Tag: Bion

appreciating the reality of analysis

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It is truly dreadful the way in which psychoanalytic theory can become so learned, so prestigious, that I would certainly hate to try to understand it myself; in fact, I don’t waste my time trying to. I do occasionally get bombarded with it: while trying to say something to me, the patient is constantly interrupted by his own high-powered psychoanalytic knowledge. There is the same difficulty at the other pole, where there appears to be an inability to understand or to appreciate the reality of analysis.

Bion, Wilfred R. (2005-06-09). The Tavistock Seminars (Kindle Locations 1497-1501). Karnac Books. Kindle Edition.

psychoanalysis and truth

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But the truth is independent of us. Psychoanalysis is an attempt to know what it is that interrupts us, or makes it impossible to think clearly or to have any respect for the facts that are available to us ; it is an attempt to investigate what it is in ourselves that causes so much trouble, not because we cause the trouble but because it is the only thing about which we can say anything at all.

Bion, Wilfred R. (2005-06-09). The Tavistock Seminars (Kindle Locations 1481-1483). Karnac Books. Kindle Edition.

“free-floating attention”

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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.