Anyone coming to this book with no prior reading of Meltzer will be daunted by the lack of introduction to his concepts, and so is unlikely to be inspired to read him in the original, which should be one of the purposes of this type of book. However, the other reason for writing such a book—to explore this man's work and lead a celebration (a festschrift)—has been carried out more successfully. I have chosen to discuss only one paper from the book, the one that most stimulated my thinking.

Didier Houzel writes in chapter 4, “It fell to Donald Meltzer to breathe life into what had remained too much of an abstraction in Klein's and Bion's theories,1… showing how processes are implemented in mental space according to recognizable criteria,… supplying them with imaginative substance and emotional content” (pp. 44-45). Meltzer did so in formulating his ideas on the use of projective identification into the internal object, on the geography of the