You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
He started off in a direction quite contrary to that of the question, as if in retreat from the aggressive intent, then made a wide sweep, ending by taking the enemy, not even on the flank, but from the rear … He seemed often to tap the wording to see if the vocabulary of the question rang true or seemed soft at the centre. Then he probed it for preconceptions, leading qualities, various penumbra of meaning from common parlance. Then often came a kind of
Page 622brutal thumping of its presumption that an answer existed as the malheur de la question. And, finally, he attacked it as a problem related to the central question of the meaning of psychoanalysis as a thing-in-itself.
This is Donald Meltzer sharing his delight in W.R. Bion's powers as a conversationalist. Its humour is typical - and is bound up with courage as the other quality essential to the possibility of deepening states of an intimacy, which Donald Meltzer relates to certain conceptions of nurture and family life, and which is an abiding preoccupation in his psychoanalytic writings.
Throughout the 34 remarkable papers that make up this book the issue recurs of how to deepen the intimacy of the therapeutic couple and to realise the meaning of the loneliness that is intimacy's converse, without being destroyed or betrayed by human inadequacy in the face of unpredictable feeling. Titles like ‘Narcissistic foundation of the erotic transference’ or ‘The role of pregenital confusions in erotomania’ describe the dangers. One paper in particular, ‘Routine and inspired interpretations: their relation to the weaning process in analysis’, deals with the issue in a manner that still belongs to the future. Writing of this kind results in insights that are quite raw. Of a schizophrenic youth (about whom he has written elsewhere) Donald Meltzer says, ‘the degree of his enslavement to an internal persecutor could be fairly judged by the distance his hand was withdrawn up his shirt-sleeve’.
Donald Meltzer has characterised cour