Long-Term Psychoanalytic Supervision with Donald Meltzer

The Tragedy of Triumph

João Sousa Monteiro

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138348585
• eBook ISBN: 9780429791482
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Long-Term Psychoanalytic Supervision with Donald Meltzer is a detailed account of a particularly demanding analysis which Donald Meltzer closely supervised over twelve years. This will enable the reader to closely follow the internal life of a long-term, trying analysis. The reader can see how Meltzer's thoughts had crucially guided the course of this analysis in many of its most challenging moments, often redirecting it. By watching things happening, the reader is enabled to get a deeper insight into Meltzer's highly complex, though outstanding thought. On many particularly important points, the author invited Meltzer to give his thoughts and interpretations in his own words as if he himself was the analyst. This provides the reader with a unique opportunity to 'listen' to Meltzer verbatim.

Long-Term Psychoanalytic Supervision with Donald Meltzer demonstrates the often overwhelming yet fascinating complexities of mental life and will speak to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists, as well as those interested in the philosophy of the mind.

CHAPTER 1

“… for a patient to discover this atmosphere of passionate interest in his mental life is the real therapeutic factor in analysis, I think.”

Summary

Donald Meltzer coined the term and first worked out the concept of “the gathering of the transference” (cf. 1967). The concept brings together into a clinically workable form the complex sequence of processes which are loosely alluded to as the development of the transference, or even more vaguely described as the initial phase of the transference. To my best recollection Meltzer was first to show that the gathering of the transference is a long, highly complex and sensitive process, being crucial in giving every analysis a firm basis. Concrete clinical evidence arguing this understanding is discussed in this as well as in the next few chapters.

The gathering of the transference is however thought to immediately trigger off emotional turbulence which most often takes the form of actings both in and out the transference. This chapter describes, almost graphically, a number of unusually intense responses to the gathering of the transference.

The history of the evolution of the transference is argued to be more clearly inscribed in the evolution of “dream-life,” rather than in individual dreams (cf. Meltzer, 1984).

NB: This chapter covers the first year of the analysis of Sophie.

__________

JSM: Sophie is the fourth child of highly educated foreign parents. Only Sophie was born in Portugal. Since she was four Sophie was noted to always be the brightest in her class, though already showing recurrent problems with indiscipline. At such an early age she seemed driven to break as many rules as she could.

Sophie graduated with the highest marks of her course, having immediately been invited abroad for a PhD degree. Shortly after having received her new degree Sophie went to another place which soon became known in her analysis as “the Crazy Place” and where she lived for the next two years. A year after she had been living there, her former tutor unexpectedly joined her. From one day to the next Sophie married him and had a daughter with him.

As soon as she married, however, she began suffering from what she described as “nightmares,” as well as from frequent intestinal colic which often resulted in diarrhea. In time, her intestinal condition proved to have a rather upsetting outcome. For Sophie has gradually been restricting, below all medically advisable limits, both the amount and range of food she was able to trust as not causing her further colic. She had gone through any number of medical examinations for her unyielding intestinal condition which however proved surprisingly negative. As her intestinal upset persisted, however, she managed to persuade a surgeon friend of hers practicing in a faraway country who, against all previous medical advice, performed on her a tentative cholecystectomy. The surgery, however, had not only not brought her any relief from her condition but was even said to have aggravated it. It was, however, the increasingly unbearable grip of nightmares and her upsetting state of chronic exhaustion that mostly decided Sophie to seek treatment.

Sophie has been seen by eight psychiatrists and analysts during the following ten years. She however has been unable to recognize any palpable benefit from this rather odd therapeutic journey, and, on the edge of exhaustion, she decided to give analysis a last try.

When I first saw Sophie she really looked on the verge of both physical and psychical collapse.

I began to see her in analysis three times weekly.

Sophie lives in a constant, deep resentment of her family. She feels that she had been deprived of something precious she cannot however describe, and seems to put all her efforts into retrieving this loss. She blames her family for having never cared about her, never listened to her, never respected her. Soon, however, the core of her resentment seemed to be her father. “Even today I follow him everywhere, like Konrad Lorenz’s little ducks, fighting to have a bit of his rare attention.”

Sophie cannot stand her mother’s voice, particularly in the evening. Should she hear her voice, even if only over the telephone and for not much more than a minute or two, she was sure she was again going to have nightmares that night, and breaks out in yet another fury against her mother. “I have to protect myself with great care at nighttime, trying not to be invaded again by too many nightmares during the night,” she told me already in our first meeting. Every time she visits her parents – which often happened – she goes in already arguing quite aggressively with them or indeed with anyone whomever she might find there. She just argues for no matter what trifle as if always fiercely disputing the unnamed precious object of her unbearable loss. Surprisingly, however, both her mother and father were consistently described as being particularly fond of her and even lovingly devoted to both her and her daughter.

Whenever any of Sophie’s women friends wished to meet her father, she would drastically dispute whom she is going to allow to meet him and under what precise circumstances of both place and time.

She would get mad and burst out in a fury at anyone who might dare to make the slightest critical remark about her daughter. The space of her relationship with her daughter was threateningly described as “sacred,” as she repeatedly put it, meaning that no one should ever dare to step in except to praise her. On the other hand, she can’t forgive herself if she neglects any possible detail concerning her daughter. Should her daughter express the slightest wish, she has to immediately satisfy it, no matter how difficult. Sophie feels under the compulsion of forestalling her daughter’s desires and satisfying them even before they were formulated.

And yet, Sophie has always been very firm in describing herself as a very happy and joyful child. And indeed, she does appear to be endowed with an inexhaustible vitality and capacity for joy. Her joy and humor seemed infectious, and it seemed quite easy for her to make both friends and lovers everywhere she shows up – with whom, afterward, she would equally easily quarrel often severely. As a young girl she could never stop running and jumping, and became noted for the extraordinary things she used to do in her physical activities.

In the beginning of her analysis, every adult, particularly the husbands of her women friends who in one way or another was concerned with children was, in her eyes, definitely “a beast.”

During the first two to three months of analysis Sophie took up the time of her sessions with what she called “nightmares,” as well as her resentful accusations against her family. Her nightmares were all about her being betrayed, abandoned and persecuted. Most of them were however imparted in the form of headings and scraps of narratives. There were virtually no associations except those many conveyed by the music of her voice by which she usually made clear her urgency to get rid of her rather intense feelings of persecution thrown out into me in the form of “nightmares.” I therefore tended to tentatively read the substance of her nightmares in the music of her voice rather than in the unintelligible scraps of her narratives. I nevertheless always tried not to allow a single nightmare to leave us without it being talked over to some extent. I always quietly questioned her about the sense of this or that aspect of each one even if, in the end, I was usually unable to gather any sense of it, such was her acute need not to dwell on them but really to get rid of them …

DM: … which really are all masochistic phantasies; masochistic masturbatory phantasies, I think.

JSM: After this initial period of two to three months, however, she brought a dream – no longer a “nightmare,” but what appeared to me a real dream; the first dream of her analysis, I would say. She dreamed that she was talking to a nice, tender childcare officer whom she had actually known many years before. In her dream, Sophie was putting the following question to her: “Is it better to have a happy childhood and an unhappy adult life, or an unhappy childhood and a happy adult life?”

DM: So she begins to differentiate between a child and an adult, corresponding really to the split between her dream life, which is largely taken up as a childish masturbatory masochistic phantasy life, and her life outside, in which there are lots of adult aspects, already taking steps toward transference. But her infantile sexual life seems to be largely confined to what she calls nightmares. Now, there is a nice childcare officer, which of course is a bit of transference for you, offering you a choice, really: you can either relate yourself as a nice childcare officer to her as an adult, or you can relate yourself as somebody who presents himself as a nice childcare officer but really abuses children – which one do you want? She offers you a choice.

JSM: Although I asked her about this nice, tender woman, all she was able to provide me with was recalling how nice she was. She did it, however, in a very tender voice as if she was “dreaming” her remembrances of her right there, on the couch. The change of the music of her voice toward tenderness was striking.

I suggested to her that she seemed to put some hope in finding out, through her analysis, what had really been unhappy in her “happy childhood,” which had perhaps been concealed behind her hectic activity and wit. “You seem to hint that the unhappy side of your happy childhood is what has now been damaging your adult life. And that, by closely and quietly looking into it together with the nice child care officer, in your analysis, you may perhaps find the truth about your childhood, and one day envisage becoming a reasonably happy adult, and of course see the end of both your nightmares and intestinal colic.”

DM: We have evidence of her offering you either maternal or paternal transference, but also of offering you contact with her masculinity or her femininity. We begin to get a picture both of bisexuality and the division between adult and infantile, between external and internal. And now we shall see what happens. It looks as if it is going to build up into a massive acting in the transference.

JSM: A pronounced change in her dream life now began to emerge. She really begins to bring dreams, instead of “nightmares.” Besides, instead of presenting herself in the role of the betrayed, abandoned and persecuted one in the few “nightmares” she still brought to her sessions, she is now shown in the opposite role of the betrayer, the persecutor, and the one who really does harm to others.

In a paradigmatic dream of this period, she saw her ex-husband’s present wife, Florence, in her parents’ bedroom, burst into a fury against her, throwing her out of the room. Then she saw herself in her parents’ sitting-room lecturing on chil dren to a number of her women friends who have divorced, telling everyone what they should do about their children.

This would soon begin to swell into a major trend in her personality: to tell others what they should say, do and even think.

DM: She is giving you plenty of warning of what’s going to happen when she really begins to act it in the transference.

JSM: You will soon see how far your guess goes …

DM: She is getting ready to take control of your life, both as an analytic mother and as a lover-father. She is really going to invade you. This is a very hysterical transference – a very concrete infantile invasion of the Oedipal couple to separate them and to relate to both of them in an erotic way, controlling, domineering and sadistically possessive. Besides, she has thrown mummy out and replaced her as an expert on children. She is really giving you plenty of warning of wha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Presentation of the book
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 “… for a patient to discover this atmosphere of passionate interest in his mental life is the real therapeutic factor in analysis, I think.”
• 2 Experiencing the session in the transference versus experiencing it outside the transference: the difference between analysis and psychotherapy
• 3 Dreams as babies brought to the analyst though also as actings in the transference
• 4 “If you don’t see and feel the intensity and the immediacy of the transference, then you see it in this diminished light as simply a repetition of the past.”
• 5 “When she lowers the passion, she lowers the value of everything, and then abandonment is so much easier”
• 6 The importance of the concept of forgiveness as a key factor in “creating a new way of thinking about things”
• 7 “… it has to be made in the depths … (long silence) … in love for the truth … (long silence) … in love for the truth …”
• 8 “It’s not the badness that has made the secrecy; it’s the secrecy that has made the badness”
• 9 “JSM: Do you take notes of the sessions you think are important? DM: Oh no, I take notes on every session. JSM: On every session of every patient? DM: On every session of every patient. JSM: And you see fourteen patients a day …”
• 10 “I can’t come [to the session], I feel it … I’m a piece of shit … I’ll come as soon as I feel human …”
• 11 The fecal nature of the devil
• 12 “… worrying about your patient is terribly important … the only way we have of keeping the patients safe is to be worried about them.”
• 13 “Well, it’s like introducing the left breast to the right breast …”
• 14 “… I have to come here to know what I’ll do the next hour …”
• 15 Wrestling with triumph
• 16 “… the way in which she does it is by crawling inside everybody and controlling them from inside”
• 17 Mother’s inside transformed into a golden grave for the triumphant child
• 18 “… all her actions have to be listened to as if they were dreams …”
• 19 Projective identification into the internal mother may infuse into the subject’s hemorrhoids such an intensely coloured pathological life
• 20 An acting in the counter-transference re-enacted in the course of a supervision session
• 21 “The thing about life in the claustrum is that it is cut off from the beauty of the world”
• Appendix: Donald Meltzer’s claustrum theory – a brief survey
• References
• Index