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There was a time when it was all fairly simple. Those were the days of symptom analysis. All that was necessary was to lift repressions, reveal the fixation points in infancy or childhood and that was the end of the analysis. The paradigm was the dream, and the method appears as early as ‘Dora’, in which it is to be found: for though Dora ended her analysis one-sidedly, the analysis of her dream is said to be complete when both the exciting cause and the infantile root had been unearthed. Then the picture changed: psychoanalysts started to investigate the patients whom Freud thought were not suitable for psychoanalysis. Klein, in particular, thought she had discovered the fixation points for schizophrenia and the manic depressive psychoses; the simple view of the perversions disappeared and psychoanalysts started to embark on much more extensive analysis of character, as Jung had done many years back. In ‘Symptomatology and characterology’ (ch. 10) there is an interesting discussion of the two modes. It was Bion who initiated the most radical departures with his analysis of thought processes and their origins in preverbal mentality. Added to the analysis of adult patients came child analysis, infant-mother observation and ultrasound observations on infants in utero.
Meltzer uses all these sources for his conclusions, which he also derives from the analyses of borderline patients, children, especially autistic ones who either are psychotic or become so; and finally there are the intuitive insights of artists. He draws on numerous experiences in supervising analyses conducted by others in a great number of countries: Europe, the United States, South America, and India. His experience is therefore unique and by now he has made his developing views known in a growing number of volumes of which The Claustrum is the latest.
It was his paper on anal masturbation which registered a starting point for his present thesis, and I will consider that one mostly, and the others more