ABSTRACT
Donald Meltzer says that supervisees always want to know about technique as if this were teachable in the sense of formal instruction. Yet he said that long experience of teaching helped him to notice things about his own clinical work that would otherwise have ‘escaped attention’, and that this was even more true of technique than it was of comprehending the content of the session. Music and interpretative exploration are functions belonging to psychoanalysis as an art form. Its scientific aspirations, Meltzer believed, would only be realised sometime in the distant future, and should not be pre-empted. Meltzer saw the chambers of the Claustrum as a feature of everybody’s mind; the degree of imprisonment to be measured by the type and fixity of intrusive projective identification. Meltzer said, scratch the surface and the madness appears. Conversely, he said, ‘the door is always open’, even to the most ensconced part of the personality: there is two-way traffic.
