Meg Harris Williams

Margot Waddell

Literature is recognised as having significantly influenced the development of modern psychoanalytic thought. In recent years psychoanalysis has drawn increasingly on the literary and artistic traditions of western culture and moved away from its original medical–scientific context. Originally published in 1991 The Chamber of Maiden Thought (Keats's metaphor for 'the awakening of the thinking principle') is an original and revealing exploration of the seminal role of literature in forming the modern psychoanalytic model of the mind. The crux of the 'post-Kleinian' psychoanalytic view of personality development lies in the internal relations between the self and the mind's 'objects'. Meg Harris Williams and Margot Waddell show that these relations have their origins in the drama of identifications which we can see played out metaphorically and figuratively in literature, which presents the self-creative process in aesthetic terms. They argue that psychoanalysis is a true child of literature rather than merely the interpreter or explainer of literature, illustrating this with some examples from clinical experience, but drawing above all on close scrutiny of the dynamic mental processes presented in the work of Shakespeare, Milton, the Romantic poets, Emily Bronte and George Eliot. The Chamber of Maiden Thought will encourage psychoanalytic workers to respond to the influence of literature in exploring symbolic mental processes. By bringing psychoanalysis into creative conjunction with the arts, it enables practitioners to tap a cultural potential whose insights into the human mind are of immense value.

Literary Origins of the Psychoanalytic Model of the Mind

The Chamber of Maiden Thought (Psychology Revivals)

'This book offers a definitive reading of Bion's remarkable autobiographical writings from a perspective embedded in the poetry of the ages, that of the Romantics in particular. It is at once learned and, utterly freshly, able to explore the inside story of Bion's life and mind. The volume is a distillation and elaboration of the work of many years. Whilst ostensibly an extended commentary on the autobiographical works themselves, it is also, in its own right, a tour de force, engaging, as it does, with the heart of the matter: with the development of a psychoanalyst, of a life, a self, a mind, thoroughly inward with the "dark and sombre world of thought".'- Margot Waddell, psychoanalyst and consultant child psychotherapist, Tavistock Clinic

A Reading of the Autobiographies

Bion's Dream

Donald Meltzer

This volume has grown over the years as a family project of Martha Harris, her two daughters Meg and Morag and her husband, Donald Meltzer. It therefore has its roots in English literature and its branches waving wildly about in psychoanalysis. It is earnestly hoped that it will reveal more problems than it will solve.

The Role of Aesthetic Conflict in Development, Art and Violence

The Apprehension of Beauty

The post-Kleinian model of the mind, as developed by W. R. Bion and Donald Meltzer, is essentially an aesthetic one. It is founded on Melanie Klein's discovery of the "internal object" with its combined masculine and feminine qualities and ambiguous, awe-inspiring nature. Turbulent emotional experiences are repeatedly transformed through symbol-formation, on the basis of the internal relationship between the infant self and its object; and the aesthetic containment provided by this "counter-transference dream" (as Meltzer put it) enables the mind to digest its conflicts and develop.This search for a pattern that can make "contrary" emotions thinkable is modelled by all art forms and accounts for their universal significance. It is a process that can be observed particularly clearly in literature, in the form of the romance between the poet and his Muse (the traditional formulation of the psycho-analytic internal object).

The Post-Kleinian Model of the Mind

The Vale of Soulmaking

This book is one of a short series on the teaching of post-Kleinian analysis, with a companion volume on Teaching Bion.The trials and tribulations of teaching are intimately connected with those of learning, and indeed have parallels with psychoanalysis in so far as this may in itself be considered a specialised mode of education. The variety of approaches recounted in this volume have been devised and refined over time and demonstrate the imaginative commitment and struggles of practitioners.Donald Meltzer's hopes for the survival of psychoanalysis rested not on schools and didacticism but on the capacity of the next generation to learn from their own experience with the aid of their internal teachers.His writings are often said to be 'difficult' by students without personal experience of his teaching. Yet Meltzer himself said his motto was 'simplicity' and he never tried to be obscurantist, but concentrated increasingly on how to make complex matters 'simple', relevant and digestible.This book shows how this aspiration to a complex simplicity can be conveyed by those who have absorbed it. Its relevance therefore goes beyond the conceptual framework of an individual analyst, and sheds new light on the task of enabling the psychoanalytic attitude in both students and teachers.

Modes and Approaches

Teaching Meltzer

Miriam Botbol

‘Counterdreaming’ is Donald Meltzer’s term for the psychoanalytic reverie that arises from the countertransference during the session, in response to the analysand’s own dreams and phantasies. He writes: ‘It is difficult to explain the technique of counterdreaming… I compare it with waiting in the dark for the deer, grazing at night, seen by their flashing white tails.’ This nocturnal vigilance is on the alert for movement of the quarry, part object minimal movements which with patience can be seen to form a pattern of incipient meaning cast before. The contributions in this book belong to analysts and psychotherapists of widely different ages and experience and from a variety of countries, languages, and institutional affiliations. Their experience of counterdreaming, sometimes in the form of actual dreams and sometimes as dreamlike reactions to specific clinical situations, makes vivid the struggles and rewards of the method. In addition to viewing the psychoanalytic session from the other partner’s vertex, they help to establish the senses in which the practice of psychoanalysis may be seen as an autobiographical art–science rather than solely investigating confidential material of the analysand. Contributions suggest it can apply also to technology-mediated analysis; and is also an appropriate way of seeing supervision situations.

Meg Harris Williams

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