Person
Donald Meltzer
American-born British psychoanalyst of the post-Kleinian school. A child psychiatrist trained at Yale and in St Louis, he came to London in 1954 to be analysed by Melanie Klein, qualified at the British Psycho-Analytical Society and taught for many years at the Tavistock Clinic, practising in Oxford after he withdrew from the Society in the early 1980s. Drawing on Klein, Bion and Esther Bick, he described the natural history of the analytic process (1967), an intrusive form of projective identification and the claustrum it creates inside the internal mother, the adhesive identification, dismantling and two-dimensional relating of autistic states (1975), and the aesthetic conflict stirred in the infant by the beauty of the mother (1988). With his wife Martha Harris he spread the Tavistock model of child psychotherapy training in Italy, France and South America.
- Born
- 1922
- Died
- 2004
- Influenced by
introduced
- Intrusive identification 1966 The idea goes back to Meltzer's 1966 paper on anal masturbation and projective identification. In The Claustrum (1992) he named it intrusive identification, setting it apart from the communicative projective identification of Bion's container.
- Adhesive identification 1975 The term was Esther Bick's, but it first appeared in print in Meltzer's 1975 paper and in Explorations in Autism, where he set it out as a mode of identification distinct from projective identification.
- Dismantling 1975 In Explorations in Autism Meltzer describes dismantling as a passive suspension of attention that lets the senses fall apart, each fixing on its own object. Unlike splitting, it involves no sadism.
influenced by
- Melanie Klein Meltzer built on Klein's clinical method and theory of positions. In The Kleinian Development he reads her Narrative of a Child Analysis week by week as the turning point of her thought.
- Esther Bick Bick's work on the psychic skin and on adhesive forms of identification underlies Meltzer's model of autistic states and of two-dimensional mental functioning.
- Wilfred Bion Meltzer's friendship with Bion shaped his later thinking. The third part of The Kleinian Development is a close reading of Bion, whose theory of thinking Meltzer takes as the next step after Freud and Klein.
supervised by
- Esther Bick Bick was one of the supervisors of Meltzer's child cases during his training in London.
- Hanna Segal Segal supervised Meltzer on both child and adult cases while he trained in London.
- Herbert Rosenfeld Rosenfeld was one of the supervisors of Meltzer's adult cases during his training.