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. 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.

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. He joined the "Kleinian group", became a teaching analyst of the British Psychoanalytical Society (BPS) and took on British citizenship. In the early 1980s disagreements about the mode of training led him to withdraw from the BPS. 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 psychoanalytic training at the Tavistock Clinic based on mother-child observation and following the theories of Melanie Klein. 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 Clinic, this model of psychoanalytic psychotherapy training became established in the principal Italian cities, in France and Argentina. Meltzer taught for many years at the Tavistock Clinic, and practised privately in Oxford until his death. Owing to having left the BPS, his ideas remained 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).

Imago Group

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. With Stokes he wrote a dialogue “Concerning the social basis of art”. Meltzer's aesthetic interests, combined with the mother-baby model of early learning processes, 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.

Overview

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

The claustrum

In his final work, The Claustrum: An Investigation of claustrophobic phenomena (1988), Donald Meltzer developed a theory of claustrophobia. Meltzer offers a Kleinian/Bionian appreciation of the phenomenon of claustrophobia, arguing that the claustrum emerges as a failure of integration in early childhood development. If there occurs massive projective identification, that the child cannot sustain, its understanding both of its own corporeality, and that of others is severely impacted. It is a result of maternal failure in the reverie and leads to an incorrect construction of the internal mother. Claustrophobia in that sense "means to be imprisoned in a state of mind without getting out", it has do with being trapped in the projective identification of others

As a teacher

Meltzer was well known internationally as a teacher and supervisor. He favoured an atelier-style system for the teaching and selection of candidates for psychoanalytical training, adumbrated in his paper, “Towards an atelier system”. 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: