Donald Meltzer

Meltzer was born in 1922. The Melanie Klein Trust's biographical entry, written by Margaret Rustin, and an obituary published by the Harris Meltzer Trust place his birth in New Jersey; the English Wikipedia gives New York City. He studied medicine at Yale and at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He then trained in psychiatry in St Louis, Missouri, and practised there as a psychiatrist. Rustin writes that his interest in Klein's ideas led him to child psychiatry.

In 1954 the United States Air Force posted him to London as a child psychiatrist. There he began an analysis with Klein that lasted until her death in 1960, and he soon left the military to pursue psychoanalysis. The British Psychoanalytical Society accepted him for training in work with both adults and children. Hanna Segal and Herbert Rosenfeld supervised his adult cases. Betty Joseph, Esther Bick and Segal supervised his child cases. Bick's ideas on the sense of a skin that holds the self together, and on the adhesive identification that takes its place when it is missing, later underlay his account of autistic states. Friendships with Roger Money-Kyrle and with Bion shaped his later thinking. He became a British citizen.

Meltzer became a training analyst of the British Psychoanalytical Society and a sought-after supervisor. He taught for many years at the Tavistock Clinic and had close ties to the child psychotherapy course that Bick had founded there at the invitation of John Bowlby. The lectures he gave at the Institute of Psychoanalysis and the Tavistock between 1965 and 1978 became The Kleinian Development⁴. He also belonged to Adrian Stokes's Imago Group, a circle of art historians, philosophers and psychoanalysts.

In 1971 he married Martha Harris, his third wife. She had succeeded Bick as head of the Tavistock's child psychotherapy training, and her second husband, Roland Harris, had died in 1969. In 1970 the two had founded the Roland Harris Educational Trust, which for some thirty years published psychoanalytic books under the Clunie Press imprint. Together they taught throughout Europe, Scandinavia and South America, and in parts of North America and India. Their travels helped establish the Tavistock model of child psychotherapy training in Italian cities, in France and in Argentina. In 1976 they wrote A Psychoanalytical Model of the Child-in-the-Family-in-the-Community for use in schools and therapeutic units. One account says the OECD asked them to write it, another UNESCO. It appeared first in French and was printed in English only in 1994. Harris died in 1987.

In the early 1980s Meltzer withdrew from the British Psychoanalytical Society. The English Wikipedia attributes the break to disagreements about the mode of training. Rustin writes of disagreement about the Society's organisation and of rather bitter personal animosities. He went on living and practising in Oxford.

His teaching favoured what he called an atelier system, set out in his paper Towards an atelier system, in which those he supervised presented unedited clinical material. Supervision groups gathered around him in many countries. He died in Oxford on 13 August 2004, on the eve of his eighty-second birthday.

The Psycho-Analytical Process¹ (1967), his first book, describes the natural history of an analysis. It is modelled on the analysis of children in the playroom and then extended to the more complex material of adults. Drawing on Klein's ideas of projective identification and the inner world, Meltzer describes a process that passes through phases mirroring the development of primitive object relations.

The first phase is the gathering of the transference. Next comes the sorting out of geographical confusions, the confusions between inside and outside, self and object, that massive projective identification produces. Then follow the sorting out of zonal confusions, the threshold of the depressive position and the weaning process. The book separates the pre-formed transference, the patient's preconceptions about analysis, from the transference proper. It also shows how the cycle of the whole process recurs within the single session.

Its present publisher describes the book as sowing the seeds of Meltzer's later model of the mind, including the aesthetic quality of the analytic process. León Grinberg wrote a preface to its Spanish translation in 1968.

Sexual States of Mind² (1973) is a Kleinian revision of Freud's theory of sexuality. It reads sexual life as a set of states of mind organised by internal object relations, and it treats sexuality in terms of metapsychology rather than description or behaviour. Unconscious phantasy and the primal scene stand at the centre of the model.

Adult sexuality, in this account, rests on identification with the internal combined parents. Meltzer distinguishes it from the polymorphous sexuality of the infantile self. He sets both apart from the perverse and addictive states in which destructive parts of the self attack the internal parental couple. The later chapters apply this structural theory to adolescence, to tyranny, to education and to pornography. Its publisher singles out its use for understanding perversions and addictions.

Explorations in Autism³ (1975) reports the work of a research group of child psychotherapists that Meltzer led, with John Bremner, Shirley Hoxter, Doreen Weddell and Isca Wittenberg. The group treated autistic children in analysis, and the book presents four of them, known as Timmy, John, Barry and Piffie.

In Meltzer's theoretical chapters, autism proper is a mindless state. It comes about through dismantling, a passive suspension of attention that lets the senses drift apart, each fixing on its own object. Unlike splitting, dismantling involves no sadism and no anxiety, and the senses come together again once attention returns.

From autism proper he distinguished post-autistic states. These are marked by two-dimensional relating, surface to surface, and by adhesive identification. A self that has not taken in a containing object cannot project into an object or take one in. Instead it holds itself together by sticking to the object's surface and imitating it. The term was Bick's, but it first appeared in print in Meltzer's writing of 1975. The case material also revealed what the book's publisher calls the geography of the internal mother, which later shaped his theory of the claustrum.

In a chapter on dimensionality in mental functioning, Meltzer ranked ways of relating to objects, space and time. One-dimensional functioning is the mindless movement towards or away from objects found in autism proper. In two-dimensional functioning, self and objects are felt as surfaces without insides. Three-dimensional functioning knows objects with interior spaces into which projective identification can enter. Four-dimensional functioning adds time and development. The publisher presents this as the first theory of the dimensionality of mental life in psychoanalysis.

The Kleinian Development⁴ (1978) gathers the lectures of 1965 to 1978 and first appeared in three parts. The first follows Freud's clinical development. Its publisher stresses the tension it traces between Freud's truthful clinical observations and a theory that could not always take them in.

The second part reads Klein's Narrative of a Child Analysis⁵, the case of Richard, week by week. The publisher calls it probably his most personal and passionate book, a tribute to his own analyst.

The third part sets out the clinical significance of the work of Bion. Meltzer described the lectures both as a search for integration into a combined internal psychoanalytic object and as a handbook for students.

The Apprehension of Beauty⁶ (1988), written with Meg Harris Williams, proposes that development begins not in persecution but in the infant's overwhelming response to the beauty of the mother. The aesthetic conflict lies between her outward beauty, open to the senses, and her interior, which is enigmatic and can only be imagined. Withdrawal from this conflict, Meltzer argued, underlies many later disturbances, while the capacity to bear it underlies thinking, art and the analytic relationship.

Rustin notes that he came to treat the phenomena of the paranoid-schizoid position as a defensive retreat from aesthetic conflict. She suggests that his view and Klein's may complement rather than replace each other. Williams's chapters read the conflict in poetry and literature. The publisher describes the book as a family project of Martha Harris, her daughters Meg and Morag, and Meltzer.

The idea of an intrusive form of projective identification goes back to his 1966 paper, The relation of anal masturbation to projective identification. That paper linked it with a failure of genuine development and with confusion of identity.

In The Claustrum⁷ (1992) he worked out intrusive identification at length. He set it apart from the communicative projective identification that Bion had described in his model of container and contained. Intrusive identification is an omnipotent phantasy of forcing one's way into the internal mother to possess her qualities.

The inner world it produces is the claustrum, divided into the compartments of the head-breast, the genital and the rectum, each with its own atmosphere. Life inside it is shadowed by a claustrophobic dread of expulsion. Meltzer traced the claustrum's part in narcissism, in perversions and addictions, in psychosis and the onset of schizophrenia, in adolescence and in politics. He also discussed the technical problems it poses in analysis. The book closes with an essay by Meg Harris Williams on Macbeth.

Rebeca Grinberg observed that Meltzer described this identification as intrusive, a matter of quality, rather than massive, a matter of quantity. Rustin links his account of anti-developmental forces in the mind, which sometimes work in the manner of a gang, to Rosenfeld's work and to John Steiner's psychic retreats.

Meltzer is regarded as a key figure of the post-Kleinian movement associated with Bion. His teaching made him influential in many countries, especially in South America and across Europe. His ideas long remained controversial in Britain, but his reputation there has increasingly regained ground. Congresses on his work were held in London in 1998, in Florence in 2000, in Buenos Aires, Savona and Barcelona in 2005, and in Stavanger in 2007.

Rustin writes that his heart lay with the conception of psychoanalysis as an art, and that individual creativity always mattered most to him. She also notes that readers may be frustrated by the idiosyncrasy of his forms of thought and writing. The Harris Meltzer Trust, which continues the Roland Harris Educational Trust, has reissued his books. It has also published records of his seminars abroad, among them Meltzer in Paris, Meltzer in Venice and Meltzer in São Paulo.

His books are The Psycho-Analytical Process (1967), Sexual States of Mind (1973), Explorations in Autism (1975, with John Bremner, Shirley Hoxter, Doreen Weddell and Isca Wittenberg), The Kleinian Development (1978), Dream Life (1983), Studies in Extended Metapsychology (1986), The Apprehension of Beauty (1988, with Meg Harris Williams) and The Claustrum (1992). Sincerity and Other Works, his collected papers edited by A. Hahn, appeared in 1994.

Among his papers are The relation of anal masturbation to projective identification (1966) and, with Martha Harris, A Psychoanalytical Model of the Child-in-the-Family-in-the-Community (1976). The Harris Meltzer Trust has since published three volumes of his Selected Papers and Adolescence (2011).