrophobia in relation to the psychic structure of the internal mother’s body – the head-breast, genital, and rectal compartments. Psychic residence in these areas results in a rigidification of infantile envy in the form – respectively - of complacent pseudo-maturity, sensual indulgence or sado-masochistic enslavement. This intrusive projection stands in contrast to the communicative forms of projection and introjection (Stokes) entailed in learning from experience (Bion), which Meltzer redefined in terms of the ‘aesthetic conflict’, and which establish dependency and trust in the internal combined object.

Aesthetic conflict is perhaps, after projective-intrusive identification, the concept of Meltzer’s that has attracted most attention outside specialised areas of investigation such as autism. The concept replaces in Meltzer’s philosophy the Freudian theory (also accepted by Klein) of the life and death instincts which is still espoused by many analysts.[v] The aesthetic conflict was formulated in The Apprehension of Beauty (1988), written in collaboration with Meg Harris Williams, an artist and literary critic. It builds on the increasingly aesthetic preoccupations of Bion’s later works. Meltzer’s term refers to the emotional tensions generated in the infant by the enigmatic qualities of the mother’s beauty, which bring to the fore the fact that her inside world remains unknown, thereby stimulating both frustration and curiosity. The concept derives in fact from an interweaving of several sources: Klein’s theory of the ‘epistemophilic instinct’ of the child; Meltzer’s deeper understanding of the complexities of the mother-infant relationship as a result of working alongside Martha Harris; Bion’s theory of thinking with its contrasting ‘vertices’ of Love, Hate and Knowledge; and on the literary side, the love-hate relationship between the poet and his Muse. The latter was explored by Harris Williams in Inspiration in Milton and Keats (1981) and in this book through an analysis of Hamlet. Meltzer’s longstanding interest in aesthetic philosophy is recorded in this book in a discussion with the Kleinian aesthetician Adrian Stokes ‘Concerning the social basis of art’ (first published in 1963, a dialogue commenced in Stokes’s ‘Imago Group’ of Kleinian intellectuals). Harris Williams uses passages from Stokes’s art criticism to illustrate the mental congruences involved in aesthetic criticism, which parallels the situation of the analyst and analysand and contributed to Meltzer’s eventual redefinition of psychoanalysis itself as an art-science.

His emerging view of psychoanalysis as an art-form focussed on the centrality of symbol-formation, not in the early Freudian sense of fixed signs but in the sense of individual containers for meaning as in Bion’s Grid and as in the tradition of philosophers such as Cassirer, Whitehead and Langer, whom Meltzer re-read alongside other linguists in the 1970’s. Dream Life (1983) was the first book in which he investigated the distinction between true symbols and concrete part-objects in dreams, taking further the ideas of Ella Freeman Sharpe and of Hanna Segal’s ‘symbolic equation’ in her seminal paper of 195-. Meltzer always emphasized that symbols are not only verbal; Dream Life is about the dominance of the dream - rather than of verbal communication - in the consulting room. Unlike many post-Klein Kleinians, Meltzer continued to hold tenaciously to Klein’s view of the concreteness of psychic reality and the part-object dramas it contains, as manifest in dreams (or in children’s play).[vi] He regarded his ability to read dreams as his primary talent, and came to see the analyst’s task as one of entering into a ‘counter-transference dream’, a state of mind suited to receiving and making sense of the dreams brought by the patient. Many of his papers are concerned with how to detect and utilise the non-verbal aspects of communication between analyst and analysand that contribute to this ‘dream’, such as temperature, distance, posture, music and resonance. In this state the analyst may receive and convert the movements of concrete part-objects into alpha-elements (Bion) which are available for thinking and for aesthetic integration within the personality. Meltzer’s final publications, in line with the artistic mission of psychoanalysis, are transcribed talks that focus on the nature of symbols and symbol-formation, and on the disorders of thinking that are their converse.

Meltzer’s view was that clinical practice is always more advanced than psychoanalytic theory, and that the function of theory is primarily to make further, more precise observations possible. Clinical work and supervision were his passion. Although he accepted being labelled ‘postKleinian’, he saw himself as a ‘Kleinian’ because Melanie Klein had radically transformed his vision of life and his way of working.[vii] She enabled him to observe psychological movements in terms of mental structures, the theatre of phantasy, and the concreteness of psychic reality; and this practical art was what inspired him, rather than theory of any kind. It dealt with the scientific realities of ‘the truth’ of what was going on in the ‘conversation between internal objects’, a meeting of minds through the transference-countertransference. Moreover he believed that the transactions within the consulting room constituted an organic process with an inbuilt necessary evolution that was regardless of psychoanalytic school or creed, and was rather, determined by the method of investigation itself. His first book, The Psychoanalytical Process (1967), clarified for himself and for many subsequent readers the progress of the clinical relationship from the ‘gathering of the transference’ to the weaning of analysand from analyst in preparation for the lifelong work of self-analysis. His essential view of the psychoanalytic method, which he always described as ‘beautiful’, never changed and perhaps for this reason, this remained his favourite book.

Meltzer is also valued by practitioners for making headway with hitherto intractable conditions such as schizophrenia and autism. Explorations in Autism (1975) records work conducted with colleagues that investigates the adhesive identifications and two-dimensional mental structure of childhood autism; in this area he was developing conceptual tools introduced by Esther Bick with her work on the significance of the skin in early object relations. Another popular work is Sexual States of Mind (1973), an inquiry into the distinction between the perversions and psychosexual exploration. Most of Meltzer’s books and many papers have been published in Italian, French, Spanish and German, and Sexual States in Japanese.

The Process, originally published by Heinemann, became the first book to be published by the Clunie Press, which he and Martha Harris set up in memory of her husband Roland Harris. In educational terms, the work of Roland and Martha Harris and Donald Meltzer in combination could be said to have culminated in the tract written in 1976 for the United Nations, ‘A Psychoanalytical Model of the Child-in-the-family-in-the-community’, which attracts increasing interest from researchers outside the immediate psychoanalytic field. The Roland Harris Educational Trust operated for over 30 years and was succeeded in 2005 by the Harris Meltzer Trust.

Meg Harris Williams

with thanks to Neil Maizels and Irene Freeden for their suggestions

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[i] See his paper ‘Towards an atelier system’ presented to the British Society in 1971, which was considered subversive. Meltzer believed that institutions were useful for their ‘housekeeping’ function but that real learning took place between individuals in a work-group (in Bion’s definition), when not under excessive pressure to succeed or conform, and when it was possible for a degree of self-selection to operate. Meltzer’s principles regarding education in general were formulated together with Martha Harris in ‘A Psychoanalytical View of the Child-in-the-family-in-the-community’ (1976; published in Sincerity: Collected Papers). These were based on Bion’s theory of ‘learning from experience’ and coincided with the alternative psychotherapeutic training practised at the Tavistock under Martha Harris’ administration. In his psychoanalytic practice, also, Meltzer preferred for patients to select themselves. He accepted anyone for whom he had space, but refused to continue if they did not bring dreams, since he considered mere ‘talking about’ (Bion) – even if disguised as free-associations - a waste of time.

[ii] Meltzer’s working methods have been documented by several groups of supervisees so far. He always asked to listen to unvarnished clinical material, not to cosmetic or ideological presentations. See: ‘About supervision: an interview with Donald Meltzer’ by R. and M. Oelsner (click here ); Supervisions with Donald Meltzer ed. Castella et al (2003); Psychoanalytic Work with Children and Adults (Barcelona Group, 2002); Transfert, Adolescenza, Disturbi del Pensiero (Racker Group, 2004).

[iii] Money-Kyrle wrote that he joined the Kleinians not because there was not good work being done elsewhere but because it seemed to him the ‘most progressive’ of the current schools of thought (Man’s Picture of his World: Duckworth 1961, p.8). In his introduction to Money-Kyrle’s Collected Papers, Meltzer writes of how the ‘piecemeal revelation of the truth can liberate men from the more primitive models which affect their judgments and guide their actions… The rectification of this [primitive] model of the world involves men in a transformation of their values’ (Collected Papers of Roger Money-Kyrle: Clunie Press 1978, p. viii).

[iv] He wrote in fact that the historical development of psychoanalysis as a science follows a series of `logically necessary propositions as garlands of flowers wind about a wire’, and that this logical necessity is his `faith’ (The Kleinian Development, Perthshire: Clunie Press, 1978, vol. I, pp. 3-4.)

[v] Like Money-Kyrle, and Winnicott, Meltzer considered the death instinct a nasty idea that was moreover ‘not useful’. Money-Kyrle, the mentor whose values he most admired, wrote that ‘A man’s good internal parents are felt to desire life as he does’ (Man’s Picture of his World (1961), p. 129. Meltzer said Bion’s idea of a Negative Grid made the ‘death instinct’ unnecessary as an explanation of human behaviour, since this negativity was sufficient to account for all forms of destructiveness (see for example ‘A review of my writings’ in Exploring the Work of Donald Meltzer: a festschrift ed. Cohen and Hahn, Karnac 2000, p. 10.) It differs from ‘envy’ (Klein) which can be a positive emotional force in the aesthetic conflict of normal development.

[vi] Meltzer writes: ‘It was the belief that dreams tell the truth that stuck me to part-objects and their functions, and to seeing not that dreams were necessarily full of symbols but that many dreams were full of part-objects…. So the differentiation between symbols and part-objects seemed to me to be revealed by dreams and showed the concreteness that infused all of these processes of thought and feeling and prevented them from finding any sort of resolution. This led so easily to their being transformed into patterns of acting-out…’ (‘A review of my writings’, p. 9). It is also the view of Money-Kyrle.

[vii] Both Donald Meltzer and Martha Harris declined to give interviews for the biography of Melanie Klein by Phyllis Grosskurth because they considered their experience to be a private matter. Mrs Klein’s couch, chair and children’s toys were in the possession – or caretaking – of the Harris-Meltzer family.