ABSTRACT
For Donald Meltzer, the most important areas of work were: intimate personal relationships, such as family life; and – in the outside world – artistic-scientific, and educational. These were areas in which valency was available to link up creatively with psychoanalysis. Meltzer saw the individual analyst as developing in tandem with psychoanalysis as a spiritual phenomenon. The real psychoanalytic movement is not a political entity, though it is a global one. Meltzer always believed, or hoped, that psychoanalysis could be a revolutionary force from societies inside, not simply an uneconomic mode of therapy for a small number of individuals. One of the main, now well-acknowledged, ways in which psychoanalytic ideas find a useful home in the world is through connections with the arts, probably the visual and literary arts in particular. For Meltzer, art work is not sublimation but one of the highest forms of work, that is, a service to humanity.
