Authentic Analysis

Now, I’d like just to mention the term “free-floating attention”. The idea being that this is the term for the appropriate state of mind of the psychoanalyst. No countertransference, no nonsense of that sort, free-floating attention. Or, as I have put it, get rid of your memory and your desire, so that you expose yourself to the full treatment. Now, you can see why I haven’t pressed this point very much, because the nearer that you can come thanks to your own personal analysis and so forth, to being as receptive as possible, the more you are going to appreciate to the full, the blast of an experience of this kind when you are actually there, when you are really exposed to it. It is, I can only say, “indescribable”.

(2013-07-31). Wilfred Bion: Los Angeles Seminars and Supervision (Kindle Locations 1688-1693). Karnac Books. Kindle Edition.

There may be modes of thinking to which no known realization has so far been found to approximate. Hallucinosis, hypochondriasis and other mental ‘diseases’ may have a logic, a grammar and a corresponding realization, none of which has so far been discovered. They may be difficult to discover because they are obscured by a ‘memory’, or a ‘desire’, or an ‘understanding’ to which they are supposed—wrongly—to approximate. Unless the obscurity can be circumvented or penetrated it will remain unobserved, as the galactic centre or the origin of the universe remains unobserved

Excerpt From: Wilfred R. Bion. “A Memoir of the Future.” Karnac Books Ltd. iBooks.
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