ABSTRACT
The content of conference, bore witness to Donald Meltzer's enduring relevance, his inspiring ideas, and his attitude of profound respect for patients' relation to their internal and external world—in particular to the infantile parts of the self. The breadth of papers showed how important the influence remains, both in clinical work and in motivation to explore further the potential and the boundaries of his psychoanalytic insights. Witnessing the tendency to trivialization or scotomization that affects the analyst's observational capacities is always a painful and dangerous experience, especially when it is compounded with a state of denial of the psychic reality of the suffering infant in the patient. In reading the many accounts of his clinical cases, one is struck by the sometimes mysterious ways in which Meltzer formulated his understanding in terms of part- or whole objects, of qualities of transference and internal object relations.
