Unpublished Draft Paper on Sexuality by Donald Meltzer1

Editor's note: Albert Mason discovered an unpublished paper by Donald Meltzer dating from around 1968 and has made the text available to the IJP. He writes “my best guess is that Meltzer gave me the paper to read/approve about the time I was preparing to move to Los Angeles and that I hastily packed it away with other papers. It got buried, and only came to light recently, kind of like a lost score that turns up in someone's attic!” The patient Meltzer discusses in his paper is a patient who Dr Mason treated for approximately 11 years, and about whom Dr Mason consulted with Dr Meltzer early in the treatment. Dr Mason has also provided the original report he wrote about the patient in the 1960s. Following an introduction by Dr Abbot Bronstein, we have published extracts from Dr Mason's report, including the following: details about the case, the two dreams which Dr Mason believes were ‘turning point dreams', and a third dream called the ‘hula hula dream’, as well as the clinical material leading up to it.

In 1968 Albert Mason presented his graduation paper to the British Psychoanalytical Institute and Society. Dr. Mason had been in analysis with Dr. Hanna Segal and had consulted with Dr. Donald Meltzer a few times on this case which he wrote up for membership. The same year Dr. Meltzer then presented a brief paper to the British Society, using some of the dreams from Dr. Mason's case to illustrate his evolving theories of sexual states and his views on homosexuality. Recently Mason found both his graduation paper and the paper by Meltzer from 1968 on Kleinian views of sexual development in boys and girls and on homosexuality.

Meltzer's short paper in most ways is a draft of ideas which were to be developed further in Meltzer's book, Sexual states of Mind, published in 1974. In this draft which is not quite ready for publication, Meltzer returns to his clarifications of the psychoanalytic process, his work on confusional states of mind