Exploring the Work of Donald Meltzer

A Festschrift

Donald Meltzer, Margaret Cohen, Alberto Hahn, Margaret Cohen, Alberto Hahn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429913471
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

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

CHAPTER ONE

A review of my writings

Donald Meltzer

It’s been absolutely lovely seeing so many people I know. It links immediately with the consulting-room, where you get one person after another that you know. And so different from wandering around airports with thousands of people you don’t know, and being reminded of how many people there are in the world. No, it’s lovely to know so many people; and, as I said yesterday, if women still wore lipstick that came off, my face would have looked like a barn door!

I am going to indulge myself in an attempt to review my experience of the past forty years. It won’t be a gallop, it won’t even be a canter—it will be an amble through these forty years, for myself to notice what has changed, because the changes are usually so slow and so different from patient to patient that one never bothered to pull them together, but I’ll try to do that for you. I don’t know how accurate it will be—the changes probably won’t fit any one patient, but a sort of aggregate of experience.

The first thing that comes to my mind is, of course, that when in 1965 I wrote The Psycho-Analytical Process (1967) it was written primarily with my experience with children in mind, and the idea of the gathering of the transference seemed absolutely correct; but as my practice moved more and more into work with adults, it’s fairly clear that nothing so effortless takes place with adult patients. It becomes clear that instead of this effortless attracting to the analytic setting all of the transference processes of the patient’s life, it seems necessary to dismantle something that I’ve come to think of as the “preformed transference” of the adult patient; the preformed transference, based on greater or lesser knowledge of or fantasies about the analytic method and the analytic experience, has to be taken down like an old shed at the bottom of the garden before anything new can be constructed. It can occur very quickly, in a few weeks, or it can take months or years to dismantle this preformed transference, a component of which is sometimes the erotic transference whose dismantling both analyst and patient tend to resist. As with Keats’s “pleasant pain”, it requires a certain ruthlessness to get rid of, and to establish the analytic situation, as Mrs Klein called it, which is the situation into which the transferences of a person’s life are sucked, rather like a vacuum-cleaner; it can be called “the gathering of the transference”, although it does seem to involve a much more active process with adults than with children.

The second thing that is very different from the book written in 1965 is the recognition that the geographical confusions are often a terrific impasse—where either part or all of the personality is in a state of projective identification that leads to seeing the world in that peculiar way characteristic of projective identification, which I finally wrote about in The Claustrum (1992a). The whole problem of releasing the personality, or more usually part of the personality, that is living in projective identification is a very difficult one, and in many ways not an analytic task. I do not know how to define it. I tried to indicate how I think one can go about it, mainly descriptively—by describing the kind of world that the person or part of the personality is living in, and to distinguish it from the outside world as seen from the outside, which very often it greatly resembles (in one aspect or another, particularly its hierarchical organization, its bureaucratic management, its emphasis on survival, the joylessness of it, and so on)—but it is often very difficult to show a patient in any convincing way that it isn’t exactly the way the world is. And, of course, I gradually discovered that as this descriptive picture is built up from the patient’s material and becomes more and more convincing, what then tends to fall away is the identificatory aspect of the projective identification—almost always, in one form or another, the grandiose aspect of projective identification. Of course, it doesn’t always seem to be very grandiose, because there can be projective identification with a very dishevelled, dilapidated figure; it doesn’t look very grandiose until you hear that they are the most miserable person in the world, or the most criminal, or despicable, and so on, and you get this picture of the grandiosity of depression that Freud himself was very keen to spot. “The most—the mostest …” And as this grandiosity gets eroded, what then begins to appear is the claustrophobia, the sense of being imprisoned in a state of mind without knowing how to get out of it.

What I discovered gradually, as I became more successful at helping patients escape from that state of mind, was the realization that while patients are living in projective identification you do not know them. Not only is the world that they are living in different from the world that you, as a sane person, are living in, but the personality of such patients is different, is adapted to that grotesque world of projective identification, and when they emerge from that state of mind, they emerge as from a chrysalis of some sort, and they throw off what Bion calls their “exoskeleton”. Like Keats’s description of Psyche, they start to flutter their wings and you begin to see something colourful and lively and attractive; and of course with borderline patients, whose almost entire personality is submerged in projective identification, this is a very long process that requires a lot of endurance on the part of both analyst and patient. It’s not so surprising that analysts can endure it, when they have some idea of the nature of the problem they are working with; what’s more surprising is that the patients endure it, because the analytic experience, from the analyst’s point of view, seems for the patient to be completely unsatisfactory. They are constantly aware of the inadequacies, the failures, which, in the constant state of the patient’s keen perceptions and voyeurism, make the analytic work a misery for the patient. Nor is it terribly interesting for the analyst; as I say, it doesn’t really involve analytic work, it doesn’t involve very much in the way of exploring the workings of the mind—it mostly involves describing the consequences of this particular state of mind induced by projective identification, and ultimately that isn’t really very interesting. When it’s new to you it’s quite interesting, but it’s like seeing the same C-grade movie over and over again; it loses its punch in spite of the beauty of the actors and actresses and scenery and so on. The work in this phase of analysis, of the geographic confusion, is never a delight. But the patient emerges from that like Theseus emerging from the labyrinth thanks to the web of Ariadne: it enabled him to follow out the route that had led him in, and that was the route for getting out. This is what patients who are trapped in projective identification have to do—to discover the route by which they got into this state. And, of course, that varies from patient to patient, as there is no single web of Ariadne that the analyst can assume from patient to patient—he has to discover with each patient just what was the route that led in. He can say, in a general way, that it was probably infantile masturbatory, intrusive, and so on, but that doesn’t really tell you very much; it’s like knowing the latitude without knowing the longitude—it doesn’t navigate you very much. But once the patient does begin to emerge—although patients oscillate and run back in as soon as they can, because what they meet when they come out is rather terrible depression and a sense of wasted time in their lives, and “it’s too late for this” and “too late for that”, and so forth—things do settle down into an analysis that is really, by and large, a pleasure, because the patient becomes able to cooperate and becomes interested in the analytic work, and then it becomes cooperative work—and that is really where the pleasure lies, in the sense of cooperation.

I have noticed that my pleasure in the analytic work has changed from the early days, when of course there was great pleasure in doing what my teachers taught me to do, and finding out that they were right, that things went in such-and-such a way. But then, of course, there comes a time when you cast off from the pier and into the open sea and are on your own, and you know then that you don’t know how to navigate—you just hope for the best and try to remain a feeling and thinking individual and rely on your patients’ cooperation. Then things get exciting, and the quality of the pleasure in the analytic work is rather egocentric, as it does not actually embrace the patient very much and tends to remain a one-sided enthusiasm.

Patients, of course, always complain that you don’t care about them, you just care about the work—and you realize that at that point in your development it’s true. You don’t love your patients, you love the work, or at least the work seems to excite and stir you, and you feel that you have to write about everything that comes along. Then you discover that you don’t write very well, and you get discouraged but are amazed that people read your books, and that keeps you going from book to book—until you finally become convinced that you hate writing, and then you discover another method, which is to just talk and let other people write about what you talk about; that’s very easy, and the last ten years have been really a sort of semi-retirement from the work of writing, leaving it to other people to tape it and write about it and so on.

The various groups that Catharine Mack Smith and I go to who have undertaken to shoulder this burden started with the Barcelona group, which I inherited from Dr Grinberg; this group functioned with an amazingly cohesive bunch of friends who learnt at a break-neck pace and wanted to produce a book—a book about my work. I managed to convince them to produce a book that was really a book about their work and not about my “marvellous” supervision. Then this spread to other groups, which took this backpack off my back, this obligation to do the writing.

So there was also that change from slogging away out of obedience to my teachers, to being on my own and beginning to discover things from my own way of working, which was full of enthusiasm and full of a kind of joyousness that didn’t include my patients but rather exploited them; and I began to produce papers and finally books. Of course, the exploitation of the patients sometimes hit rocks like the patients resenting being written about, and I had some tiffs about that—but on the whole … I myself was written about by Mrs Klein and felt it a great honour and expected my patients to feel honoured, but not all of them did. I think they should have…. It was in the tradition—I couldn’t see any good reason for giving a patient a veto on my writing about him or her, because I was really quite clear that I wasn’t writing about the patient at all: I was writing about my imaginative construction of the patient and of the analytic process which had, at best, a kind of “shadows on the wall” resemblance to the person and the person’s life—I think that is true of analysis. What you can write about, what is analytical material, is really just a particular shadow of the total personality. You’d have to be a really great artist to write about a person; I’m often amazed, when I read literature, at the liveliness with which characters jump out of the page—in Dostoevsky, or this recent book that I read called The God of Small Things (Roy, 1997), where a host of people absolutely jump out and wiggle about in a most lively fashion—such marvellous writing. Of course, in writing psychoanalytic material, if we stick to the patient’s dreams, we have a possibility of bringing things to life; the moment we get away from the patient’s dream material things go very flat and prosaic and unimaginative, which takes us back to the question of why the patient should feel honoured: because that creative aspect of his capacity for dreaming is being given a publishable form—it is the patient who creates the really lively part of any paper I’ve ever written. And I notice that when people refer to a paper—“You know, the one about the woman who dreamt so-and-so and so-and-so”, “Oh, yes”—the dreams that form the landmarks of the analysis also form the dramatic aspect of a patient that can find publication; in a sense, writing analytic papers is a kind of plagiarism.

These realizations about the analytic work came to me gradually, very much as a result of the experience of discovering that patients could be helped to emerge from projective identification; when they did so, a quite totally unknown person emerged, almost always much more likeable, almost always much more ready to cooperate and enjoy working with you; but of course it did also extend the period of analysis. I went through a period of great optimism in which I was very pleased that analyses were only taking two and a half to four years—till I gradually discovered that these patients were coming back five years later wanting and needing more analysis. I am now not surprised to discover suddenly, “Oh, you’ve been here seven years. That’s nice—getting to know one another.”

The whole shift in my experience of the analytic process is, of course, the shift from the pseudo-science of my early days, having grown up through medicine and through a romance with neurology and neurophysiology. I can’t imagine what in the world made me fall in love with Melanie Klein’s work, because by the time I came to the United Kingdom—by which time I had become “the Kleinian in St Louis”—I realized I didn’t know a thing about it. As soon as I started working analytically and having supervisions in London, I very quickly realized that though I had read all her books I hadn’t really understood a word of them—and that was really very exciting. And of course having analysis with her—talk about a gallop—was a breath-taking process. Poor “Richard” (Klein, 1961) had only three months, as she galloped through his mind; but she worked at that pace almost all the time. She had a Japanese print of a galloping horse at the foot of her couch, which I dreamt about the first night of my analysis with her—that I was on that horse, without a bridle and without a saddle, and he was going…. And whether it was terrifying or exciting I couldn’t tell—it finally contributed to the chapter, years later, in The Apprehension of Beauty (Meltzer & Harris Williams, 1988a) concerning the love and fear of horses.

So this change that I’m describing to you was a change from enjoying being an analyst and having patients, to a pleasure in the experience of the relationship of patient and analyst, the extreme intimacy of it. By that time I had already discovered that you ended up in analyses that really went the distance, as it were, when you ended up loving your patient and they loving you—and that the ending of an analysis of that sort was very much like a beloved child going out into the world, and your feeling very uncertain of the patient’s equipment to deal with his or her generation of dangers, because the patient’s generation of dangers wasn’t the same as the dangers that you yourself had navigated. So not only did I discover that the analyses were lasting longer, they were also lasting longer because I was holding on and thinking—it’s not ready, not ready—then thinking I had better just leave it up to the patient to decide, since I really had very little in the way of equipment for deciding questions about the patient’s readiness. Wittgenstein’s phrase “now I can go on” is his way of describing that moment in learning when you are able to extrapolate what you have learnt into analogous circumstances, to extend it, as it were. “Now I can go on”—and I discovered that there was no way that I as the analyst could know “now you can go on”. “You can go on” means “get out”—and it’s not really suitable.

As far as Sexual States of Mind (1973) is concerned, I don’t think very much has changed in my feeling or my understandings about the role of sexuality, except that I think it has become a much less important factor in my interest with my patients, particularly being a male analyst; the heterosexuality of female patients which tends to blossom very early in this preformed transference tends also to go away fairly quickly and leave space for the real analytic work. But I can see that in terms of a “model of the mind”, and the ways in which my thinking developed, sexuality has become just one aspect of the attempts to comprehend life’s experiences, and, of course, Bion’s work—particularly his Grid—rescued me from utter confusion. When I left the United States Air Force in this country and said goodbye to my nice salary, I didn’t yet have a work permit, and I went through some rather lean days before Hanna Segal helped me to get my citizenship here. During those days I tried to cook up some sort of research project that I could get funds for, and one of them was an attempt to form a grid, a periodic table, of mental development, which had nothing in it of the genius with which Bion constructed his. It was just an attempt at a notational system for what we already knew about development, and it was utterly uninteresting and never reached any development at all—and was gladly chucked as soon as I got my citizenship and could begin to receive patients and to earn a living. So when Bion’s Grid came along I gobbled it up; it struck me as a marvellous stroke of genius, the way that he had constructed it, not of what we already knew but of what we didn’t know, which was fundamentally the way Mendeleev’s grid in chemistry was constructed. The important things in it were the empty spaces.

That sort of switch-over into Bion’s interest in mental functions was a slow but very great move in my way of working; my work had very largely had a Kleinian preoccupation with structure, with the distribution of parts of the self and objects and so on, which was very much in keeping with my natural bent of thinking very concretely and structurally. Bion’s way of thinking in terms of factors and functions seemed much more imaginative and much more abstract, but it didn’t come so easily to me, and I had to find my way into it by way of language. My new interest in language started in the mid-1970s (with a fairly intensive study of linguistics), and I began to badger my patients about words and the use of words. I like Jean Bégoin’s contribution (chapter nine), which distinguishes between the qualities of the “ambiguous” object and the qualities of the “mysterious object”. Those sorts of differentiations, linguistic differentiations, eventually crept into my way of working, till I became a sort of nag—“What do you mean? Why do you use that particular word instead of this word or that word?”, and so on. I don’t know how much this involved a departure from psychoanalysis or the psychoanalytic method, but it certainly mated with another aspect of my work which took me further and further away from colleagues in London, and that is my clinging to the concept of “part-objects”; likewise, my seeing Bion’s preoccupations with factors and functions and the Grid, and ideas of thought disorder, in combination with the functions of part-objects, which was very Kleinian but wasn’t very obviously Bionic. But it is how my imagination worked—there’s no arguing about it—it wasn’t a question of theory, it was a question of my imagination being so absolutely fixed on dreams as being the fundamental information that allows you to construe what is going on in somebody else’s head. It was that 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. That the house “was the mother”, not “was a representation or a symbolic representation of the mother”—for this patient it was the mother. That the aeroplane really was daddy’s penis—it didn’t just represent it. 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; the acting-out of a dream that was very concrete, rather than symbolic, in its references, was the easiest thing in the world, and the most natural thing, too—to go from representation to action, when the representation itself was so concrete that just walking into your home transformed your mental state, or that getting on board an aeroplane immediately presented you with claustrophobia. So I began to see that the concept of acting-out, which was related to the transformation of mental imagery into action in the outside world, was very closely connected with the concreteness of part-objects, and that a lot of attention had to be paid to them, that these objects could not just be treated as symbols available for “thinking” but were only representations available for “action”. In a sense...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 A review of my writings
• 2 Experiences of learning with Donald Meltzer
• 3 Development is beauty, growth is ethics
• 4 The beauty and the violence of love
• 5 Keats’s “Ode to Psyche”
• 6 “Song-and-dance” and its developments: the function of rhythm in the learning process of oral and written language
• 7 Clinical notes on the organizing function of time during puberty
• 8 The light meter, the thermostat, the tuner: the compositional aspects of communication with very disturbed adolescents
• 9 Love and destructivity: from the aesthetic conflict to a revision of the concept of destructivity in the psyche
• 10 Reflections on “aesthetic reciprocity”
• 11 Beckett: dramas of psychic catastrophe
• 12 Living in intrusive identification
• 13 Reading Donald Meltzer: identification and intercourse as modes of reading and relating
• 14 A learning experience in psychoanalysis
• References
• Index