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It is very difficult to do justice to a book of this kind, some six hundred pages long, comprising thirty-four papers written during the last forty years. Some of the papers are very short, while others could have made a book by themselves. That is true of ‘Sincerity’, from which the volume takes its title: written in 1971, it amounts to about a hundred pages, and no less than thirty-three papers written before and after that year, between 1955 and 1989, are assembled around it. The book thus offers an exceptional survey of the whole of a scientific life, showing the evolution of the thought of an analyst who was a particularly prolific author—eight books to date, all of them important, published between 1967 and 1992. The oeuvre also reveals sometimes revolutionary changes in Meltzer's thought.
I myself have been able to follow this evolution very closely because I knew Donald Meltzer in the 1960s through the seminars organised with the London group of Kleinian analysts by Marcelle Spira in Geneva, where I had my analytic training. After settling in Paris, I had supervision with him in London in the 1970s on a case that taught me a great deal, demonstrating in particular Meltzer's extraordinary virtuosity in dream interpretation, which he displayed much later in his book Dream Life (1984). I was then the French translator of his first two books, The Psycho-Analytical Process (1967) and Sexual States of Mind (1973); with his friend James Gammill, who settled in France after training in London, we invited him to Paris regularly for seminars and supervisions.
Let me now attempt to trace the evolution of Meltzer's psychoanalytic thought. The first phase of his work was, I suppose, essentially clinical, comprising in particular intensive activity in the field of child psychoanalysis and the composition of various papers on adult analysis published in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis. This first period of Meltzer's oeuvre ended with The Psycho-Analytical Proces