ABSTRACT
Donald Meltzer’s view of the primacy of aesthetic response, and of this being bound up with the baby’s relation to the mother’s internal spaces as well as her external appearance, is the basis for his formulation of the ‘Claustrum’, the self-imprisonment resulting from all the various defences against aesthetic impact. Meltzer believed that all groups resemble a Claustrum compartment and tend towards basic assumption organisation – to unthinking conformity, obedience and hierarchy. For Meltzer, the Claustrum is not a metaphor but a description of psychic reality, founded on the infant’s original innate preconception of the mother-as-the-world. Psychic reality is primary; it establishes the type of vision by which external reality becomes known and is interacted with. Internal objects evoke emotions; external objects have emotions deployed on to them. The mother is naturally compartmentalised by the ‘baby’ and each compartment may in phantasy be viewed from an outside or an inside position. The viewpoint from inside is what constitutes the Claustrum.
