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The Work of Donald Meltzer Revisited: 100 Years After His Birth returns to and reassesses the contributions of Donald Meltzer, one of the most significant disciples of Melanie Klein and who was deeply inspired by Wilfred Bion.
Donald Meltzer was a distinguished psychoanalyst and one of Klein's most productive and prominent analysands. He was a very influential teacher internationally and an extraordinary practitioner and theorist as well. He codified Kleinian technique, was innovative in the treatment of autistic children, and was the foremost metapsychologist for Klein's and Bion's works. Of his many outstanding contributions, The Apprehension of Beauty, which he co-authored with Meg Harris Williams, heralded a new age in psychoanalysis by providing its aesthetic perspective in relation to that of infant development.
Introduction to the Work of Donald Meltzer is a critical survey of Donald Meltzer's central themes which simultaneously focuses on the most important concepts of his work. This detailed volume should not only spark the reader's interest in these fascinating, yet complex, themes but also encourage readers to deepen their knowledge of them. 'I have tried to point out an aspect which, in my view, is fundamental in Meltzer's theory: that is, the possibility of communicating those typical aspects of his analytical work which go beyond the well-established and reassuring technique. Meltzer's interest constantly turns to that area which is difficult to describe in words and perhaps cannot be expressed in conventional language: the emotional area of non-verbal communication, of reverie and unconscious thinking.'- From the Preface
The author formulates here the existence of an anxiety apparatus whose functioning is a part of the ego and the personality structure and illustrates how in attacking this apparatus the ego is attacking itself. An example is given of the workings of the death instinct, and a differentiation is made between the ego's defence mechanisms and other pathological character devices.
In this intelligent and insightful work, Meg Harris Williams presents a clear and readable introduction to the works of influential psychoanalyst Donald Meltzer. The book covers Meltzer’s ideas on key themes including sexuality, dreams, psychosis, perversion and aesthetics, and his work with both children and adults. This book focuses especially on Meltzer’s views on the nature of psychoanalysis itself, as an investigative method conducted by the cooperation between two people. His intuitive understanding of dreams is underscored by a scholarly interest in philosophy and linguistics. The book will give readers a window into Meltzer’s clinical seminars and supervisions, as well as a com...
This book is a tribute to Donald Melzer's extraordinary contribution to psychoanalysis. It includes many of the papers given at the Tavistock Centre in London to celebrate Meltzer's 75th Birthday. Among the contributions, Margaret Rustin and Michael Rustin write on the work of Samuel Beckett; Gianna Williams elaborates upon Meltzer's thinking about the meeting of mother and baby; Didier Houzel discusses the aesthetic conflict and its connection with beauty and violence; and the Psychoanalytic Group of Barcelona describe their experience in working with Meltzer as a visiting supervisor. There are also several papers discussing the clinical relevance of Meltzer's thinking, particularly in work with children and adolescents.Apart from these papers, the book also contains a candid review by Meltzer of his own writing and thinking. This book provides a unique set of perspectives on his work and influence, and the sheer diversity of fields in which his thinking is now being used. It will surely be of continuing value to anyone interested in the state of psychoanalysis
Explorations in Autism is a turning-point in both the understanding of and the clinical approach to autism. The clinical material gradually unveils the geography of the internal mother (which proved crucial for the development of Meltzer's 'claustrum' theory) and allowed him to draft, for the first time in psychoanalysis, a theory of the dimensionality of mental life
This volume has grown over the years as a family project of Martha Harris, her two daughters Meg and Morag and her husband, Donald Meltzer. It therefore has its roots in English literature and its branches waving wildly about in psychoanalysis. It is earnestly hoped that it will reveal more problems than it will solve.
A ground-breaking psychoanalytic study on sexuality which maintains its originality today, forty-five years after its first publication. The book is a revision of psychoanalytic theory, starting with the work of Freud himself and including Melanie Klein's contributions on the early Oedipus Complex and the Depressive Position. But more than that, it is a metapsychological study of sexuality which provides a different perspective from more well-known ones that relate simply to a descriptive or behavioural point of view. In differentiating adult sexuality from infantile sexuality and polymorphism and perversion, taking unconscious phantasy and the notion of the primal scene as the pivotal point, Meltzer proposes a unified theoretical and clinical model which has proved of particular help in the field of the psychopathology of addictions and perversions.
It is a tribute to the fourteen years of work carried out together in Barcelona and Simsbury, Oxford, and an invitation to other clinicians to share in the learning experience of talking freely about the vicissitudes of their daily work. The transcriptions are presented unedited, excepting grammatical corrections, in order to preserve the atmosphere of the meetings and enable the reader to experience them fully. They cover subject matter such as anorexia, hysteria and perversion that arise in the course of clinical work and the subsequent discussions envelop the whole range of the ideas of post-Kleinian psychoanalysis. This broad spectrum is indicated by the three separate indexes that end the book - on the central ideas, on the main subjects and on diagnoses. This is an absorbing representation of the valuable work carried out over the years by these meetings and will provoke much thought and further discussion from its readers, perhaps even inspiring some to begin similar dialogues.