Donald Meltzer

Donald Meltzer (1922–2004) was a Kleinian psychoanalyst whose teaching made him influential in many countries. He became known for making clinical headway with difficult childhood conditions such as autism, and also for his theoretical innovations and developments.[1] His focus on the role of emotionality and aesthetics in promoting mental health has led to his being considered a key figure in the "post-Kleinian" movement associated with the psychoanalytic theory of thinking created by Wilfred Bion.[2]

Life and work

Meltzer was born in New York City and studied medicine at Yale University. He practised in St. Louis as a psychiatrist, before moving to England in 1954 to have analysis with Melanie Klein.[3] He joined the Kleinian group, became a teaching analyst of the British Psychoanalytical Society and took on British citizenship. In the early 1980s disagreements about the mode of training led him to withdraw from the Society.[4] Meltzer worked with both adults and children. Initially his work with children was supervised by Esther Bick, who was creating a new and influential mode of psychoanalytical training at the Tavistock Institute based on mother-child observation and following the theories of Melanie Klein.[5] As a result of the regular travels and teaching of Meltzer and Martha Harris (his third wife), who was head of the Child Psychotherapy Training Course at the Tavistock, this model of psychoanalytic psychotherapy training became established in the principal Italian cities, and in France and Argentina.[6]

Meltzer taught for many years at the Tavistock, and practised privately in Oxford (UK) until his death. Owing to having left the British Society, his ideas were controversial. He supervised psychoanalytically oriented professionals in atelier-style groups throughout Europe, Scandinavia and South America, and his visits also included New York and California. Since his death in 2004 his reputation has increasingly regained ground also in his adoptive country. Several international congresses have focussed on his work: in London (1998), Florence (2000), Buenos Aires (2005), Savona (2005), Barcelona(2005) and Stavanger, Norway (2007).[7]

Meltzer was a member of the Kleinian Imago Group founded by the Kleinian aesthete Adrian Stokes for discussing applied psychoanalysis. The group included among others Richard Wollheim, Wilfred Bion, Roger Money-Kyrle, Marion Milner and Ernst Gombrich.[8] With Stokes he wrote a dialogue “Concerning the social basis of art”.[9] Meltzer's aesthetic interests, combined with the mother-baby model of early learning processes,[10] led to seeing psychoanalysis itself as an art form. His later works describe the relationship between analyst and analysand as an aesthetic process of symbol-making. This has had an influence on the philosophical view of the relation between art and psychoanalysis.[11]

Ideas

Some of Meltzer's significant and widely used developments of Kleinian object relations theory are as follows:

Publications

Donald Meltzer was a prolific writer and his books and many papers are translated into French, Italian, Spanish, German and some into Portuguese and Japanese.

As a teacher

Meltzer was well known internationally as a teacher and supervisor.[12] He favoured an atelier-style system for the teaching and selection of candidates for psychoanalytical training, adumbrated in his paper “Towards an atelier system”.[13] His method was to ask supervisees to present sessions of unedited clinical material, rather than finished papers. Several of his groups and individual supervisees have documented their experiences.

See also

References

  1. ↑ R. Money-Kyrle, "Review of Explorations in Autism", International Journal of Psycho-analysis Vol. 57, reprinted in Collected Papers of Roger Money-Kyrle (Clunie Press, 1978), 450–56.
  2. ↑ S. Fano Cassese (2002) Introduction to the work of Donald Meltzer (London: Karnac), xviii' R. DesGroseillers, Portraits of the British Psychoanalysts Archived June 9, 2007, at the Wayback Machine.. For an online account of Meltzer's place in the context of Kleinian thinking, see N. Glover, Psychoanalytic aesthetics: the British school Archived June 9, 2007, at the Wayback Machine.
  3. ↑ For an introduction to Melanie Klein see H. Segal, An introduction to the work of Melanie Klein (Karnac, 1973)
  4. ↑ Meltzer, “A review of my writings”, in Cohen and Hahn (ed.) Exploring the work of Donald Meltzer (Karnac, 2000) 8; A. Hahn, obituary in International Journal of Psycho-analysis Vol. 86 (1) 175–78; another obituary Archived April 15, 2007, at the Wayback Machine.
  5. ↑ M. Rustin, “Dr Meltzer’s contribution to child psychotherapy”, The Bulletin of the Association of Child Psychotherapists 149, Nov 2004, 9–11; M. Harris, "The Tavistock training and philosophy", Collected Papers of Martha Harris and Esther Bick (Clunie Press, 1987); A. Sowa, “Observing the unobservable: the Tavistock Infant Observation Course and its relevance to clinical training”, Fort Da, spring 1999 Vol. 1(1).
  6. ↑ R. Li Causi and M. Waddell, "An appreciation of the work of Donald Meltzer" Journal of Child Psychotherapy Vol. 31(1) 3–5; I. Freeden, obituary, Journal of the British Association of Psychotherapists Vol. 43 (19) 88
  7. ↑ See also A. Hahn, "Dr Meltzer's Biography"
  8. ↑ http://www.psa-atelier.org/index.php?ul=abc89aac75c4c81dc70221e0b3ea96a0
  9. ↑ In A. Stokes, Painting and the Inner World (1963), reprinted in Meltzer and Harris Williams, The Apprehension of Beauty (Clunie Press, 1988) 206–7
  10. ↑ J. Begoin, “Love and destructiveness: from the aesthetic conflict to a revision of the concept of destructiveness in the psyche”, Exploring the Work of Donald Meltzer, ed. Cohen and Hahn (Karnac, 2000) 119–35; G. Williams, "Reflections on aesthetic reciprocity", ibid., 136–51
  11. ↑ S. Gosso, Psychoanalysis and art: Kleinian perspectives (Karnac, 2004): N. Glover, Psychoanalytic aesthetics: the British School" "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2007-06-09. Retrieved 2007-06-01.
  12. ↑ R. D. Hinshelwood (1989) "Donald Meltzer", A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought. London: Free Association Books. Revised edition 1991
  13. ↑ Meltzer, “Towards an atelier system”, in Sincerity: Collected Papers of Donald Meltzer ed. Hahn (Karnac, 1994), 285–89

Further reading

https://www.academia.edu/14952920/Donald_Meltzer_the_Analyst_meets_Pinocchio_the_Real_Boy_excerpt_from_the_book_Teaching_Meltzer._

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