An appreciation of the work of Donald Meltzer

Donald Meltzer, who made a major contribution to child psychotherapy through his teaching, supervision and writings, died on 13 August 2004 at the age of 81.

Meltzer was an original thinker and an extraordinary teacher. As a member of the British Psychoanalytical Society, he taught at the Institute up to the point when his relationship with the organization deteriorated and he withdrew in the early 1980s. He taught at the Tavistock Clinic for many years after that. In Europe, especially in Italy, Spain and France, as well as in South America (Argentina in particular), he was revered and appreciated to the present day. In Italy, from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, he lectured and supervised with his wife, Mattie Harris, a psychoanalyst and leading child psychotherapist, communicating their inspired understanding of the mind of the child. Their visits fostered the establishing of child psychotherapy trainings, following the Tavistock model, in all the principle Italian cities.

Meltzer's many books and extensive range of papers constitute a kind of developmental sweep. He had his own view of human emotional development, every aspect of it, from the possible meanings of pre-birth experience, to the nature and significance of the earliest mother/baby relationship, through the characteristics of latency and adolescent mentality, to the formative impact, from puberty to adulthood, of different sexual states of mind – amounting to a theory of the contrasting roots of genuine psychosexual development on the one hand, and of perversion on the other (Sexual States of Mind, 1973). A number of papers which are now, justly, regarded as ‘seminal’ were appearing in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis at around this time – most notably, perhaps, ‘Terror, persecution and dread’ (1967), a dissection of paranoid anxieties, and ‘The relation of anal masturbation to projective identification’ (1965).

The ‘sweep’ encompassed a shift of focus from Meltzer's early involvement, durin