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.
For 18 years, my colleagues from the Barcelona Psychoanalytic Group and I met Donald and Catharine Mack Smith several times a year for supervisions and lectures, and also to share pleasant moments both at the dinner table and listening to music in Oxford, London, Florence and Barcelona. His home felt like our home. And he enjoyed coming to Barcelona very much. During these 18 years, I saw Donald at different moments and in different emotional states, yet I always found in him a flexible and serene stability: a stability that moved to and fro like bamboo canes beside a river but did not break.
This reminded me of a paragraph in that excellent paper he wrote with Martha Harris: ‘A psycho-analytical model of the child-in-the-family-in-the-community’. When they describe the adult organization of personality, they say:
Its degree of integration of masculine and feminine attributes of mind is directly dependent on the state of integration of the internal objects, identification with combined object being a precondition for creative mental functioning. The parental ethic of work and responsibility for the world and his children, human, animal, or vegetable, is its central preoccupation and the source of its joy. Its capacity for loving companionship in sexuality generates the family, while its capacity for friendly cooperation makes the work-group (Bion) possible. (Harris & Meltzer 1976, p. 398)
He surprised us in every meeting with his creative capacity, and his perception of the clinical material always illuminated new paths for us. We had this same experience in our last supervision with him, which took place in Oxford the month before his death. We1 went knowing that this was