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In The Claustrum, Meltzer writes that the “heart of post-Kleinian psychology” consists in the addition of geographic and epistemological aspects of mental functioning to Freud's original categories of dynamic, genetic, structural, and economic. He then adds, “Whether the aesthetic aspect will eventually take on sufficient distinctness to add a seventh category remains to be seen” (1992, p. 50). To help give “distinctness” to the aesthetic category is essentially the aim of this book.
In this chapter, I would like to review two of the key concepts at the heart of the Bion-Meltzer model of the mind: Meltzer's “aesthetic conflict” and Bion's “catastrophic change”. They are key concepts because they structure the whole process of “learning from experience” in Bion's particular sense of that phrase: the process of mental development with all its ethical, emotional, and cognitive implications. Any vital work of art can be said to be about them, and they embrace all the other aesthetic concepts of Bion and Meltzer: the thought without a thinker, the observer-observed, the positive and negative Grid, container-contained (Bion), the “generative” theatre of meaning, dimensionality, reciprocity (Meltzer), the “combined object” that governs the ethics of the inner world, and