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.
Over the past 60 years an increasing number of analytic organizations have included the practice of Baby Observation in their trainings. Baby Observation, the observation of a baby's developing emotional relationship with
his mother/world, came about through the thinking and practice of Esther Bick and Martha Harris. Martha Harris was Meg Harris Williams's mother; Roland Harris, poet, educator, acquaintance of Bion, her birth father; Donald Meltzer, her analyst and stepfather. Meg Harris Williams, born into an analytic aristocracy, is a poet, artist and scholar of Romantic poetry in her own right. However, she has devoted a large proportion of her career to writing about the analytic theories of Wilfred Bion and Donald Meltzer.
Her contribution to furthering an understanding of the late writings of Bion and Meltzer is well recognized. But in those writings and even in The Apprehension of Beauty, which Meltzer, in his introduction, described as ‘a family project’ (Meltzer, , p. 182), Williams clearly separated her personal views from her understanding of the views of Bion and Meltzer.
In The Aesthetic Development, Williams attempts to speak in her own voice. But, although she writes:
This book reflects my own lifelong preoccupation with developing the aesthetic affiliations of psychoanalysis, and with suggesting through literary analogy the kind of poetry that is innate and implicit in the psychoanalytic method as well as the poetic influences on the model of the mind. (p. xiv)
the end result is a book that in my view does not have an authentic voice. Rather, The Aesthetic Development is a hybrid book. It encompasses Williams's experience as an analysand, speculation as to the origin and future of psychoanalysis, aesthetic theory, the insights of the Romantic poets, autobiography, the changing role of the psychoanalyst, the developmental origins of psychic disturbance, and the goal of psychoanalysis. There are also two chapters devoted to discussing whether psychoanaly