Unpublished draft paper on sexuality by Donald Meltzer

Editor's note : Albert Mason discovered an unpublished paper by Donald Meltzer dating from around 1968 and has made the text available to the IJP. He writes “my best guess is that Meltzer gave me the paper to read/approve about the time I was preparing to move to Los Angeles (1968–69) and that I hastily packed it away with other papers. It got buried, and only came to light recently, kind of like a lost score that turns up in someone's attic!” The patient Meltzer discusses in his paper is a patient who Dr Mason treated for approximately 11 years, and about whom Dr Mason consulted with Dr Meltzer early in the treatment. Dr Mason has also provided the original report he wrote about the patient in the 1960s. Following an introduction by Dr Abbot Bronstein, we have published extracts from Dr Mason's report, including the following: details about the case, the two dreams which Dr Mason believes were ‘turning point dreams’, and a third dream called the ‘hula hula dream’, as well as the clinical material leading up to it.     

Waves of Being: Merleau-Ponty with Bion and Meltzer Toward an Ontology of Music

Phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty, early on, neglected music's theoretical value in favor of painting's. Later, however, he found that it is the transience of music that speaks to the phenomenological experience of Being. This transition from painting to music presents the possibility of an ontological understanding of music for psychoanalysis. For Freud, music and morality were both from a “beyond” that was an effect of neurosis. Drawing on psychoanalyst Bion's idea of container–contained, and his disciple Meltzer's application of this to art, as well as Bion's later innovation of the unknowable O, I apply Merleau-Ponty's distinction between painting and music to the therapeutic nature of art in order to see what sort of psychoanalytically significant revelation is obtained through music.