The Kleinian Development Part 1

Meltzer describes the series of lectures on Freud, Klein and Bion known as The Kleinian Development as both a quest for personal integration into some kind of 'combined internal psychoanalytic object', under whose aegis he personally could aspire to work, and as a vademecum for students. They were originally delivered to students at the Institute and at the Tavistock, specifically with the aim of demonstrating the logical development of that line of psychoanalytic practice. Seeking for this logical development reveals 'an unfolding of method, leading to discovery of new realms of phenomena, generating in turn new models of the mind, which then modify method, etc.' The lectures on Freud therefore are concerned less with his theory of mind and more with the spiralling alternation of thinking and clinical discovery. Meltzer focuses on those papers, mainly clinical, which highlight key moments of change in Freud's own knowledge and understanding, brought about by the impact of what Bion was to call 'learning from experience' with its inbuilt autobiographical implication. These include: the 'Fragment' on Dora in which Freud's curiosity (about the new method) enabled him to press on where Breuer had retired after his experience with with Anna O. (the 'inventor of psychoanalysis'); the work with Little Hans which established the significance of childhood but only retrospectively; the new evidence of internal conflict manifest by the Rat Man; the Leonardo paper, not for its initiation of the 'bad tradition' of psychobiography but for its autobiographical examination of the ideas of sublimation and narcissism; the Schreber memoir in which Freud began to conceptualise the reality of the inner world; the 'child being beaten' which demanded a new understanding of masochism; and the Wolf Man with its central phantasy of the primal scene, and the idea of true bisexuality (rather than active-passive trends) and the 'complete Oedipus complex'.