Doing Things Differently

Margaret Cohen a child and adult psychotherapist in private practice in London. She worked in the Department of Psychological Medicine at Great Ormond Street and then in the Neo-Natal Intensive Care Unit and Paediatric Oncology at The Whittington Hospital, London. She has written about prematurity among other subjects and has taught at The Tavistock Clinic, The Anna Freud Clinic and in Italy. Alberto Hahn is a member of the British Psychoanalytic Society and works in a private practice in London. He also teaches psychoanalysis at the Tavistock Clinic, and lectures abroad. He is the translator into English of the 'Introduction to the Works of Bion' and the editor of ' Sincerity and Other Works: Collected Papers of Donald Meltzer'. He has written a number of clinical and theoretical papers, among them 'Observation and Intuition in the Psychoanalytic Situation', 'On Complaining', 'The Nature of the "Object" in the Claustrum', and 'Ways of Thinking about Adolescent Psychopathology'.

'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

• Series 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