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This book will be of particular interest to those readers who have been following Donald Meltzer's work in developing what he has called extended metapsychology. It offers an introduction to many of Meltzer's ideas, giving us an opportunity to ‘listen in’ to the way this psychoanalyst pays attention to his patients' communications and discusses them with members of a seminar.
The term ‘post-Kleinian’, as it appears in this book, seems to this reader to have become synonymous with one particular set of ideas, as Sanders states when he writes, ‘“Post Kleinian” signifies a model of the mind that adds to Freud's metapsychology of genetic, dynamic, economic and structural aspects the geographical, epistemological and aesthetic concepts of Klein, Bion, and Meltzer’ (p. xii).
In Sanders's book, in spite of the references to the work of Klein, Bion and Meltzer, I am reminded much more of the work of Jung. There seems at times to be an almost Jungian reliance on intuition in showing the patients the symbolic content of what is going on in their lives and in their minds, and the analyst's knowledge of literature tends to be brought into the consulting room more than with most modern-day Kleinian analysts. The following is a good example:
The analysand was apparently well, but she complained of a loss of meaning in the direction her life was taking. She likened herself to a mermaid who can see men on land but is unable to reach them. This thought came at a family wedding, when her attention was caught by a graceful, petite young woman in a full-length sequined dress. As she approached her fortieth year, she described herself as a creature who might wish to be human and live on land but who was confined to her own watery medium and her gloomy asexual view of the world.
… After this, I looked again at the Hans Christian Andersen story of the little mermaid, whose famous likeness in the form of a pensive adolescent sits on rock in Copenhagen harbour. Her story is that she is allowed