ABSTRACT
Donald Meltzer saw psychoanalysis as an art-science. For him, the progressive features of the model were best illuminated by the Kleinian line of advance: beginning with Freud’s discovery of transference and moving through Klein’s exploration of children’s phantasy life to Bion’s new perspective on thinking and the relevance of psychoanalysis as a Kantian ‘thing in itself’. Meltzer describes Freud’s model as essentially neurophysiological. Meltzer was an erudite Freud scholar and always maintained his interest, but he did not think Freud’s early neurophysiological model was realistic or genuinely scientific. By contrast, Melanie Klein’s model is not based on an explanatory causal system but is ‘a description of the geography of phantasy life’ in which parts of the self and objects communicate in a ‘theatre for the generating of meaning’ – an inner world. Meltzer was a great admirer of Roger Money-Kyrle and worked closely with him for many years even before he began to study Bion in depth in the mid-1970s.
