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In his foreword to this beautifully written book, Donald Meltzer acknowledges that Harris Williams had, many years ago, taken his own work seriously by considering it and contextualizing it in combination with Bion's work and calling it ‘post-Kleinian.’
He added that Klein gave psychoanalysis a distinctly platonic orientation, in contrast to Freud's ‘scientific orientation,’ by discovering that the inner world had its own type of geographic concreteness, and that it was from the ‘transactions’ of this inner world (dreams and unconscious phantasies) that the meaning of the outer world derived its origin. While external objects modified internal objects, it was the objects of the internal world that gave particular and individual meaning to the external world. It was not from external consensus. Some meaning and the development or formation of earliest character can be found in utero where the child-to-be relates to its intimate environment and its containing mother. At birth, there are the potential for ‘love at first sight’ moments of ‘passionate contact’ between the two. For Harris Williams, such moments of passionate contact possess the capacity to express love of the world, hatred of the constraints of desire, and the desire for knowledge. Both Meltzer and Harris Williams refer to a ‘thirst for knowledge,’ a concrete but poetically delicate semantic affirmation that, at the site of nurturance and feeding, it is not simply the body that is nourished (thirst), but also the site where exploration and the creation of meaning (epistemology) outside the womb begins through holding and the eye-to-eye gaze of the mother-baby: feeding and learning are vitally linked. At this wondrous transforming nipple and breast, eye-to-eye contact with mommy, the ‘beautiful object’ is internalized. For the infant, this can happen with mommy and other intimate caregivers, and later in life with one's muse. This is a far more sophisticated, subtle, and emotionally impactful experience