Editorial

The idea for putting together a special edition of the Journal devoted to the work of Donald Meltzer was first suggested at the Donald Meltzer Development Fund’s 2015 conference, ‘A Mind of One’s Own: Exploring the Work of Donald Meltzer’. We are delighted to be able to publish some of the main papers originally delivered at the conference; three of the articles we have included here, by Margaret Rustin, Louise Allnutt and Pamela Sorensen, are revised versions of conference papers and will also be included in a new publication, Neo-Kleinian Thinking: Further Explorations of Donald Meltzer’s Psychoanalytic Ideas (Hahn and Cohen, Forthcoming). We hope that this edition will whet appetites for the book; we hope, too, that it will inspire renewed interest in some of Meltzer’s key concepts and highlight their continuing importance and relevance for child psychotherapists.

It is often said that Meltzer’s ideas should be felt intuitively, at an emotional level, before a rational understanding of them can be reached. For many of us, however, his particular strands of complex theorising can remain obscure, opaque, out of reach, the productions of a mind too sophisticated to follow with ease. Indeed, not all psychoanalytic child psychotherapy trainings include Meltzer’s writings as a core part of the curriculum and, even when included, his work often requires reading and re-reading, or expert exposition, before our own understanding begins to emerge. Even then, many of his ideas remain hard to grasp until, that is, we find them starkly illuminated by the struggle with a disturbing child in the consulting room, and, finally, if we are both lucky and attentive, ‘the penny drops’.

So it seems entirely apt that we open this issue with an appreciation by Margaret Rustin which reminds us that Meltzer himself was one of the great champions of the necessary companionship of theory and clinical practice, and which emphasises the commitment he encouraged to a professional life in which t