a brief psychoanalytic biography

Remembering Donald Meltzer 1922–2004

A BRIEF PSYCHOANALYTIC BIOGRAPHY

Clara Nemas

The biographical information which follows is not about Meltzer’s personalhistory, with which I am not familiar, but his history as a psychoanalyst,which he has told us at various times in a very charming way (which makesthis an ‘authorized’ biography). It is composed of a series of anecdotes thatwe might consider as the myth of the birth of a vocation.

The first story takes us back to when Meltzer was 8 years old. He was trav-elling with his parents along the Mediterranean coast when, with feelings ofadmiration, a mixture of fear and awe towards the beauty of the horses andthe trees, he suddenly became aware of the beauty of the works of man whileobserving some sculptures. At that moment, he felt that the highest aspira-tion would be to breathe life and beauty into stone.

His comment on this experience was that he found it most appropriatethat the mind should discover its own beauty only after having discoveredthe beauty of nature and of the works of man that prove it and praise it.

The second anecdote comes from his adolescence. In an interview inBrazil in 1988, he recounted his first contact with psychoanalysis at the ageof 16. This occurred when the brother of his first girlfriend was training inpsychoanalysis and gave him a book by Freud to read.

In 1978 (ten years prior to that interview) Meltzer wrote in the introduc-tion to his book, The Kleinian Development, that he had already read Freudfor the first time by the age of 16. That time, however, he attributed it to theinfluence of Nathaniel Apter, a friend of his elder sister.

At that time, in the United States, Meltzer’s native country, those whoaspired to become psychoanalysts were required first to study medicine andthen to specialize in psychiatry. When he was 22 and still a medical student,Meltzer read the texts of Melanie Klein for the first time. These works madea deep impression on him. After training in child psychiatry, he started hispsychoanalytic training at the Chicago Institute. He was determined to study

British Journal of Psychotherapy 21(3), 2005© The author 443

CLARA NEMAS is a training analyst of the Buenos Aires Psychoanalytic Association.She is in full-time private psychoanalytic practice. She is involved in teachingKleinian and neo-Kleinian theory and Baby Observation Seminars in variouspsychoanalytic societies in Argentina. She is the author of numerous papers onadolescents and psychoanalytic theory, technique and ethics. Address for corres-pondence: Clara Nemas, French 3027, (1425) Buenos Aires, República Argentina.[email: [email protected]]

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with Melanie Klein but it took him many years to organize his affairs so thathe could emigrate.

He arrived in London in 1954 to complete his training. After he had beenin England for four years, he felt so much at home and had made so manyfriends that he decided to stay. He was in analysis with Melanie Klein forsix years until she passed away during a vacation.

Meltzer said that this analysis changed his life. Before the analysis, he wasa very jolly and kindly young man. Afterwards he found that the analysismade him less jolly and less kindly but that he was now more intelligent andmore capable. During his first session, he noticed that at the foot of thecouch there was a Japanese engraving of a horse. He had always been crazyabout horses. That night, he dreamed that he was riding on that horse. Hewas riding without a saddle and without reins – riding like the wind andscared to death. He described his analysis as being just like that; he wasscared to death all of the time but it was marvellous.

We cannot leave out the figure of Bion from Meltzer’s psychoanalyticbiography. Although Bion was quite a bit older than Meltzer, not havingstarted his training at the Institute of Psychoanalysis until he was 50 yearsold, he and Meltzer were nearly classmates in the seminars of the first yearsof training. At the beginning, there was not much theoretical contactbetween these two personalities; on the contrary, there were some antagon-istic positions.

For example, when Meltzer visited Argentina for the first time in 1964,he told us that it was his habit at that time to take notes at the end of eachsession and, on the Monday of the next analytic week, he would read thenotes from the previous week in order to be better able to treat and tomake contact with his patients after the weekend. At around the sametime, Bion said that notes were of no use to him and tape-recordings evenless. He felt that the best state for connecting with a patient was what hewould later call ‘without memory and without desire’, a state in which heconnected with his patient in each session as if it were the first time he sawthe patient. This hypothesis grew stronger over the years. These histories,which began with different developments, later converged. Meltzer tells usthat only when he was 40 years old did the personality and thought of Bionbegin to have an impact on him. It was only then that Bion began to ‘comeinto his office’.

When Meltzer spoke of the training of psychoanalysts, a subject on whichhe had very definite ideas that led him to move away from the IPA, hedefined its pillars as the experience of the therapeutic analysis, supervisionsand small group discussions with a kind of atelier atmosphere betweenpeople who want to teach and the people who want to learn. He also saidthat psychoanalysis can be learned but can never be taught. And this, amongother reasons, brought him closer to the idea of psychoanalysis as an artmore than as a science. The idea of the atelier derives from this perspective.

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In fact, most if not all his books are compilations of lectures and seminarsthat he gave in different places, including Buenos Aires.

On one occasion, when he was asked why he wrote, he answered some-thing to the effect that it was because he couldn’t help it – that somethingbegan to grow in his mind, pushing to get out, and that he needed to get ridof it. He also said that he didn’t like to make revised re-editions of his books,that when he wrote, he ignored that, more in the style of Melanie Klein thanof Freud.

However, the coherence that can be seen in Meltzer’s works was also tobe found in his clinical work. It consisted in his adhesion to a model ofmental functioning whose technical consequence is a longitudinal organiz-ation of the material that gives both patient and analyst a feeling that thereis continuity in their experience. The other aspect that lends coherence tohis works is that they are purely psychoanalytic works, in the sense that hestakes everything on the validity of the psychoanalytic method of obser-vation. The result of this approach, which he conveys in his writings andclinical seminars, is an unfailing strength and conviction in his work. In thissense, I believe that we could apply one of his ideas on three ways of facinglife to psychoanalytic work. He says that one can swim vigorously facing thecurrent, or let oneself float, or else pretend to swim while actually lettingoneself be carried along by the current.

Being in contact with Meltzer’s works arouses not only interest but alsothe feeling of being in the presence of something beautiful, something thatfinds an echo in the cavern of one’s mind, something that is being illumin-ated from different angles, provoking new conjunctions, both those thathave just been seen as well as the expectation of those one will discover next,waiting in the dark.

In this sense, his death has been only too premature – leaving us the taskof discovering what comes next, with the help (if we can keep our narcis-sism at bay) of his inspiring internalized presence in us all.

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a brief psychoanalytic biography

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