You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In October 2002 Dr Meltzer gave a talk in Barcelona in the course of which he mentioned this book by Silvia Fano
Cassese, saying that it was ‘pretty impressive’ and that ‘it was really a work of fiction, mythologizing my so-called contributions’. On the surface this seems a strange (but very Meltzerian) remark to make, but I think that what he means is that Silvia Fano Cassese's book is a story about a journey into the mythological place of the unconscious that has been Meltzer's abiding passion for the whole of his lengthy analytical working life.
The book originally grew out of a series of seminars held for psychiatrists and psychologists in the Florentine Association for Psychoanalytical Psychotherapy. This in itself is interesting, as it was also in that way that many of Dr Meltzer's own books, particularly the books that are under investigation in Cassese's book-The Psychoanalytic Process and Explorations in Autism — came into existence. This seems to manifest something that Dr Meltzer firmly believes and that again he alluded to in the talk in Barcelona, namely that you discover what you are thinking when you speak out loud. I am quite sure that a great deal was added to Silvia Fano Cassese's thinking in the course of those seminars and that what we have here is a distillation of that thinking.
The author's way to approach the task, apart from in the first chapter, is to present Dr Meltzer's ideas in a systematically chronological form, working steadily through the published work, book by book, idea by idea. This enables us to see the coherence in the development of his ideas, which Dr Meltzer realizes was not available to him at the time of writing. At times she makes use of charts to summarize and clarify certain theoretical developments, such as the extension through the work of Freud, Klein, Bion, and Meltzer of the concept of projection and projective identification. The idea of massive intrusion into the interior of the internal object is obviously one o