The Vale of Soulmaking: The Post-Kleinian Model of the Mind

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Williams, Meg Harris

Mental Health

Routledge

Bion's Dream: A Reading of the Autobiographies

Product Description In this intelligent and insightful work, Meg Harris Williams presents a clear and readable introduction to the works of influential psychoanalyst Donald Meltzer. The book covers Meltzer’s ideas on key themes including sexuality, dreams, psychosis, perversion and aesthetics, and his work with both children and adults.This book focuses especially on Meltzer’s views on the nature of psychoanalysis itself, as an investigative method conducted by the cooperation between two people. His intuitive understanding of dreams is underscored by a scholarly interest in philosophy and linguistics. The book will give readers a window into Meltzer’s clinical seminars and supervisions, as well as a comprehensive overview of his published work, all thoughtfully brought together by someone who worked with Meltzer for many years.Bringing Meltzer’s ideas into contemporary context, this fresh approach to his work makes his rich and complex theories about our inner world accessible to all. Part of the Routledge Introductions to Contemporary Psychoanalysis series, this book will be of great importance to psychoanalysts, clinicians and scholars familiar with Meltzer’s ideas, as well as those seeking an introduction to his work. Review "This book is to be welcomed as both timely and necessary. It is presented as an introduction to the work of one of the most important and prolific thinkers in psychoanalysis of recent times. But it takes us on a journey through Donald Meltzer’s work in a really intelligent way, guided by the author and her in-depth knowledge. The book will allow readers to recreate the atmosphere of the clinical seminars and supervisions shared with Donald Meltzer. His optimism about the human spirit holds all of us who choose to engage in the task of holding ‘the most interesting conversation in the world’ in the consulting room and in the different settings we inhabit."Virginia Ungar, M.D., IPA President"This is an excellently structured and immensely readable book, which is bound to whet the appetite to read Donald Meltzer’s original work.It is no easy task to introduce an oeuvre of eight books and a large collection of essays, conference talks and clinical papers into a 40,000-word volume, but Meg Harris Williams has succeeded in that elegantly and rigorously. She presents Meltzer’s understanding of his teachers: Freud, Klein, Money Kyrle and Bion, crucially pinpointing the aspects of their theories that had stimulated his original thinking. Williams skilfully manages to serve two masters: the theoreticians, who will be impressed by her academic style, and the clinicians, who will relish the quoted clinical examples. The latter show her deep appreciation and respect for Meltzer, who maintained that any psychoanalytic theory must be conceived, gestated and born in the consulting room."Irene Freeden, Training and Supervising Psychoanalyst, British Psychoanalytic Association"Meg Harris Williams has managed to offer us more than just an introduction to Meltzer’s oeuvre. This book visits almost each milepost of Meltzer’s evolution as an analytic original thinker. She brings his concepts back in her own clarifying words and illustrates them with generous citations from Meltzer’s writings. It reads like a pas-de-deux between explanation and citation, thus both inspiring the reader’s thoughts as well as stimulating (healthy) curiosity which will lead many to study Meltzer’s books and articles. For the reader already familiar with Meltzer’s writings, it will offer a fresh look into them, and a very enjoyable one. Williams pays homage to Meltzer who developed, enriched and applied the works of Freud, Klein and Bion. This rather short book is a délicatesse to savor and let ‘dissolve in your mind’."Robert Oelsner, M.D., Psychoanalyst FIPA, Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California About the Author Meg Harris Williams is a literary scholar and former analysand of Meltzer. She was formerly a lectu

Donald Meltzer (Routledge Introductions to Contemporary Psychoanalysis)

This book takes a new approach to Shakespeare’s plays, exploring them as dream-thought in the modern psychoanalytic sense of unconscious thinking. 
Through his commitment to poetic language, Shakespeare offers images and dramatic sequences that illustrate fundamental developmental conflicts, the solutions for which are not preconceived but evolve through the process of dramatisation. In this volume, Meg Harris Williams explores the fundamental distinction between the surface meanings of plot or argument and the deep grammar of dreamlife, applied not only to those plays known as ‘dream-plays’ but also to critical sequences throughout Shakespeare’s oeuvre. 
Through a post-Kleinian model based on the thinking of Bion, Meltzer, and Money-Kyrle, this book sheds new light on both Shakespeare’s own relation to the play and on the identificatory processes of the playwright, reader, or audience. Dream Sequences in Shakespeare is important reading for psychoanalysts, playwrights, and students.

Dream Sequences in Shakespeare

Literature & Fiction

Dramas & Plays

Dream Sequences in Shakespeare: A Psychoanalytic Perspective

Literature is recognized 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. "The Chamber of Maiden Thought" explores the seminal role of literature in forming the modern psychoanalytic model of the mind. The authors argue that psychoanalysis is a true child of literature rather than merely the interpretor or explainer of literature, illustrating this with examples from clinical experience and by close scrutiny of the dynamic mental processes presented in the work of Shakespeare, Milton and others.

The Chamber of Maiden Thought: Literary Origins of the Psychoanalytic Model of the Mind

Waddell, Margot

Psychology & Counseling

Tavistock Books

The Chamber of Maiden Thought (Psychology Revivals): Literary Origins of the Psychoanalytic Model of the Mind

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.

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).

'Few people would be better qualified than the author to write this innovative and eagerly anticipated post-Kleinian book. Deeply versed in the opus of Bion and Meltzer, the author enhances the concept of "catastrophic change". The analyst who "eschews memory and desire" observes the subtle interplay of transference and countertransference (Meltzer's "counter dreaming") as it works through aesthetic conflicts. The ensuing reciprocity of the patients and analysts unconscious is revealed as the aesthetical and ethical basis of psychoanalysis. In that sense the psychoanalytical process parallels that of poetic and artistic inspiration. They are all generated by creative internal objects. Harris Williams' intellectual tour de force demonstrates convincingly the human capacity for symbolic thinking that underlies literary, artistic and psychoanalytic creativity. Her encyclopaedic understanding of literature, art and psychoanalysis contributes to this book's virtuosity.'- Irene Freeden, Senior Member of the British Association of Psychotherapists

The Aesthetic Development: The Poetic Spirit of Psychoanalysis: Essays on Bion, Meltzer, Keats

Karnac Books

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Williams, Meg Harris. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Williams, Meg Harris

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Williams, Meg Harris. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Vale of Soulmaking: The Post-Kleinian Model of the Mind

Bion's Dream: A Reading of the Autobiographies

Donald Meltzer (Routledge Introductions to Contemporary Psychoanalysis)

Dream Sequences in Shakespeare

Dream Sequences in Shakespeare: A Psychoanalytic Perspective

The Chamber of Maiden Thought: Literary Origins of the Psychoanalytic Model of the Mind

The Chamber of Maiden Thought (Psychology Revivals): Literary Origins of the Psychoanalytic Model of the Mind

The Chamber of Maiden Thought (Psychology Revivals): Literary Origins of the Psychoanalytic Model of the Mind

The Vale of Soulmaking: The Post-Kleinian Model of the Mind

The Aesthetic Development: The Poetic Spirit of Psychoanalysis: Essays on Bion, Meltzer, Keats