A Brief Psychoanalytic Biography

The biographical information which follows is not about Meltzer's personal history, with which I am not familiar, but his history as a psychoanalyst, which he has told us at various times in a very charming way (which makes this an ‘authorized’ biography). It is composed of a series of anecdotes that we might consider as the myth of the birth of a vocation.

The first story takes us back to when Meltzer was 8 years old. He was travelling with his parents along the Mediterranean coast when, with feelings of admiration, a mixture of fear and awe towards the beauty of the horses and the trees, he suddenly became aware of the beauty of the works of man while observing some sculptures. At that moment, he felt that the highest aspiration would be to breathe life and beauty into stone.

His comment on this experience was that he found it most appropriate that the mind should discover its own beauty only after having discovered the beauty of nature and of the works of man that prove it and praise it.

The second anecdote comes from his adolescence. In an interview in Brazil in 1988, he recounted his first contact with psychoanalysis at the age of 16. This occurred when the brother of his first girlfriend was training in psychoanalysis and gave him a book by Freud to read.

In 1978 (ten years prior to that interview) Meltzer wrote in the introduction to his book, The Kleinian Development, that he had already read Freud for the first time by the age of 16. That time, however, he attributed it to the influence of Nathaniel Apter, a friend of his elder sister.

At that time, in the United States, Meltzer's native country, those who aspired to become psychoanalysts were required first to study medicine and then to specialize in psychiatry. When he was 22 and still a medical student, Meltzer read the texts of Melanie Klein for the first time. These works made a deep impression on him. After training in child psychiatry, he started his psychoanalytic training at the Chicago Institute. He wa