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Meltzer brings out this book at the age of seventy, twenty-five years after The Psychoanalytical Process, both as a revision and expansion of this earlier book and also of other significant works published later. His intention is, in particular, to develop the projective-intrusive facet (in projective identification) tackled in his “The Relation of Anal Masturbation to Projective Identification” , since identification (grandiosity, depressive and confusional states, etc.) have already been sufficiently investigated.
In the exploration of the psycho-analytical process in terms of the claustrum - especially in chap. 6 concerning “technical problems” and in chap. 10 with regard to “Symptomatology versus Characterology” - which has been variously undertaken in clinical experiences (both his and those of his colleagues, all of them increasingly complex and unreliable), Meltzer appears quite close to the diminished optimism of Rosenfeld in Impasse and Interpretation . The claustrum as the compartmentalization of the interior of the mother's body (as distinct from the “container” which was first specifically discussed in “The Conceptual Distinction between the Projective Identification (Klein) and Container-Contained (Bion)” but which is not mentioned here) finds its pictorialization in “The Garden of Earthly Delights” by H. Bosch. But the “claustrum” is an important step (or perhaps discovery) linking up with Bion's three assumptions and perhaps also with the three “tropisms” (creation, parasitism and murder) that Bion noted in '59 - now published in Cogitations (, p 34).
In my view, they need to be considered and explored. Let