Description
Book SynopsisDoing Things Differently celebrates the work of Donald Meltzer, who was such a lively force in the training of child psychotherapists at the Tavistock Clinic for many years. The book represents the harvest of Meltzer's thinking and teaching, and covers such topics as dimensionality in primitive states of mind, dreaming, supervision, and the claustrum.
Trade Review'Overall, one of the most striking and moving aspects of the book is that the chapters, in their very different ways, come together to express what could be called something like "the generation of meaning". They are testament to the space for the "co-creation of imaginative conjectures" that one author describes, a process at the heart of what Bion thought of as the growth of the mind, the developing a mind of one's own, so compelling and so enabling for these authors, as for their readers. For threading their way through this book are countless examples, some fleeting, some deep and extended, of intellectual and psychic "growth", in the true sense of the word.'As we see here, the way in which Meltzer taught, and the actual content, were inseparable: we hear of his wit and humour, his often surprising turns of mind and phrase, his surpassing originality and, as the authors here collectively attest, to the presence of something as elusive as "clinical intuition", learned not through trying to define the indefinable but through the nature of the insights found here in the case material described.'--Margot Waddell, from the Series Editors' Preface
Table of ContentsSeries Editors’ Preface -- Introduction -- Doing things differently: an appreciation of Donald Meltzer’s contribution -- The relevance of Donald Meltzer’s concept of nipple-penis confusion to selective mutism and the capacity to produce language -- Point–line–surface–space: on Donald Meltzer’s concept of one- and two-dimensional mental functioning in autistic states -- Autism reconsidered -- Donald Meltzer’s concept of dimensionality in clinical work with autistic patients -- Does the meta-psychological concept of dimensionality refer to a geometrical or a topological model? -- A response -- Dimensionality, identity, and security: finding a home through psychoanalysis -- The isolated adolescent -- Supervision as a space for the co-creation of imaginative conjectures -- Keeping tension close to the limit: from latency towards development -- Donald Meltzer’s supervision of psychotherapy with a psychotic child -- The second life of dreaming -- On having ideas: the aesthetic object and O -- Degrees of entrapment: living and dying in the claustrum -- Trapped in a claustrum world: the proleptic imagination and James Joyce’s Ulysses -- Gaudete: a response to Mary Fisher-Adams -- A mind of one’s own: therapy with a patient contending with excessive intrusive identification and claustrum phenomena -- Battered women lose their minds -- Concluding thoughts on the nature of psychoanalytic activity
