Harris Meltzer Trust Series – serie

Martha Harris (1919-1987) was one of the most influential and also one of the most loved psychoanalysts of the generation that trained with Melanie Klein. She also worked with Wilfred Bion, and wrote many books and papers on psychoanalytic training and child development. Her colleague James Gammill cites Mrs Klein as saying: "She is one of the best people I have ever known for the psychoanalysis of children….and she has a mind of her own." Harris was responsible for the child psychotherapy training at the Tavistock Clinic from 1960 onwards, developing laterally the method founded on infant observation that had been put in place by Esther Bick. She established cross-clinic work discussion groups, a pioneering schools’ counselling course (in collaboration with her husband Roland Harris), and individual work with disturbed children in the school environment. Her belief that psychoanalytic ideas could and should “travel”, both geographically and across the professions, led to her seeding the “Tavi Model” in many other countries through regular teaching trips, in company with her later husband Donald Meltzer.Her influence was not as a theorist, but as a teacher with an extraordinary capacity to engage processes of introjective learning in both students and readers. This tribute by some of those who studied with her is not simply testimony to a remarkable teacher and clinician whose wisdom has been rarely equalled; it also offers inspiration to others who may be struggling to find ways of using psychoanalytic ideas imaginatively in a variety of contexts--clinical, social or scholarly--in what can at times appear to be an unreceptive world.

This tract was commissioned from Donald Meltzer and Martha Harris in 1976 by the Organisation for Economic and Cultural Development as part of a project to develop policies and programs that would support families in their educational task. It was included in Sincerity: Collected Papers of Donald Meltzer (1994) but has never until now been published as an independent work in English, though it has been published in French, Spanish and Italian and has had extensive use in those countries by therapists, teachers, teacher-trainers and social workers.It is a unique work owing to its integration of a psychoanalytical theory of learning with an ecological conception of how the various systems involved in the educational process are interconnected, and as such is still of great present-day relevance, both to clinical and educational practitioners and to policy-makers.

"In this compact and illuminating study of the evolving theoretical framework informing psychoanalytic work with couples, the authors highlight concepts that have been most drawn upon in developing dynamic couple therapy. They chart the shifting emphasis away from interpreting and reconstructing the past towards approaches that engage partners and therapists in constructing and reflecting on their encounters with each other in the present. The triangular space that is created through this process contains therapists as well as the couples with whom they talk, and invites us to revisit the essential nature of the therapeutic conversation in this light. A thoughtful and fascinating book that will interest everyone who is keen to understand the interior world of couple psychotherapy."—Christopher Clulow, PhD, Senior Fellow, the Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships, London

This book is one of a short series on the teaching of post-Kleinian psychoanalysis, with a companion volume on Teaching Meltzer. Wilfred Bion always emphasized that he had no desire to implant his thoughts in others but hoped instead to inspire their own process of self-knowledge or ‘becoming’, which can only take place in the conviction that the mind ‘exists’ and is not merely a figure of speech. He spoke of ‘intercessors’ and cited one of his own teachers, Socrates, on the need to distinguish phantoms from real thoughts, intelligence from wisdom.Like psychoanalysis itself, teaching is a form of learning from experience, conducted in the context of a joint search with students or colleagues, or indeed patients. A good teacher is essentially a student, and ‘What are you when you cease to be a student of psychoanalysis?” as Bion said. Teaching the work of one’s teachers can be an especially fruitful means of internalizing them, and an invitation to others.The contributions in this book are international and varied in their approach, and have been worked out over time, so offer an opportunity for current and future teachers to experiment and analyze their own methods. Style, cultural context, personal bias and interests are all important in making the teaching situation a live and authentic one from which the participants, and likewise the reader, can select what speaks to them.

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 specialized 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.

This new edition of Roger Money-Kyrle’s classic work is published together with three of his late papers, "Cognitive development", "The aim of psychoanalysis", and "On being a psychoanalyst". Its intention is to introduce new readers to this key Kleinian thinker, whose influence has been quiet and uncontroversial but deep and formative. The book also includes Donald Meltzer’s discussion of the paper on "Cognitive development".

The contents of this book represent a series of experiments in dramatizing Bion’s A Memoir of the Future, the primary one being an unfinished film begun in India in the 1980s and directed by Kumar Shahani, "epic" artfilm maker, most of whose films have been produced in Hindi. The film was inspired and initiated by Bombay psychoanalyst Udayan Patel, and sponsored by the Roland Harris Educational Trust. The cast of actors included Jalal Agha, Tom Alter, Robert Burbage, Nicholas Clay, Neil Cunningham, Carol Drinkwater, Peter Firth, Nigel Hawthorne, Shona Morris, Jonathan Page (as a child), Angela Pleasence, Juliet Reynolds, and Alaknanda Samarth.The filmscript and a commentary are here included, together with a narrative poem written for Alaknanda Samarth who played the Ayah of Bion’s childhood, and a playscript written for Tom Alter who played the Father. The play is due to be first performed in Bombay and Delhi in February 2016.An appendix reprints a psychoanalytic study of Memoir by Donald Meltzer, who was closely involved in the production of the original film.The book is illustrated by screenshots from the film and the ebook contains video extracts.