CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Adhesive identification
(1974)

In this lecture, the author traces Esther Bick's investigations

and his own clinicalflndings with autistic patients. to describe
a type of narcissistic identification that is different.from
projective identification and about which he had written at
length in Explorations ln Autism (1975). which appeared soon
afterwards. (See particularly chapter 9--on Dimensionality-of
that book.)

P
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sychoanalysis is such an essentially historical subject

and method that it really does not make sense to talk
about it in any way but historically. and, of course. we
have to start with Freud. However. history is like the law: the
law is what the courts do. and history is what historians say:
and my history is different from your history and you must not

This Is the transcript of an Informal talk to the William Alanson

White Psychoanalytic Society on 25 October 1974.

335

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expect it necessarily to correspond. It is just my way of under-

standing psychoanalytic history. It is a very peculiar science
that we have. I do not begin yet to understand how it works or
develops. and why sometimes it does not develop and some-
times it seems to shoot ahead. You can see in Freud's way of
working that while he thought himself an inductive scientist,
he certainly did not work purely inductively at all-he worked
deductively at times. The process of his development is inter-
estingly documented. We have in the marvellous and somewhat
horrific "Project for a Scientific Psychology~ (Freud, 1950a
[1887-1902)), a document that states with such clarity a mass
of preconceptions that he had to gradually whittle away and get
rid of in order to change from a neurophysiologist to the great
phenomenological psychologist that he eventually became. I
suppose all of us have to do that. We have from our education
and development a massive preconception of models and
theories and ideas that we gradually have to get rid of in order
to free ourselves to receive new impressions and to think new
thoughts and entertain new models. It seems to me an extra-
ordinarily difficult process: it tends inevitably to grind to a halt.
How is it that we get kicked forward? It seems to start mainly in
our consulting-rooms: when we are in trouble and nothing good
seems to be happening. we begin to think again. and what I am
going to present here is an outgrowth of being in trouble, and
trying to find new ways of thinking.
This process of "adhesive identification" that I am going to
describe is something Esther Bick and I began working on in
our own separa te ways and talking about together back in the
early 1960s after Melanie Klein's death. We were both terribly
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lonely, since the person who had been carrying the load was
now gone. Somebody, everybody. had to pick up the bit of it
that he could carry. During that time Esther Bick was working
in various ways. First of all she introduced infant observation
into the curriculum of the Tavistock Clinic training for child
psychotherapists. and in the Institute of Psycho-Analysis. She
was also treating some psychotic patients. children. and super-
vising the treatment of a large number of children. I remember
there came a period when she kept saying to me. "Oh. I don't
know how to talk about it. they are just like that" (sticking her
hands together). "It is something different." I did not know what

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 ADHESIVE IDENTIFICATION 337

she was talking about for a long time. I myself at that time was
doing my ordinary practice. which Is a mlxture of neurotic
patients. training cases. one or two schizophrenic patients. a
few children. and supervising a lot of work with children. I
began to find things with autistic children that Is also like
something stuck together. Gradually we came to something
that we think is new and interesting. but in order to under-
stand tt. one has to go back in history. and that is what I want
to do now.
Identification processes seem to me to have a very funny
place in Freud's writings. As phenomena. he seems to have
been very brilliant in observing identification processes: even
starting from the Studies in Hysteria (l895d) they are men-
tioned. "Elizabeth" was Identified with her mother and her
father. "Dora" was identified. The "Rat Man" was identified. and
you hear this over and over again and mentioned as having
something to do with imitation. something vaguely to do with
character. Then he came to the Leonardo (1910c) paper.
Although In many ways it is not a nice paper at all from the
point of view of art history. it does seem to me to be an
Important paper from the point of view of psychoanalytic his-
tory. because it is really the first time that Freud tries to take a
life as a whole thing and to try to understand it-a great move
forward for him-to separate the pathology from a matrlx of
health and life processes. Health did not seem to interest him
very much. He seems in his early writings to be more purely a
psychopathologist and not to be Interested in people. you might
say. The Leonardo paper starts something different: there he
speaks of Identification processes In a meaningful way that is
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connected with the beginnings of a concept of narcissism. and

he states that there Is something that he would like to call
narcissistic identifications. In his paper on the "Wolf Man"
(1918b (1914)). also. Freud seems to recognize narcissistic
identifications and to realize that they have something to do
with identity. something to do with distortions of identity.
Then. suddenly. Freud begins to take an interest in the
ideal ego and the ego ideal. and then finally the superego in the
1920s. The concept of identification comes to be used suddenly
in a very different way. Using Ferenczi's term. he speaks of
introjection into the ego and the establishment of a gradient

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within the ego by which a portion of it is separated off as the

superego, and this he calls an identification. That is very puzz-
ling, because what it seems to set up is an internal voice. an
observing function. a part of the ego that now observes the ego,
criticizes it. He seems quickly to forget the other ego ideal
function-that is, of encouraging and supporting the ego in
favour of the harsher. more restrictive and punitive aspects of
it. Somehow this conceptual use of the term "identification~ for
the process by which the superego is established does not seem
to fit with the phenomenological use of the term "identification~
as it is used in the case histories in particular. whereas I think
it has something to do with imitations and being like somebody
else: the superego does not seem to be. as Freud sees it. part of
the ego or to induce character manifestations. Ifyoujudge from
the little paper on the anal character (1908b) or the one on
"Some Character Types Met with in Psycho-Analytic Work"
(1916d). Freud's idea of character still seems to be bound to the
libido theory and the way in which libido is diverted. inhibited,
sublimated, reacted against. and so on. His idea was that
character is built up through the management of the vicissi-
tudes of instinct. This problem has puzzled me greatly, and
having taught it for many years, I have always tried to under-
stand it. It seems to me that if you compare Freud's paper on
Mourning and Melancholia (l917e [1915)) with Abraham's pa-
per on melancholia and manic-depressive states. you can see
that there is a very important difference in the kind of model
they had in their minds. Freud in Mourning and Melancholia
gets into a terrific muddle about who is abusing whom. Is the
ego ideal abusing the ego? Is the ego abusing this object that
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has been taken inside? On the other hand, Abraham is quite

clear about it and speaks about it in very concrete terms. He
says that an object has been attacked Internally and turned
into faeces: it has then been defecated out and then compul-
sively reintrojected by a process that has the meaning of eating
the faeces , and that this faecal object is then established inter-
nally. Freud could never have talked in this way. and for a very
important reason. He could not get rid of the preconceptions of
the neurophysiological sort on the one hand and the so-called
hydrostatic model of instinct on the other in order to conceptu-
alize the mind as a place. as a space. Nowhere in his writings is

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 ADHESIVE IDENTIFICATION 339

there a conceptualization of spaces. He comes a little closer to it

in the Schreber case (Freud. 1911c (1910)). where he talks
about the world destruction fantasy. He talks a little bit there
about what world was destroyed-inner or outer-but then he
hedges it in a very peculiar way and says that it was a world
that had been built up through the precipitate of identifica-
tions. He uses the words "identifications" and "sublimations". I
have never understood what he meant by that. He also hedges
the problem. because you may remember that he speaks of this
world as having fallen to pieces by the withdrawal of libido, as if
a kind of magnet could draw the mortar out from between the
bricks and the thing would just fall to pieces. But then. as a
footnote. in which he quotes Heine's poem, he makes it quite
clear that it has been smashed to pieces. It has not just crum-
bled from neglect or withdrawal of Interest. It has been
smashed to pieces.
I think one can see evidence that Freud had some sort of
difficulty about allowing himself to shift to a model in which
there was a conception of something very concrete-the inside
of the mind as a place where things could really happen and
not just be imagined. This term "Imagined" is just not good
enough to describe the events of the mind. It fudges the issue
and does not account for the relentlessness and inevitability
with which events follow one another. and particularly the
inevitability with which attacks upon objects in this inner
space. which damage these objects. produce psychopathologi-
cal changes that really have to be painfully repaired and
restored in order for the process of recovery to take place.
This is where Freud was and where he remained until the
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end of his life. In the 1920s. when Melanie Klein, who was
studying with Abraham at the time. began to work with chil-
dren. he almost immediately began to hear things from these
children about spaces. and particularly about a very special
space experienced in a very concrete way that was Inside them-
selves. in their bodies. and in particular inside their mothers'
bodies. This evidence had not really been unavailable to Freud.
because if you read Little Hans (Freud. 1909b). you see that he
talked about the same things. He talked about the time when
little sister Hanna was inside the stork box. the stork box was
inside the carriage. and the carriage was obviously his mother.

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and it was very closely connected with his fear of loaded wag-
ons falling over, and the relationship of the horse to the wagon.
and so on. Freud saw all that quite clearly. but he did not take
any interest in it. He did not take any interest at all in Little
Hans' proliferation of fantasy about the time before Hanna was
born and the time before he was born. when he and Hanna
were together in the stork box. and the things they did. and the
things they ate, and the places they went. and so on. Freud
sweeps all of that aside and attributes it to his pulling his
father's leg and having revenge on him because of the stork
story. as much as to say-1 think, Freud says-something like.
"if you expect me to believe the stork story. you've got to believe
this rubbishM. So he just sweeps it aside. That was the evidence
that Melanie Klein did not sweep aside. and which put her on to
this whole question of spaces-spaces inside the self. spaces
inside objects. and a place where concrete things happened
that had relentless and evident consequences and could be
studied as part of the transference process. To me this is really
a major move. and it was from the study of processes of
phantasy related to these spaces that our concepts of the pre-
genital Oedipus complex and the concreteness of internal
objects-the prelude to the genital Oedipus complex. part-
object relationships. and so on-originate. All of the work she
produced in the 1930s stemmed from this and was very
controversial at that time. It took her until 1946 to make any
headway at all with the problem of identification. It was in 1946
that she presented a paper called "Notes on Some Schizoid
MechanismsM. in which she described splitting processes and
projective identification. Under the term "projective identifica-
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tion~ she described an omnipotent phantasy whereby. in

combination with splitting processes. a part of the self can be
split off and projected inside an object and by that means take
possession of its body and its mentality and its identity. She
described some of the consequences that arise from this con-
fusion of identity, in particular claustrophobic anxieties and
some of the severe persecutory anxieties related to claustro-
phobia.
The history of the so-called Kleinian group from 1946 on
is by and large the history of the investigation of projective
identification and splitting processes. The basic work done by

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Melanie Klein on the pre-genital Oedipus complex and the

technical development in child analysis are her original con-
tributions. From 1946 on the people who worked with her
really got their teeth into this. because it threw up a terrific
snowstorm of phenomena and technical problems. It greatly
widened the range of patients who could be approached
through the psychoanalytic method. It encouraged people to
apply the psychoanalytic method to more psychotic patients
and schizophrenics without modifying the method. It gave them
conceptual tools with which they could work. to explore phe-
nomenology that they not only could not work with but could
not even notice previously.
The point about projective identification is that it is the
description of a process by which a narcissistic identification
comes about-that is. a process of the omnipotent phantasy of
splitting off and projecting a part of the self into an external or
internal object. This process results in phenomena of identi-
fication with the object of an immediate and somewhat
delusional sort. which is the identification aspect of projective
identification . Then it throws up a spectrum of phenomena
related to the projection itself. which is related to the emotional
and phantasy experiences of the part of the self that is inside.
leading into claustrophobic anxieties and related things like
hypochondria. depersonalization states. confusion about time
and space. and so on.
When I came on the scene in London in 1954. projective
identification was used by the people in our group as synony-
mous with narcissistic identifications. We were comparing it
with the processes of introjective identifications which Freud
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had described in relation to the genital Oedipus conflict and the

establishment of the superego. and which Melanie Klein had
moved to an earlier period in development by describing the
introjection of the breast. both the good and bad breast. as
part-objects. These internalized part-objects. preludes to the
superego. she called superego. or precursors of the superego.
This process of introjective identification was being understood
as something very different from a narcissistic identification in
that it was not something that happened in a moment-an
object was set up internally through introjection. and this
object. primarily through its ego-ideal functions . would prom-

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ulgate in the ego-or really in the self. as she would speak of

it-a thrust for development along certain lines, an aspiration
to become like the object. worthy of it. all of which was part of
what she described as the depressive position. At that time. we
rather thought that the problem of narcissistic identifications
was in a sense solved. conceptually speaking: that they were
produced by projective identifications. and that was that. There
was just the matter of exploring what began to look like an
almost limitless field of phenomenology related to projective
identification and its consequences. We got quite used to the
term-it is not a very nice tenn. in the sense that it is not
at all poetic-but it came easily off the tongue. and we found
ourselves saying. "projective identification", "projective identifi-
cation". and we got quite blase about it and I think quite
careless about it in a way. Of course we also began to notice
that the interpretation along the lines of projective identifica-
tion did not seem to carry any weight in certain situations. We
were in trouble with certain kinds of patients and saw that
something else was going on that certainly was connected with
identification processes: it certainly was connected with narcis-
sism. but it seemed to have quite a different phenomenology
from what we had gathered together under the rubric of projec-
tive identification.
The first paper about it was finally produced by Esther Bick
called the "The Function of the Skin in Early Object Relations"
in 1968. There she described something connected with very
early infantile development that she became aware of in her
work with mothers and infants-something that had to do with
states of catastrophic anxiety in certain infants whose mothers
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seemed somehow unable to contain them. When these infants

became anxious. their mothers became anxious too. and then
the infant became more anxious. and a spiral of anxiety tended
to develop. which ended with the infant going into a state of
some sort of quivering and a kind of disintegrated. disorganized
state that was not screaming. nor a tantrum. just something
that one would have to describe as disorganized. Esther Bick
began to observe this phenomenon also in certain patients.
generally patients who. on the whole. did not seem terribly ill. in
candidates. in people who came because of problems like poor
work accomplishment. unsatisfactory social lives. vague patho-

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logical complaints: In people who were somehow on the periph-

ery of the analytic community and wanted to have an analysis
and could not quite say why. She began to observe that these
patients In their dream life and In their waking life were subject
to states of temporary disintegration very much like the Infants.
Suddenly they just would not be able to do anything. They
would have to sit down. and they would shake. It was not that
they were anxious in the ordinary sense of an anxiety attack-
they just felt muddled. paralysed. and confused and could not
do anything. They just had to sit down or lie down until it went
away. The material of the analysis at these times began to throw
up Images like a sack of potatoes that got wet and all the
potatoes spllled out. or where the patient suddenly wet herself.
or in which a patient's teeth fell out. or his arms fell off. or
things like that. quite painlessly-which described disintegra-
tion processes of some sort. of something not held together. not
contained. Bick began to notice that these people all had distur-
bances related to the skin or their experience of the skin-not so
much dennatologic disorders as how they felt about the skin.
that it was too thin. that it bruised easily. that it was easily
lacerated. that It did not feel as if it had any strength to it. and
so on. She discovered that this was a very pervasive kind of
experience for these people: they were not properly held to-
gether by a good skin. but they had other ways of holding
themselves together. In her paper on the skin. she describes
some of these: Some of them held themselves together intellec-
tually with their Intelligent thinking and talking, with the "gift of
the gab". They could hold themselves together with explana-
tions, and they had explanations for everything. Bick felt she
could observe situations in the infants who were disorganized
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showing that early verbalization had been encouraged. and they

became children who were not prone to activity but to talking all
the time: they turned Into terrific chatterboxes. She observed In
some adult patients that they seemed to hold themselves to-
gether muscularly: they did callisthenics. weight-lifting, and
athletics, and their attitude towards life was a muscular one-
that you did not think about a problem. you did it first and saw
it happen. and If It did not work out you did It another way. but
you moved your muscles. Esther Bick discovered that she could
also trace processes in these Infants where their mothers

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encouraged them to be rather aggressive little boxers and to

attack the mother with their fists. laughing in an excited way. It
was a way of overcoming these states of anxiety or disintegra-
tion, and she began to call these "secondary skin formations",
or "substitute skin formations".
All the time she was describing this to me back in the
1960s, she was also going like this (hands together). and she
said. "they are sticky, they stick". You feel in the analysis that
this is a patient who does not intend ever to finish the analysis.
that they are on to something good and they expect to be with
you for the duration. plus six months. She also thought that
these patients had some sort of difficulty about introjection
and that they could not use projective identification very much.
that their conception of their relationships was a very external
one. that their values were very external and not generated
by internal relationships. not based on internal principles. not
based on observation of themselves. their own reactions. but,
as it were. looking in the mirror of other people's eyes all the
time, copying other people. imitating. fashion-conscious. pre-
occupied with manners and social forms and social status and
things of that sort. not necessarily in an offensive way or even
in a way that one would have noticed. In fact. many of them
were "well-adjusted"-a hateful expression. They were well-
adjusted people and people who would not ordinarily have
come to analysis. had they not in most instances lived on the
fringes of the analytic community where going into analysis
was the thing to do. They most often came to analysis because
some friend of theirs was in analysis.
Esther Bick had a vague feeling that there was something
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wrong with their identification processes: they somehow did

not use introjection very well: they did not learn in a very
experiential way from really having experiences but metely by
imitating other people. Of course. our educational system is
right up their alley. you might say. so that they were often
educationally very successful-rote learners. imitators. unim-
aginative.
At this time. I was working with a group of child psycho-
therapists who were treating autistic children. I had worked
with autistic children in the States. and I began supervising
colleagues through U1e late 1950s and the 1960s: some eight or

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ten cases of autism that were being treated by psychoanalytic

methods drifted Into supervision with me. We finally set up a
little group and began to study and reView the material. We
began to discover things about autistic children that began to
ring a bell: in some way. these discoveries were connected also
with phenomena that Esther Bick was obserVing. Without going
into the whole business of autistic children. I would like to
emphasize a few of the major things that we discovered and
that impressed us very much.
First of all. what impressed us about these children was
that when we looked back after several years of psychoanalytic
treatment of a child. we felt we could diVide the phenomenology
that was manifest in the consulting-room into two categories.
First. there was the category of purely autistic phenomena.
which remained the same and never changed. consisting of an
assortment of rather disparate items of behaviour with differ-
ent objects in the room and involVing in a simple way particular
senses and very simple activities (a child might always. when
he came into a room. go and suck the latch on the window.
or go to smell the Plasticine. or go and lick the glass of the
window: actions like that-very simple. very sensual). At first.
of course. we had to assume that every item was meaningful
and it must be related to every other item of behaviour: that all
behaViour was strung together by a thread of meaning. and so
on. These items did not change. They only shrank. as it were.
from occupying nine-tenths of the session to begin with. to
eventually occupying one-tenth of the session. They might even
clear on Wednesday and only be present on Friday or Monday.
before or after the weekend. Those seem to be the autistic
items.
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Then there was a second category of items that were more

complicated: they were not repetitive. When you culled them
out from the autistic matrix. you could string them together.
and described to someone. they would sound like the ordinary
play of a neurotic or psychotic child in the playroom that could
be examined psychoanalytically and sometimes even under-
stood a bit. So we felt we were seeing in this matrix of autistic
phenomena something very simple. very meaningless. very
sensual. very repetitive. and in a sense a flight from mental life.
In this sea of meaninglessness there were little items of mean-

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ingful experience that gradually began to agglutinate. to fill up

the Wednesdays. fill up the middle of the week or the middle of
the tenn. These children turned out to have incredible intoler-
ance to separation. We did not at first think of these two
categories in tenns of dimensionality of life-space: we thought
of them in tenns of "mental" and "non-mental". as if in the
autistic phenomena we were seeing something equivalent to
what you might see in a petit mal seizure or in the automatism
of the comatose patient.
It was only after we studied in retrospect children who had
been in treatment for three. four. five years that we began to
think in tenns of dimensionality and in tenns of space. and of
spaces and spatial relations. and with it. of course. the effect
upon time relationships. What gradually emerged for us as we
thought and talked about it was that outside the area of their
autism. in what we came to think of as their post-autism. their
post-autistic psychosis. these children functioned as if there
really were no spaces. there were only surfaces. two dimen-
sions. Things were not solid, only surfaces that they might
lean up against or that they might feel. smell. touch. or get
a sensation from. There were surfaces. and they leaned up
against them: they leaned up against the analyst. they leaned
up against the chest of drawers. They could not seem to crawl
into places. like most children do. You would think they never
had pockets-nothing ever went into their pockets. They did
not seem to hold things well. Items just seemed to fall through
them. They also gave the impression that they did not listen
very well. You felt very strongly that your words went right
through them. Their responses often seemed so delayed that
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you felt that all that had been left behind of what you had said
was a kind of musical disturbance that they eventually reacted
to or reacted against. Their relationships to inside and outside
the playroom were very characteristic in that they seemed not
really to distinguish between being inside and being outside.
With one little boy it was quite typical that when he came into
the playroom. he would rush to the window to see if there were
any birds in the garden. and at first. if he saw any birds. he
would be terrifically triumphant. We assumed this meant that
he was inside and they were outside. But then in a moment it
changed. and he felt very persecuted and began shaking his fist

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 ADHESIVE IDENTIFICATION 34 7

at them. and then he would run over to the analyst and look
into his mouth or look Into his ears. and it seemed fairly clear
that a reversal had taken place. From being Inside and the
birds outside. It had suddenly reversed. and he was outside
and they were inside-inside the analyst. Inside the building.
undistinguished by him. Another child. for instance, tended to
draw pictures of houses, one on each side of the paper. and
when you held it up to the light. you saw that the doors were
superimposed-a kind of house where you open the front door
and step out of the back door at the same time.
We came to understand that these children were having
difficulty In conceptualizing or experiencing a space that could
be closed. In a space that cannot be closed. there is just no
space at all. Then we had the exciting experience of seeing
some of them begin to close these orifices. One boy, for in-
stance. went through a period in which he papered the walls of
the playroom and papered the walls of his room at home. and
then he began to draw pictures of maps. and these maps
consisted mainly of the route between his home and the con-
sulting-room. At first these pictures seemed to be of terrible
things happening-absolute chaos. disorder. police cars that
seemed to tum into criminals one minute. soldiers that turned
into madmen the next. and so on. Gradually. over a period of
months. stop-lights and little Royal Canadian mounted police-
men began to appear in these drawings. and slowly order
seemed to settle. Then he began to draw pictures of the Inside
of the clinic where he was being seen. in which there began
to be rooms. There began to be doors. rooms began to have
separate functions. and these pictures were very exciting. be-
Copyright © 1994. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

cause they all looked like the insides of bodies. They did not
look like the insides of buildings at all. So something could
happen with these children that enabled them to take an object
that was so open that getting Inside it was impossible because
you fell out and the inside was like a house without a roof. it
rained inside as well as out. so you might as well stay out. They
gradually began to close the orifices of their objects to make a
space. and development-particularly language development-
began to take place in them as it had not occurred before.
It was at that time that we began to think about
dimensionality and of the autistic phenomena proper as a kind

Meltzer, D. (1994). Sincerity and other works : Collected papers of donald meltzer. Taylor & Francis Group.
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 348 COLLECTED PAPERS OF DONALD MELTZER

of mindlessness in which there was only a sort of tropism

relationship. with direction. For instance. a child would come
in and run right up to the window and suck on the latch or run
between two doors. one door which he smelled and the other
door which he licked. Then there was the two-dimensional
surface relationship to objects in which there were no spaces
and in which therefore identification processes could not take
place and development did not seem to occur because they
could neither use projective identification. which required a
space to get into. nor introjective identification. which required
a space that you could take something into. We did notice that
these children had another kind of identification. something
that we felt we could really call imitation. One could see it in
their posture sometimes. one could hear it in their tone of
voice. Suddenly out of a little mite of a boy a deep voice would
come out. saying "bad boy". One could notice it in relation to
their clothing: they would insist on Items that were the same
colour as the analyst had worn the day before. One could notice
it in that it was difficult for them to take an interest in anything
new: it was always the thing that had interested and attracted
the attention of the analyst that would be repeated over and
over again.
We began to see a link in what we were noticing with the
autistic children and what Esther Blck was observing with her
patients and with the infants. We began to think that we were
now observing a new type of narcissistic identification. and that
we could no longer think of projective identification as being
synonymous with narcissistic identification but had to think
of identification as a broader term in the sense that defence
Copyright © 1994. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

became a broader term and repression became subsumed

under it. We had to think of narcissistic identification as the
broader term. with projective identification subsumed under it.
and we decided to call this new fonn of narcissistic identifica-
tion adhesive identifl.cation. Some sort of identification process
took place. which we thought was very closely connected with
mimicry and very closely connected with the kind of shallow-
ness and extemalization of values that Esther Bick was observ-
ing in the patients that I have described to you. Time seemed
not Implied. as in four-dimensionality. In fact. a proper relation
to time is a very sophisticated achievement. We began to ob-

Meltzer, D. (1994). Sincerity and other works : Collected papers of donald meltzer. Taylor & Francis Group.
Created from tau on 2024-12-14 10:47:15.
 ADHESIVE IDENTIFICATION 349

serve that the two-dimensional patients had a very osclllatlng

relationship to time. that It went In one direction and then It
went back and then It went In another direction and went back,
and it did not really move. When they came out of this and
became more three-dimensional. concerned with spaces. they
had a much more circular relationship with time. in which It
went around and It really was cyclical. Day and night were
different. but It always came back to the same spot. It did not
get anywhere. and you did not really grow older: something
grew bigger. something shrivelled up and died. but you really
did not get older in any inevitable way. Ageing was a kind of
accident due to poor planning. or negligence. or the aggression
of other people. The progression to four-dimensionality, to an
appreciation of time as a linear process and to a lifetime as
a thing with a definable beginning and end came much later.
Little Hans thought that he had always been In the stork box
before he came out. That was a fairly sophisticated idea and
had something to do with the achievement of what Melanie
Klein had described as the depressive position-that Is, a shift
from egocentricity and preoccupation with one's own self.
safety, and comfort to a primary concern with the welfare of
one's objects. These processes connected with confusion about
time. and attitudes towards time could now be noticed more in
the phenomenology of the consulting-room and brought into
the interpretive work. So we coined the term "adhesive identifi-
cation", and the more we thought about it. the more we began
to notice that it played a part in much of our patients' lives
and in our own lives. This was particularly true in relation to
values-the difficulty in establishing internal values. that is, an
Copyright © 1994. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

internal source of values. For instance. one noticed in people

who were artistic and seemed to have good taste in art and to
be very knowledgeable. that they often reported that they knew
very well that there was something wrong because when they
went to a gallery they always looked at the title and who painted
it before they looked at the picture. because they wanted to
know its value before they actually looked at it. This was. In a
sense. a sort of prototype of their altitude towards the world.
They really wanted to know the price of things. because they
had no basis internally for es tablishing their own personal
evaluation of it in terms of its meaningfulness to them. We

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 350 COLLECTED PAPERS OF DONALD MELTZER

discovered patches of shallowness present in everybody.

patches in which emotionality was very attenuated-not in a
sense of flatness. but as a kind of thinness. a kind of
squeakiness of emotional response.
We think that in our own way of working we are beginning to
open up a new area of phenomenology. we have a new concep-
tual tool with which we can pry things open and begin to see
phenomena that we had not noticed before. Where it will lead
and how it will enrich our work is a bit too soon to tell.
Copyright © 1994. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

Meltzer, D. (1994). Sincerity and other works : Collected papers of donald meltzer. Taylor & Francis Group.
Created from tau on 2024-12-14 10:47:15.