And even angels…had a ladder to go to heaven by steps (1)

Clinical implications of the notion of psychoanalytic intuition

Avner Bergstein

 (This is an abbreviated and modified version of an article published in 2022 in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 103:2, 246-263)

(1)  "And even angels, whose home is heaven, and who are winged too, yet had a ladder to go to heaven by steps":  John Donne, Meditation II, p. 12

I would like to begin with Bion's words in 1967, which we may be just beginning to grasp. He says: "…We’re using an invention of the human race, the ability to talk... It is rightly or wrongly our chosen weapon. We talk. We talk to children, we talk to even babies, and we talk (or try to talk) to our patients. The trouble arises if the language is not sufficiently developed to be able to deal with the phenomena that we want to deal with. So far … one could say that psychoanalysis has at last come to the stage where it is able to scratch at the surface of things. Looked at from another angle, of course, it goes far deeper than any other form of communication in a relationship that anybody knows of so far. But from the point of view of what we want to do, especially if we are going to have to deal with patients which are not really like the sort of patient which is spoken of in classical psychoanalysis, then not only are we to treat these patients, but we have to invent the methods by which we are going to treat them.

"It seems to me", Bion goes on to say, "that there’s no doubt at all … about the reality of what we deal with ... But, at the same time, we have not really developed the tools, the technique, and so on, which is necessary if we are going to go further and further into that domain. And I don’t think anybody else is going to help us. I don’t think they can, because I don’t think anybody…can really understand that we are dealing with a special kind of reality" (Bion, 1967a, p. 66).

Bion's words seem to echo Freud's intuitive notion when he wrote that "we recognize that the Ucs. does not coincide with the repressed; it is still true that all that is repressed is Ucs., but not all that is Ucs. is repressed.... [W]e find ourselves thus confronted by the necessity of postulating a third Ucs., which is not repressed (Freud, 1923, p. 18). 

I would like to reflect on the way we might approach unrepressed unconscious experience as well as the unknowable, ultimate reality of the psychoanalytic experience. Superficially, an analytic session may appear featureless or devoid of interest, yet as Bion (1965) cautions, there should be no occasion when the analyst is not aware that they are in the presence of intense emotion. And yet, this emotional experience is often 'invisible to mortal sight', ineffable, a thought that has not found a thinker to think it. It is an emotional experience which we are only barely aware of, ungraspable in thought or language, often concealed by 'the deafening noise of the patient's and analyst's words'. Drawing on both Freud's conceptualization of 'attention' and Bion's emphasis on the power of observation, I wish to consider the clinical implications of the notion of psychoanalytic intuition as a primary tool in this endeavor of approaching unknowable ultimate reality.*

Intuition is often described as an unmediated knowing or understanding of truth, not supported by any information derived from a familiar sensual source. It is thus often seen as close to mystical revelation (de Bianchedi, 1991). John Berger (1960), the art critic and novelist, writes of imagination, that it is not as is sometimes thought, the ability to invent; it is the ability to disclose that which exists. To my mind, intuition too, is the ability to disclose that which exists. I wouldd therefore like to suggest that intuition is founded upon the analyst's sharpening of their capacity for attention and observation, as evident in Bion's clinical descriptions. 

I will try to unfold what I mean by these two processes. 

In one of his earliest papers, Language and the Schizophrenic (1955), Bion describes a patient who had been lying on the couch, silent, for some twenty minutes. During that time Bion had become aware of a growing sense of anxiety and tension in himself. As the silence continued he became aware of a fear that the patient was meditating a physical attack on him, even though there was no outward change in the patient's posture. As the tension grew, and even though the patient said nothing, Bion shared with the patient his feeling that he had been pushing into him (that is, evoking in the analyst) his fear that he might murder him. Bion noticed that the patient now clenched his fists so tight that the skin over the knuckles became white. The silence was unbroken but at the same time the tension in the room decreased. Bion assumed, and interpreted, that now that this rage and fear, of which the patient may not have been consciously aware, had been articulated and verbalized, the patient could take them back in and feel enraged or afraid, rather than unconsciously communicate these emotions through primal communication verging on acting out. Bion does not give us much information as to how he arrived at his thought, except that he waited for impressions to pile up until he felt he was in a position to make his interpretation. Bion seems to have intuited his notion relying on close observation and attention to his own emotional experience, gradually gathering his impressions.

Bion now realized that the analyst, who attempts to make contact with irrepresentable, unmentalized, ineffable psychic reality, must be prepared to discover that for a considerable time the only evidence on which an interpretation can be based is afforded by the analyst's own emotional experience.

A few years later, in his paper On Hallucination, Bion (1958) is much more meticulous in describing his observations, and goes into the minutest details in order to describe how he had arrived at his intuitive notion that the patient was in fact hallucinated in the session itself, even though the patient himself did not verbally report any such hallucination. We can see Bion's capacity for observation of hallucinations as phenomena of the consulting room. Bion closely describes the patient's behavior, much of which seems unrepresentational, from the minute he enters the room until the moment he lies on the couch, probably not more than a couple of minutes, described over almost two pages. He describes his observation of the patient's and his own every movement, every quivering, until the moment when he becomes at-one with the patient's transformation of his emotional experience and 'sees' the patient's hallucination. However, this was not a moment of revelation that arrived out of nowhere, but as Bion stresses, it had emerged, or evolved, over years of being attentive and receptive to the minute fragments of an emotional experience dispersed in analytic space, until it was finally borne in on him. And yet, the moment when it is borne in on him, may be seen as a quantum leap, whereby its sudden emergence is often inexplicable.  

Bion (1967b), as always, laments his inability to truthfully convey the totality of his emotional experience in words. He is aware that the only description he can give is in terms appropriate to sensuous experience, although the experience also had psychic reality that is not representable by the sensuous reality. Our language, as Meltzer (2000) writes, is very rich in words for describing objects and functions, but very poor in words for describing emotions.

In Attacks on Linking, Bion (1959) realizes that even though the so-called psychotic patient appears to have no dreams, his dreams consists of material that is present, but so minutely fragmented, and projected into limitless space, that it is denuded of any visible component, and hence appears invisible.  The analyst thus has to take further steps in order to 'see' what is sensuously invisible. 

Of Freud, Bion (1961) wrote that his "investigation of what he believed originally to be sick people…has turned out to be no less than an investigation of the human mind itself" (p. 22). Bion seems to have followed a similar path. His experience with so-called psychotic patients, in whom thinking was defected and their verbalizations incoherent or utterly mute, led him to recognize that a patient's hallucination may be a prototype of the non-sensuous, unthinkable experience that the analyst needs to be able to 'observe', or intuit. He further recognized that any psychical or emotional experience is mostly ineffable and sensuously invisible, and that he could hardly rely on verbal thought in truthfully apprehending psychic reality.

In fact, the so-called psychotic patient and the psychoanalyst find themselves in the same predicament. Both are trying to deal with a real and almost palpable experience, and yet one that has no sensuous realization, which cannot be thought or mentalized, even though felt to be at the tip of one's fingers. These are 'the ghost of psychoanalysis'. It is an emotional reality one has no doubt of, even though it is as yet unrepresented – a "no-thing" in Bion's words (Bion, 1965). The domain of thought may be conceived of as a space occupied by no-things. Thinking thus entails the capacity to tolerate the no-thing, that is to say, to let go of the sensuous aspects of reality so as to open oneself to its non-sensuous, psychic aspects, and tolerate the often-painful meaning they carry, or alternatively, to bear the pain entailed in the meaningless experience. In the absence of a capacity to tolerate the no-thing, the psychotic personality is compelled to deal with this reality by enforcing a hallucinatory form onto the unbearable formless experience. Any form, any meaning, be it as painful as may be, is better than formlessness meaninglessness. In the absence of a capacity to bear psychic pain, to tolerate one's doubts, losses, remorse and torments, the individual collapses to hallucinatory bodily pains, ideologies and explanations that seem to imbue the meaningless experience with some apparent meaning. The analyst, for their part, often deals with the as-yet formless, meaningless emotional experience with a precocious interpretation, again, a hallucination, "artificially produced – [a] container intended to hold in, imprison, inoculate the emotional experience the personality feels too feeble to contain without danger of rupture…" (Bion, 1992, p. 67).

Hallucination may thus be seen as the inverse of intuition due to the incapacity to tolerate the no-thing. Thus, the psychotic's hallucination had become the basis of Bion's conception of analytic intuition as a non-sensuous phenomenon and of the sensuously invisible nature of the emotional experience to be intuited. In fact, I suggest that Bion proceeds from an attempt to get in touch with a so-called psychotic part of the personality that lacks a good enough capacity for verbal thought and for being in contact with reality, up to an apprehension of an ineffable, unthinkable psychic reality beyond the reach of the human mind (Bergstein, 2019). 

At first, when encountering irrepresentable and hallucinatory phenomena, Bion noted that his interpretations leaned on his use of Klein's theory of projective identification, first to illuminate his emotional experience, and then to frame the interpretation. However, he was not satisfied with this conception of projective identification which presupposes the development a three-dimensional space into which parts of the personality are projected. He came to recognize that the analyst dealing with so-called psychotic (I would just say, psychic) transformations, is obliged to deal with phenomena that are beyond symbolization and are intolerant of the restrictive nature of symbolization. The analyst is then in a domain that has no finite boundaries.

Attention, Observation and intuition

Freud (1911) speaks of attention as a function instituted to search the outer world, associated with the development of a capacity to contact reality.

Following Bion, the function of attention may be elaborated to encompass the scanning of the outer and inner world, attending to the nuances of reality sensuous and psychic, both patient's and analyst's. Bion's elaboration of this concept implies a paradoxical, receptive state of mind oriented towards invariant, ultimate reality, perpetually flickering between sensuous and psychic aspects of reality. 

To my mind, attention is in fact an essential part of the analyst's intuition, and the function that promotes it. Furthermore, "intuition", Bion says, "is a term which I can use for purposes of mental observation" (1973, p. 39).

Throughout his work, Bion unfolds his notion of psychoanalysis as a theory of observation. In fact, Bion's concern is not with psychoanalytical theories of the personality and its development, but with the theory of psychoanalytical observation of the personality (Meltzer, 1978) and, especially, of the psychoanalytic session. 

Bion writes, "The analyst, to observe correctly, must be sensitive to as many of the phenomena…as possible. The more nearly he is able to approximate to this ideal, the nearer he is to the first essential in psycho-analysis…correct observation. The complement of the first essential is the last essential—correct interpretation. By 'first' essential I mean not only priority in time but priority in importance, because if an analyst can observe correctly there is always hope; it is of course a big 'if'. Without the last essential [correct interpretation] he is not an analyst, but if he has the first essential [correct observation] he may become one in time; without it he can never become one, and no amount of theoretical knowledge will save him" (1963, p. 14). 

Yet it is not only with one's five senses, but prominently with one's 'inner eye' that one can 'observe' and attend to the faintest nuances of the nature of the patient's and analyst's psychic reality. It is true that meaning, as Bion (1961) writes, does not inhere in sensuously observable phenomena but is something that man seeks to abstract from phenomena. And yet, as Ernest Fenollosa writes and Bion cites, 'My subject is poetry, not language. Yet the roots of poetry are in language' (in Bion, 1992, p. 323). Even though emotional experience is primarily non-sensuous, can we, as Sandler (2005) asks, conceive them without the port of entry, the senses?

It is true that in his later writings Bion often passionately asserts that "psychoanalytic 'observation' … is not concerned with sense impressions or objects of sense" (1967c, p. 136), or that "records based on perception of that which is sensible are records only of the psycho-analytically irrelevant" (1967b, p. 1). However, such emphatic and vigorous statements, in a rather uncharacteristically dogmatic tone, have given rise to many serious misunderstandings (Mawson 2014). It seems that in his wish to underscore the non-sensuous aspects of reality and the effort required to reverse our habitual, natural mode of thinking, Bion, at times, may seem to collapse to dichotomous thinking.

In this vein, it is sometimes said that Bion made a paradigmatic change and moved away from any reality that is sensuously apprehended. But as Bion says in response: "My own feeling is that my views have 'evolved', and although this must mean they have changed, I think the 'change' less significant than the 'evolution'" (1967c, p. 148).

Moreover, as his writings evolve, Bion does not seem to argue for the absolute elimination of sensuous experience but rather for its eclipse; Not only because absolute elimination is impossible to achieve, but because, as Bion says, "it is difficult in practice to de-focus – peripheralize – the irrelevant without falling into the opposite error of permanent insensibility; blindness, deafness, repression. That is why", Bion goes on to say, "I talk about the 'opacity' of memory, desire and understanding" (1991, p. 232).

Bion is clearly struggling with this question, and the entire corpus of his work reflects the turbulent to-and-fro movement he is immersed in. And yet, this turbulent struggle seems to reflect the inescapable turbulence when encountering the complexity of the psychoanalytic experience and unconscious, ineffable psychic reality. Inspired by Kant, Bion is always reiterating that intuition without any corresponding concept is 'blind', whereas, without intuition any concept is empty. Bion refers to Paul Valéry who wrote that "it is no good thinking that the poet is somebody who writes a poem in a night of delirium, a drunken stupor, a night of fever; the poet is the cold thinker, almost a mathematician, at the service of an affine dreamer" (in Bion 1977, p. 32).

I thus suggest that it is from the dialectic interplay between observations acquired both through the senses and through intuition that transcends those sensuous observations, and their coalescence, that meaning evolves. 

John Ruskin, an English art critic of the Victorian era, who inspired Bion very much, argues that art should devote itself to the accurate observation and documentation of nature. But he too asks what is observation? His volume Of General Principles and of Truth is a powerful essay on the art of observation, as well as its inevitable failure (or incompleteness). In one of his poetic descriptions, Ruskin illuminates the power of close observation on the way to approaching an invariant truth. He writes, "there are no two trees in the forest whose boughs bend into the same network, nor two leaves on the same tree which could not be told one from the other, nor two waves in the sea exactly alike. And out of this mass of various, yet agreeing beauty, it is by long attention only that the conception of the constant character – the ideal form – hinted at by all, yet assumed by none, is fixed upon the imagination for its standard of truth" (1843, p. 146). Is Ruskin not describing Bion's contention that the analyst should observe patiently, aware of the innumerable aspects of the material presented to them that may seem familiar, yet in fact only point to an as yet unknown invariant truth, awaiting to emerge out of the 'void and formless infinite'?

This is reminiscent of work with children with autism who push our power of observation to its extreme, when sessions often appear to be utterly repetitive over months and even years, pulling the analyst into silent despair, boredom and withdrawal. And yet it is only through close observation, very often to one's own emotional experience, that micro- or nano-transformations in the patient's apparently perseverative material can be glimpsed at, allowing the analyst to approach an ineffable psychic truth. As Bion (1977) further says, it is when the analyst allows themselves to appreciate the information that is brought to them by their senses, that they can then get beyond that and try to transcend those senses to approach their meaning, their origin. It is not, however, as Ruskin notes, always easy, either in painting or literature [in fact any discipline], to determine where the influence of sensuous aspects of reality stops, and where that of non-sensuous reality begins.

The analyst is thus required to be, in Bion's words, a gatherer of sense impressions (1976). These may be faint and seemingly slight occurrences in the background of the patient's or analyst's experience and discourse. Attending to the background 'noises' rather than the more obtrusive, articulate words and cause-and-effect narratives, opens up a whole realm of unknown experience. This may take months and years. 

I thus think of psychoanalytic intuition as the mind's perpetual movement, generating an open, unprejudiced state of mind, seeking not to grip onto any external anchor, allowing the analyst's mind to transiently capture the 'fallout' of the patient's and analyst's emotional experience, 'invisible to mortal sight' yet scattered in and beyond 'the infrared and ultraviolet ends of the emotional spectrum'. These ephemeral experiences are momentarily embodied in words, utterances, demeanor, gestures, and so on, but apprehended through the meaning attributed to them.

No doubt, these phenomenological derivatives are only the object's emergent qualities that impinge upon the human personality as phenomena. They differ from the unknowable ultimate reality itself. Yet as Ruskin warns, as I think Bion would too, "unless the minds of men are particularly directed to the impressions of sight, objects pass perpetually before the eyes without conveying any impression to the brain at all; and so pass actually unseen, not merely unnoticed, but in the full clear sense of the word unseen" (1843, p. 142). Clearly, once perceived, these must now be transcended so that ineffable emotional reality can be apprehended. But first, they must be perceived. It is when the emotional events have "piled up" and evolved that they become 'intuitable' (Bion, 1967b, p. 161).

Perpetual motion in the playground of infinite possibilities

Nevertheless, we are always perplexed by the question of how these differing modes of reality can be bridged, or discerned, and how one might penetrate the caesura between sensuous and psychic facets of reality. We realize that the 'distance' between the two modes is infinite, and however much we try to make it smaller, it always remains infinite (Matte-Blanco, 1981). It seems that these different modes of apprehending reality are incompatible and so it is impossible to transform one into the other due to the difference in logic. And yet Bion asks, how can we make inroads into this formless infinite?

The ultimate psychic reality of the session, O, can be described as a space with an infinite number of dimensions and thus cannot be grasped in its totality due to the fact that the human mind is limited to three dimensions. Instead of thinking the unthinkable we only succeed in thinking what is thinkable, because when we are contemplating the undifferentiated unconscious, we are in a differentiated, conscious state of mind. And yet we attempt to do this all the same. These attempts amount to what Matte Blanco calls 'fertile failures'. It is a fertile failure in that by not being able to grasp reality in its totality, we get a sense of what infinite psychic reality feels like (Cartwright, 2010). 

And so, I would like to emphasize, that to my mind, this attempt to reach the unreachable is transformative in itself. It is the seeking of meaning that is transformative, and not arriving at a specific meaning (Bergstein, 2013). For me, it is the perpetual 'to and fro' movement in pursuit of the ineffable that is at the heart of psychoanalytic thinking – the psyche's natural movement between cohesion and dispersion, between conception and intuition, between the finite and the infinite. It is, I suggest, with the aid of 'binocular vision', a perpetual flux, between the movement of experiencing, becoming or being (transformations in O, in Bion's language) and the movement of getting to know the emotional experience (transformations in K). It is, in fact the continuous movement between K and O — where O is the moment to moment, ultimate, irreducible, indivisible, and yet simultaneously and paradoxically ever-changing reality, potentially transforming into an infinite number of transformations in K, and an infinite number of vertices from which one can experience truth-O. 

One might say that K collides with O, intersects, penetrates, rubs against, scratches ultimate reality - O, each time generating a new and unique encounter with emotional truth. Schematically, even though inadequately, it might be denoted as a movement of infinite caesuras between O / K1 / O / K2 / O /…K∞ ad infinitum. Since emotional truth is always in transit, in constant flow, like the river of Heraclitus, it cannot be grasped in a static state, but only apprehended in a continuous, dynamic movement. Intuition may thus be the capacity to apprehend reality in transience; not the seemingly static objects that comprise it but the perpetual movement in and between these objects, allowing for an ever more complex apprehension of reality.

One might then say that it is the very capacity to live and move in the caesura between the differentiated and the undifferentiated zones (cf. Vermote 2013), in that "intermediate region" (Zwischenreich), a playground of infinite possibilities, that has a very powerful and transformative potential. The mere transient encounters with the undifferentiated, formless zone, in effect with O, are then a profound transformational experience. This movement challenges, modifies, stretches and expands our mind endlessly.

Clinical illustration

I would like to present some clinical material which might hopefully illustrate one such moment when the invariant emotional experience seems to have ripened to be represented fleetingly in words and yet still retain its emotional charge. It is but one footstep in the unceasing to-and-fro movement of the psychoanalytic encounter which, in spite of the abundance of words, will only, at its best, approximate the emotional experience I wish to convey. I will try to depict how the notion of intuition, as I have outlined so far, expands our capacity for getting in closer contact with the emotional experience of the psychoanalytic encounter.

I will describe a session from a years-long analysis, when the patient was now more able to speak of his emotional experience without resorting to his habitual bodily symptoms and obsessional recounting of events in his external reality. 

[In the previous session I seem to have disconnected from the patient and, overwhelmed by desire, stepped into the role of a parenting expert, concerned with his son instead of with him.] 

Gil says: "I thought quite a lot about what we said about Danny and his swim team. I think that deep inside, rationally, I know that what's best for him is to be at a club where he feels he belongs, and not to be too preoccupied with him being a top athlete. Rationally, I know it's not necessarily the right thing to focus on performance so much. But the issue is not him, but me. He's managing it on his own with commendable calm. But as for me… I can't find words ... Sometimes I feel there's this predator inside me that I have to constantly restrain. 

"I go to these swim meets with him and I can't keep it under control. The competition heats up, I see the scores on the board, and it really annoys me… He's getting okay scores, but it won’t get him any medals… That annoys me so much! It's incredible how annoyed I get. I don't say anything when I'm with him and I keep a poker face. I tell him it's great. But inside I feel like a wild animal, I get so annoyed!"

He goes on to speak of a family trip to the desert. Even there, where everything was so peaceful, he tries to take a nap but finds himself walking around totally irritated! 

He says: "I feel there's something inside which I can't control… I don't know how to explain it…I was walking around so tense. It took me hours until I finally managed to relax…"

Now, as I'm listening silently, I feel unbelievably tired and sleepy. I struggle to stay awake and beat myself up for having had a heavy lunch. I feel very tormented and guilt-ridden.

He goes on recounting how his wife irritates him. And all this time, I remain very drowsy and hazy. I hear his words but can't say anything, almost in a state of daydreaming, but with no images I can hold onto. I feel in the grips of a web of immense strength, unable to free myself. Once in a while I suddenly 'wake up' in a startle with my heart pounding very fast. I make a very big effort to listen.

Gil goes on to say that later on, at night, when Danny is off to sleep, he's flooded with guilt for only thinking of the competition and the results. He says, "Why can't I just enjoy the experience with him?!... But then, as soon as one of the parents sends a text message about reminding the kids that it's the experience that counts and not the score, I feel the urge to kill that person!"

We're silent for some long minutes. Perhaps he's waiting for me to say something but he makes no sign of that. He yawns and I try to gather myself but cannot. I feel how easy it is to just not say anything because he's apparently immersed in his thoughts and doesn't complain, doesn't demand anything.

He sighs and says something about getting lost in his general existence and I realize he might be talking about my disconnectedness in which he gets lost. I'm still not aware of the rage he might feel toward me. I become a bit more attentive and manage to say: "So when I'm silent you feel lost…"

He says: "Perhaps… My mind goes off to more ordered things – like flight schedules."

He goes on to tell of driving to the desert and having to stay focused because the roads are dangerous. But when they arrive, he has nothing to do…and then "bad" thoughts come up in his mind, memories of trips he used to take with his dad before he passed away, and he gets tense. He says he thought of drinking some alcohol; felt he had to do something, so as not to panic. 

I say something about him panicking when he doesn't know what to do, suddenly finding himself in an unbound, vague space. Being in such a foggy experience is just too frightening. 

Although my interpretation may be 'right', it is not correct… It is said from a distance. Barely, I'm aware that I'm getting away from what's happening here, colluding with the part that gets us away from the experience and I become explanatory. 

I can't find anything else to say.

He says: "What usually happens is that we're driving in the desert, in a row of four electric cars so it's very slow. We're with the kids, the guide is very nice, a peaceful family outing, driving along in the valley, laying out mattresses, brewing some coffee, and I feel good, very comfortable. But it takes about 3 seconds for me to snap out of it…It's so good and yet it's so unnatural for me".

There's another short silence.

And then, somehow, I get in touch with the excruciating and intense feelings of sleepiness and numbness that I experienced earlier in the session. His words seem to have suddenly broken through the veil of my emotional disconnectedness and conjoined with my emotional experience, momentarily becoming meaningful. 

It is then that I try to describe his experience from my own experience, struggling to hold on to the evanescent threads of these feelings. I try to verbalize the numbness, the grasp of sleep, and the fast heartbeats when I wake up in a startle, feeling as if I am almost having a panic attack myself. I say, speaking from a dreamlike state in which I am still partially immersed, "It seems that when you're not occupied with some activity, you sink into a sort of disconnectedness … something like a troubled sleep, unpleasant and frantic, disquiet… There's something frightening about it, like getting lost, losing touch with reality, almost dying…" [I'm vaguely aware and surprised that I am using a rather strong word like 'dying', which came up almost of its own accord]. 

I go on to say, "You feel you must do something otherwise you begin to panic, your heart is pounding, you become tense, you feel you're drowning, something very destabilizing and bleak. You feel you must snap yourself out of it, get yourself back to reality, afraid you might sink into despair…."

Gil listens attentively, sighs heavily and after some long minutes begins to speak slowly, also in a dreamy manner: "I think it's very real. My heart does beat really fast in these situations, not to mention the horrific dreams. Really weird dreams! Horrible dreams!"

I am quite surprised because he rarely mentions any dreams and I ask him to say a little more about them…

He says: "I can't remember the whole dream, but I remember we were walking somewhere, on some road, and it was raining. And between the road and the pavement, on the crosswalks, on the road itself, on every corner, there was a little dead child lying there, a body of a child… And as we're walking, I'm saying 'don't look' and we ignore it. We keep on walking… perhaps into a clothing store, not saying a word about what we had just witnessed… A horrible spectacle…Once in a while somebody passes by and bursts out crying desperately. We walk on, keeping a poker face, not saying anything... Perhaps it's me who's telling them, or maybe it's someone else telling us, not to pay attention. And this road… there's a dead body on every corner. And we just walk into this super-fashionable, organized store, and I can't remember what we wanted to buy, but we're negotiating with the saleslady as if nothing happened…purely practical… we just turn our heads to the other side, and completely ignore the situation, saying nothing." 

While Gil is speaking, some situations he had told me about spring up in my mind. I am reminded of situations when he and his family would talk about nothing even though someone was in great distress.

And then I suddenly realize it's now happening between us, when I too ignored him, forgot about him in the previous session, as indeed at the beginning of this one. My only concern the last time was Danny, and I didn't see his despair, or the rage.

He goes on: "The truth is that this happens to me a lot in reality. In the dream it was very, very, very intense. It was so intense that I was actually woken up by it, and I was horrified. But it happens quite often; for example, when I'm sitting with my business partner and he begins telling me about something bad that happened to someone at work, and I immediately tell him 'stop, don't tell me! I don't want to know!'"

I am very touched by all this and I say: "Sometimes you feel you're the one seeing all those dead bodies and ignoring them, going on about your business, getting on with practicalities; but at other times you feel you are the child lying on the road, dying, and someone, perhaps me, ignoring you, unaware of what's really happening to you. 

I think you're familiar with this feeling where you ignore things, but it's also true of those who are supposed to take care of you, like me, who get on with their business while you're in the midst of some horrific experience, or a witness to something horrible."  

He remains quiet for a few minutes until the end of the session, perhaps reflective. I am very tense – anxiously anticipating a response that doesn't arrive. I am unsure whether he is silent in order to digest my words, or if he is using silence to create a space to nullify the effect of what I had just said and so diminish the emotional turbulence it has aroused in him.

Some afterthoughts

Later, while writing up the session, with the wisdom of hindsight, I could become aware of various themes Gil was bringing to the session. 

For example, he may be telling me that we are having an 'electric car' sort of analysis, where the cars are going very slow, the analyst-guide is very nice and it's all very peaceful. However, the nicer I am and the more peaceful the atmosphere, the more worried he is that I would become anesthetized, unable to get near the more violent emotions. He may come to this "super-fashionable" analysis which is calm and organized, but he remains very lonely.

All this, as well as other possible notions, may be interpreted symbolically with straightforward analysis of projective identification as a communication. Moreover, the themes and content of this session are quite familiar to us. However, I would like to emphasize, that it is when the three-dimensional narrative further disseminates in the analyst's mind, and loses its form, and the analyst loses their familiar anchors, that they may drift into the sensuously invisible ultraviolet and infrared wavelengths of the emotional experience. They may then get in touch with a more complex albeit more inchoate, unformulated and unbound 'layer' of psychic reality. This might then be transiently "phenomenised".

In the session I have described, my mind seems to have become the space where the patient's indigestible sense impressions could be gathered. Yet, I would especially like to highlight the analyst's attention to their own elusive, barely perceptible and seemingly meaningless emotional experience. The analyst might then catch a 'glimpse' of that something which "shares with dreams the quality of being wholly present or unaccountably and suddenly absent" (Bion 1967c, p. 137). As Bion (1965) notes, "when I thought I grasped his meaning it was often by virtue of an aesthetic rather than a scientific experience" (p. 52), that is through patterns, rhythms, sensations, and the emotions generated by these.

I believe Gil's getting in touch with his dream was a response to my dream, or perhaps my non-dream (Cassorla 2013). My telling him of his experience, through my own experience in the immediate here-and-now of the transference, seems to have evoked the memory of his dream and his ability to recount it. 'Dreaming' rests on the capacity to tolerate the no-thing and, in that sense, it is a factor in the analyst's intuition. The analyst's 'dreaming', including non-dreaming, is then a phenomenological realization of their intuition.

However, I would like to stress that it is not the content of the dream that was of major significance. Rather, it was a moment when O intersected with K and could briefly find words which echoed the emotional experience beyond words that we were both immersed in – a mixture of numbness, disconnectedness, deadness and deadliness, holding on desperately to external stimuli. 

I seem to have become identified with so many conflicting and contradictory parts within his internal world, past and present, which somehow coalesced. It was a moment when the semantic narrative conjoined with the intense emotional experience, and I had got in touch, or was at-one, with the complexity we had been living through, a complexity which could only be experienced but could not as yet be articulated: my mind may have become a reflection of the inner workings of his mind, struggling between the need to get in touch with unbearable feelings and the wish to numb these feelings; I had become an object unable to connect with his emotional experience, yet at the same time, I was also an attentive object that was experientially very connected to him through attention to the nuances of our disconnectedness, and at one with the fear of the perception of impending pain. I was simultaneously "a very nice guide" and a dead body lying around on the road. This was, perhaps, a representation of an internal mother who, as he often said, could look straight into him and feel every tinge of fear, embarrassment or threat he felt, and yet was also often depressed and withdrawn. The dream itself can be seen to express the patient's unconscious registration of the succession of my failures to receive his communication; and so on and on in an increasing complexity. This multi-dimensional, complex, paradoxical way of being, seemed to be a reflection of those contradictory parts within himself, whereby he was a highly sensitive individual who could hardly be unaware of any emotional nuance in his environment, and at the same time emotionally numb and very disconnected from his own experience, helpless and insecure as well as arrogant and grandiose, overly present and utterly aloof. Any interpretation can only address a part of this complexity, a complexity which was momentarily wholly present. Moreover, any interpretation, if not immediately relinquished, would become an overvalued idea.  

Again, the 'facts' of his narrative were not unfamiliar to us, but could not in themselves induce a durable psychic transformation. One might say that an interpretation depends on whether the analyst is attending to the repressed or the unrepressed and unrepresented unconscious experience. From the view I am trying to put forward, it is the perpetual movement between both. Without intuition the narrative facts were empty, whereas the emotional experience of numb disconnectedness, without any conception, was blind. The experience had to accumulate so that the sensuously invisible link between us could evolve and momentarily take shape. And this link was evoked by, and in the transference. Both he and I could now be in close contact with the immediate emotional experience. And it is this evanescent contact with emotional truth that is food for the mind and transformative. I assume that it was this accumulation of moments of encounter with the infinite multiplicity of Gil's personality which had paved the way to a more complex and integrated experience of his self, and a more truthful contact with reality, as was becoming evident in the months and years of his analysis.

Thus, I imagine the analyst, in the transference, as a psychic, satellite-dish-shaped magnetic surface, attracting fragmented bits of experience, which by chancing or stumbling upon them leave a mark, even if just an as yet meaningless registration. These elements collide with a receptive mind and so do not continue their flight into infinite space and get lost into oblivion. The mere mark that has been left on the analyst's mind, marks a process, and initiates a process, whereby these particles reverberate in their mind until they fleetingly cohere into a momentary meaning. These conjoin with more and more ephemeral moments of meaning, accumulating, enriching and elaborating the emotional experience. Even though these fragments may not yield any meaning in themselves, their gathering in the analyst's mind allows one to approach, transiently, a psychic reality that is bigger than the sum of its parts. Psychoanalytic intuition is thus to my mind, akin to the analyst's receptiveness to projective identification in the psychic realms of infinite dimensions, affording a more complex, and therefore more truthful, apprehension of psychic reality in transit.

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