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This short book, first published in 1967, sets out in notational form the stages of analysis as understood in the reflective, taking stock, periods after the event. Its intention is to evoke in the professional reader ‘associations to his own experience’. Meltzer conceptualizes the analytic process in metapsychological periods. These conceptualizations come out of application, dedication, hard work, discussion and reflection and are thought of by him as discoveries. Elsewhere he has described imagination as a foraging instinct; here he writes of conceptualization as ‘the capacity to discover beyond the verification’ of what the analyst has been taught. He lists five periods: gathering the transference, sorting geographical confusions, sorting zonal confusions, the threshold of the depressive position and the weaning process. Each of these has distinctive characteristics which he describes occurring within sessions, between sessions and over longer holiday breaks. He calls this the ‘natural history’ of an analysis. The material comes from child analyses.
This book makes use of the hyphenated language of early Kleinian metapsychology (e.g. toilet-breast) which refers to the confusions which exist in part-object relating. One value of this language is that it makes it possible to trace the transformations which occur to these part-objects as they change from being, for instance, a faeces-penis-nipple to becoming a penis-in-a-breast to eventually becoming a breast combined with a nipple, as the move towards the oedipal conflict emerges. But today this language sounds arcane and out of touch with contemporary practice. I will briefly consider the five stages.
‘The Gathering of the Transference’. This refers to the ‘tendency for transference processes to find expression where their anxieties can find relief’ (p. 7). Along with this comes the deepening of the transference in response to the separations of weekend breaks and holidays - separations which are linked to individu