intuition – authentic analysis

You speak often of the “heart,” but not in sentimental terms, it seems to me.

E. Borgna: The “reasons of the heart” are those that move in St Augustine and that led even Heidegger to write that the essential things of life, i.e., birth, suffering, dying, can be grasped only if we leave behind the bright light of reason, acknowledging that there exists an alternative form of knowledge, which is the one of which Paschal or Scheler speaks, but also the Christian one, I believe. Proust identifies the reasons of the heart as intuition. But what is intuition? I usually give this example: a patient comes into the office, and even before he speaks, before he expresses something of his suffering, thanks to a perception of the invisible–which comes, without doubt, through looks, faces, the smiles that are sometimes tears, the tears that are sometimes smiles–you perceive instantly the deep core that is in him. How can an abstract, rational knowledge tell me something about the feelings, the emotions that others feel? What does rational knowledge have to do with the memory that makes me suddenly relive long-ago events–here is the “intermittent heart”–that are born again in that instant because the light I see this morning outside the window of my office is associated with the light I saw years ago over Monte Rosa, on another day, a day as crystalline and sunny as this one? God is perceptible by the heart and not by abstract reason, said Paschal.

Interview with Italian psychiatrist Eugenio Borgna

Q: Are you suggesting that the analytic experience can be a dehumanising once?

Bion: I think that there is a great danger of it. I come across a lot of what is thought to be scientific psychoanalysis, but it doesn’t remind me of anything except boredom.

The situation in the consulting room, the relationship between these two people, could be like the ashes of a fire. Is there any spark which could be blown into a flame? In this little bit I have described, we would have to examine, observe, devote care to mental debris – bits of what we have been taught, bits of what we have learnt, bit of what the patient has been taught. In analysis one is seeing the totality of debris. What has happened to the face of a man of forty-two? Why does he look twenty-five or sixty-two? Why does he say he is forty-two? It is all part of the debris. Do those pieces come together? Would you be able to put them together so that they make sense?

Q. (an inaudible reference, to ‘psychotic experience’)

Bion: The idea that it is a psychotic experience is very cerebral. In analysis we are concerned with something which might ultimately be expressible in cerebral terms, but that is not how it appears to us as practising analysts. That is one reason why we have to reconcile ourselves to the fact that patients do not come to us with little labels tied to them saying, ‘manic’, or ‘depressive’, or ‘manic-depressive’, or ‘schizophrenic’. If they do come with such labels we should regard them as more pieces of debris. I do not mean by calling it debris that it is not worthy of attention; I mean that it is something which has to be observed and scrutinized with very considerable care, otherwise you might throw away the necessary, vital spark. One cannot afford to cast aside imaginative conjectures on the grounds that they are not scientific – you might as well throw away the seed of a plant on the grounds that it is not an oak or a lily but just a piece of rubbish. This applies to all that goes on in your consulting room.

But I suggest that it would be worthwhile considering it not as your consulting room, but as your atelier. What sort of artist are you? Are you a potter? A painter? A musician? A writer? In my experience a great many analysts don’t really know what sort of artists they are.

Q. What if they are not artists?

Bion: Then they are in the wrong job. I don’t know what job is any good because even if they are not psychoanalysts they need to be artists in life itself. A mathematician can see that an algebraic formula is a beautiful one; a musician can hear a manuscript which is simply black marks on paper. Even using the language I know best, I cannot tell you what an ‘artist’ is; I prefer you to go beyond that word and see what I am trying to convey to you by this very inadequate word. It is certainly not somebody who is able to deceive your eyes, to make you think that there is a tree there when there isn’t one, but somebody who has made you able to see there really is a tree there and its roots even if they are underground.

I suggest that behind this forty-two-year-old man is hidden a person, and that person has roots, an unconscious which, Like the roots of a tree, is hidden from sight. There are not only branches which are ramified and have veins, but under the surface it has roots. So when this person comes into your room, what do you see? I am not asking simply what do you see with your eyes, but also what does your intuition enable you to see?

Wilfred Bion, Seminar in Paris; July 10th 1978