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From time immemorial it has been a human imperative to enshrine, in one form or another, ancestor worship as the guide to ethical development and as a condition of individual and cultural well-being. In our psychoanalytic history, this is fulfilled by the ongoing evolution of conceptions of the Oedipus Complex. In contemporary Post-Kleinian analysis,1 it is contained in Bion's insistence that he is Freudian and Kleinian — that there is no such thing as “Bionian” — and also in his epistemological concept of “the thinking breast,” the introjection of which is the source of healthy psychological functioning. In the work of Donald Meltzer, this function is performed by a theology of the divine couple, or combined couple in the internal object world, a creative transformation of all one's actual and virtual good objects.
Williams has dedicated this book as a paean to her ancestors in different domains — biological, psychoanalytic, literary, and philosophical. She is uniquely qualified by birth, by education, and by her social milieu for the task (see her long Afterword, “My Kleinian Ancestors”). Her mother was Martha Harris, who was supervised by Bion and a close friend and colleague of Esther Bick. Bick established infant observation and child analysis at the Tavistock Clinic, the unit Harris took over and ran after Bick's death. Williams's father, Roland Harris, an eminent educator and poet, was an analysand of Bion's. Williams herself was in analysis with Meltzer from age 7 to 18, became his stepdaughter when he married Martha Harris, was