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The Kleinian development Perthshire, Clunie Press. Part One, pp. viii + 141; Part Two, pp. 130; Part Three, pp. 133. £12.50.
Donald Meltzer has composed a book made up of his lectures given to students and guests of the Child Therapy course at the Tavistock Clinic. It is divided into three parts. I found the third part, about Bion, particularly interesting and it stimulated me to relate many of his ideas to Jung's formulations.
The first part covers the clinical aspects of Freud's writings and reflects on the development of psychoanalysis as a method. Theory is included only in so far as it influences clinical practice, because Meltzer conceives that Freud's efforts to construct an explanatory system were unsatisfactory. As a scientist Freud is not to his liking, because of the mechanistic nature of his metapsychology, which considered emotion as so much ‘noise in the machine’. But this does not prevent him enjoying Freud as an interpreter and artist.
Meltzer is the first psychoanalyst I have come across with Kleinian training to embark on criticism of Freud. Most of them, Melanie Klein included (Racker also), have been at pains to show that their findings are strictly in line with Freud's practice and theoretical orientation. Not so Meltzer. He dislikes libido theory and the theory of impulses against which the ego erects defences. Among his rather drastic appraisals is the criticism that the efforts of psychoanalysts to enter into the motives of artists makes nonsense of art. Freud began this with his essay on Leonardo da Vinci which, surprisingly, Meltzer goes into at some length. That, however, is only because it introduces the concepts of narcissism (important for Kleinian developments), projective identification and the epistemophilic instinct. Finally Meltzer deplores the increasing emphasis, during the ‘last years’, on economic factors in the neuroses because it led to pessimism and to a clinging to ‘orthodoxy’. He asserts that the emphasis was used