Martha Harris (1919-1987) was one of the most influential and also one
of the most loved psychoanalysts of the generation that trained with
Melanie Klein. She also worked with Wilfred Bion, and wrote many books
and papers on psychoanalytic training and child development. Her
colleague James Gammill cites Mrs Klein as saying: She is one of the
best people I have ever known for the psychoanalysis of children ... and
she has a mind of her own. Harris was responsible for the child
psychotherapy training at the Tavistock Clinic from 1960 onwards,
developing laterally the method founded on infant observation that had
been put in place by Esther Bick. She established cross-clinic work
discussion groups, a pioneering schools' counselling course (in
collaboration with her husband Roland Harris), and individual work with
disturbed children in the school environment. Her belief that
psychoanalytic ideas could and should travel, both geographically and
across the professions, led to her seeding the Tavi Model in many other
countries through regular teaching trips, in company with her later
husband Donald Meltzer. Her influence was not as a theorist, but as a
teacher with an extraordinary capacity to engage processes of
introjective learning in both students and readers. This tribute by some
of those who studied with her is not simply testimony to a remarkable
teacher and clinician whose wisdom has been rarely equalled; it also
offers inspiration to others who may be struggling to find ways of using
psychoanalytic ideas imaginatively in a variety of contexts - clinical,
social or scholarly - in what can at times appear to be an unreceptive
world.
