Rediscovering Psychoanalysis

Rediscovering Psychoanalysis demonstrates how, by attending to one’s

own idiosyncratic ways of thinking, feeling, and responding to patients,
the psychoanalyst can develop a “style” of his or her own, a way of
practicing that is a living process originating, to a large degree, from
the personality and experience of the analyst.
This book approaches rediscovering psychoanalysis from four
vantage points derived from the author’s experience as a clinician, a
supervisor, a teacher, and a reader of psychoanalysis. Thomas Ogden
begins by presenting his experience of creating psychoanalysis freshly
in the form of “talking-as-dreaming” in the analytic session; this is
followed by an exploration of supervising and teaching psychoanalysis
in a way that is distinctly one’s own and unique to each supervisee
and seminar group. Ogden goes on to rediscover psychoanalysis
in this book as he continues his series of close readings of seminal
analytic works. Here, he makes original theoretical contributions
through the exploration, explication, and extension of the work of
Bion, Loewald, and Searles.
Throughout this text, Thomas Ogden offers ways of revitalizing
and reinventing the exchange between analyst and patient in each
session, making this book essential reading for psychoanalysts, psycho-
therapists, and other readers with an interest in psychoanalysis.

Thomas H. Ogden is the winner of the 2004 International Journal

of Psychoanalysis Award for Outstanding Paper. He is the Director of
the Center for the Advanced Study of the Psychoses and a member
of the International Psychoanalytical Association. His previous publi-
cations include This Art of Psychoanalysis: Dreaming Undreamt Dreams
and Interrupted Cries. His work has been published in 16 languages.
 THE NEW LIBRARY OF PSYCHOANALYSIS
General Editor Dana Birksted-Breen

The New Library of Psychoanalysis was launched in 1987 in associ-

ation with the Institute of Psychoanalysis, London. It took over from
the International Psychoanalytical Library which published many of
the early translations of the works of Freud and the writings of most
of the leading British and Continental psychoanalysts.
The purpose of the New Library of Psychoanalysis is to facilitate a
greater and more widespread appreciation of psychoanalysis and to
provide a forum for increasing mutual understanding between psy-
choanalysts and those working in other disciplines such as the social
sciences, medicine, philosophy, history, linguistics, literature and the
arts. It aims to represent different trends both in British psychoanalysis
and in psychoanalysis generally. The New Library of Psychoanalysis is
well placed to make available to the English-speaking world psycho-
analytic writings from other European countries and to increase the
interchange of ideas between British and American psychoanalysts.
The Institute, together with the British Psychoanalytical Society,
runs a low-fee psychoanalytic clinic, organizes lectures and scientific
events concerned with psychoanalysis and publishes the International
Journal of Psychoanalysis. It also runs the only UK training course in
psychoanalysis which leads to membership of the International Psy-
choanalytical Association – the body which preserves internationally
agreed standards of training, of professional entry, and of professional
ethics and practice for psychoanalysis as initiated and developed by
Sigmund Freud. Distinguished members of the Institute have included
Michael Balint, Wilfred Bion, Ronald Fairbairn, Anna Freud, Ernest
Jones, Melanie Klein, John Rickman, and Donald Winnicott.
Previous General Editors include David Tuckett, Elizabeth Spillius
and Susan Budd. Previous and current Members of the Advisory
Board include Christopher Bollas, Ronald Britton, Catalina Bronstein,
Donald Campbell, Sara Flanders, Stephen Grosz, John Keene, Eglé
Laufer, Juliet Mitchell, Michael Parsons, Rosine Jozef Perelberg,
Mary Target, and David Taylor, and Richard Rusbridger, who is now
Assistant Editor.
 ALSO IN THIS SERIES

Impasse and Interpretation Herbert Rosenfeld

Psychoanalysis and Discourse Patrick Mahony
The Suppressed Madness of Sane Men Marion Milner
The Riddle of Freud Estelle Roith
Thinking, Feeling, and Being Ignacio Matte-Blanco
The Theatre of the Dream Salomon Resnik
Melanie Klein Today: Volume 1, Mainly Theory Edited by Elizabeth Bott
Spillius
Melanie Klein Today: Volume 2, Mainly Practice Edited by Elizabeth Bott
Spillius
Psychic Equilibrium and Psychic Change: Selected Papers of Betty Joseph
Edited by Michael Feldman and Elizabeth Bott Spillius
About Children and Children-No-Longer: Collected Papers 1942–80 Paula
Heimann. Edited by Margret Tonnesmann
The Freud–Klein Controversies 1941–45 Edited by Pearl King and
Riccardo Steiner
Dream, Phantasy and Art Hanna Segal
Psychic Experience and Problems of Technique Harold Stewart
Clinical Lectures on Klein and Bion Edited by Robin Anderson
From Fetus to Child Alessandra Piontelli
A Psychoanalytic Theory of Infantile Experience: Conceptual and Clinical
Reflections E. Gaddini. Edited by Adam Limentani
The Dream Discourse Today Edited and introduced by Sara Flanders
The Gender Conundrum: Contemporary Psychoanalytic Perspectives on
Feminitity and Masculinity Edited and introduced by Dana Breen
Psychic Retreats John Steiner
The Taming of Solitude: Separation Anxiety in Psychoanalysis Jean-Michel
Quinodoz
Unconscious Logic: An Introduction to Matte-Blanco’s Bi-logic and its Uses
Eric Rayner
Understanding Mental Objects Meir Perlow
Life, Sex and Death: Selected Writings of William Gillespie Edited and
introduced by Michael Sinason
What Do Psychoanalysts Want? The Problem of Aims in Psychoanalytic
Therapy Joseph Sandler and Anna Ursula Dreher
Michael Balint: Object Relations, Pure and Applied Harold Stewart
Hope: A Shield in the Economy of Borderline States Anna Potamianou
Psychoanalysis, Literature and War: Papers 1972–1995 Hanna Segal
Emotional Vertigo: Between Anxiety and Pleasure Danielle Quinodoz
Early Freud and Late Freud Ilse Grubrich-Simitis
A History of Child Psychoanalysis Claudine and Pierre Geissmann
Belief and Imagination: Explorations in Psychoanalysis Ronald Britton
A Mind of One’s Own: A Kleinian View of Self and Object Robert
A. Caper
Psychoanalytic Understanding of Violence and Suicide Edited by Rosine
Jozef Perelberg
On Bearing Unbearable States of Mind Ruth Riesenberg-Malcolm
Psychoanalysis on the Move: The Work of Joseph Sandler Edited by Peter
Fonagy, Arnold M. Cooper and Robert S. Wallerstein
The Dead Mother: The Work of André Green Edited by Gregorio Kohon
The Fabric of Affect in the Psychoanalytic Discourse André Green
The Bi-Personal Field: Experiences of Child Analysis Antonino Ferro
The Dove that Returns, the Dove that Vanishes: Paradox and Creativity in
Psychoanalysis Michael Parsons
Ordinary People, Extra-ordinary Protections: A Post-Kleinian Approach to
the Treatment of Primitive Mental States Judith Mitrani
The Violence of Interpretation: From Pictogram to Statement Piera
Aulagnier
The Importance of Fathers: A Psychoanalytic Re-Evaluation Judith Trowell
and Alicia Etchegoyen
Dreams That Turn Over a Page: Paradoxical Dreams in Psychoanalysis
Jean-Michel Quinodoz
The Couch and the Silver Screen: Psychoanalytic Reflections on European
Cinema Edited and introduced by Andrea Sabbadini
In Pursuit of Psychic Change: The Betty Joseph Workshop Edited by Edith
Hargreaves and Arturo Varchevker
The Quiet Revolution in American Psychoanalysis: Selected Papers of
Arnold M. Cooper Arnold M. Cooper. Edited and introduced by
Elizabeth L. Auchincloss
Seeds of Illness and Seeds of Recovery: The Genesis of Suffering and the Role
of Psychoanalysis Antonino Ferro
The Work of Psychic Figurability: Mental States Without Representation
César Botella and Sára Botella
Key Ideas for a Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Misrecognition and
Recognition of the Unconscious André Green
The Telescoping of Generations: Listening to the Narcissistic Links Between
Generations Haydée Faimberg
Glacial Times: A Journey Through the World of Madness Salomon Resnik
This Art of Psychoanalysis: Dreaming Undreamt Dreams and Interrupted
Cries Thomas H. Ogden
Psychoanalysis as Therapy and Storytelling Antonino Ferro
Psychoanalysis and Religion in the 21st Century: Competitors or
Collaborators? Edited by David M. Black
Recovery of the Lost Good Object Eric Brenman
The Many Voices of Psychoanalysis Roger Kennedy
Feeling the Words: Neuropsychoanalytic Understanding of Memory and the
Unconscious Mauro Mancia
Projected Shadows: Psychoanalytic Reflections on the Representation of Loss
in European Cinema Edited by Andrea Sabbadini
Encounters with Melanie Klein: Selected Papers of Elizabeth Spillius
Elizabeth Spillius. Edited by Priscilla Roth and Richard Rusbridger
Constructions and the Analytic Field: History, Scenes and Destiny
Domenico Chianese
Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow Hanna Segal
Psychoanalysis Comparable and Incomparable: The Evolution of a Method to
Describe and Compare Psychoanalytic Approaches David Tuckett et al.
Time, Space and Phantasy Rosine Jozef Perelberg
Mind Works: Technique and Creativity in Psychoanalysis Antonino Ferro
Rediscovering Psychoanalysis: Thinking and Dreaming, Learning and
Forgetting Thomas H. Ogden

TITLES IN THE NEW LIBRARY OF PSYCHOANALYSIS

TEACHING SERIES

Reading Freud: A Chronological Exploration of Freud’s Writings

Jean-Michel Quinodoz
This page intentionally left blank
THE NEW LIBRARY OF PSYCHOANALYSIS

General Editor: Dana Birksted-Breen

Rediscovering
Psychoanalysis
Thinking and Dreaming, Learning and Forgetting

Thomas H. Ogden

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d n o jo s p u e jj 15 jo |Xb i

s a o 人 M 3N QNV NOQNOl
 First published 2009
by Routledge
27 Church Road, Hove, East Sussex BN3 2FA
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business
© 2009 Thomas H. Ogden
Paperback cover design by Sandra Heath
Typeset in Bembo by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
This publication has been produced with paper manufactured to
strict environmental standards and with pulp derived from
sustainable forests.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ogden, Thomas H.
Rediscovering psychoanalysis : thinking and dreaming, learning and forgetting /
Thomas H. Ogden.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-415-46862-6 (hbk.) – ISBN 978-0-415-46863-3 (pbk.)
1. Psychoanalysis. 2. Psychotherapist and patient. I. Title.
[DNLM: 1. Psychoanalysis 2. Professional–Patient Relations. 3. Psychoanalytic
Therapy. WM 460 O34ra 2008]
RC504.O34 2008
616.89′17—dc22

2008014935

ISBN 978-0-415-46862-6 (hbk)

ISBN 978-0-415-46863-3 (pbk)
 For James Grotstein,
my friend, who taught me to marvel
This page intentionally left blank
 Contents

Acknowledgments xii

1 Rediscovering psychoanalysis 1

2 On talking-as-dreaming 14

3 On psychoanalytic supervision 31

4 On teaching psychoanalysis 50

5 Elements of analytic style: Bion’s clinical seminars 70

6 Bion’s four principles of mental functioning 90

7 Reading Loewald: Oedipus reconceived 114

8 Reading Harold Searles 133

References 154
Index 161

xi
 Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the Institute of Psychoanalysis, London, UK for

granting permission to publish the following papers:
Chapter 2 is based on “On talking-as-dreaming,” International Journal
of Psychoanalysis, 88: 575–589, 2007, © Institute of Psychoanalysis,
London.
Chapter 3 is based on “On psychoanalytic supervision,” International
Journal of Psychoanalysis, 86: 1265–1280, 2005, © Institute of Psycho-
analysis, London.
Chapter 4 is based on “On teaching psychoanalysis,” International
Journal of Psychoanalysis, 87: 1069–1085, 2006, © Institute of Psycho-
analysis, London.
Chapter 5 is based on “Elements of analytic style: Bion’s clinical
seminars,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 88: 1185–1200, 2007,
© Institute of Psychoanalysis, London.
Chapter 7 is based on “Reading Loewald: Oedipus reconceived,”
International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 87: 651–666, 2006, © Institute of
Psychoanalysis, London.
Chapter 8 is based on “Reading Harold Searles,” International Journal
of Psychoanalysis, 88: 353–369, 2007, © Institute of Psychoanalysis,
London.

I would like to express my gratitude to Marta Schneider Brody for

her invaluable comments on the manuscripts of each of the chapters

xii
 Acknowledgments
in this book. I would also like to thank Patricia Marra for the care and
thought that she put into the production phase of this volume. I am
also grateful to Tom Richardson for the cover illustration which is
made up of a mosaic of photographs of the stone labyrinth on the
floor of the Chartres Cathedral.

xiii
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 1
Rediscover ing psychoanalysis

From the time I was six or seven years old, I was aware of psycho-
analysis as a form of treatment for psychological problems, such as
feeling unhappy and frightened all the time; but it was not until I was
16, on reading Freud’s (1916–1917) Introductory Lectures on Psycho-
Analysis, that I first discovered psychoanalysis as a set of ideas concern-
ing how we come to be who we are. In using the term discovered, I am
borrowing a word from a memorable sentence in that introductory
lecture series: “I shall not, however, tell it [psychoanalysis as a thera-
peutic method] to you but shall insist on your discovering it yourself ”
(1916–1917, p. 431). How better to be introduced to psychoanalysis
than by means of an invitation not to be taught, but to discover?
I have spent a good deal of my life since that initial discovery
rediscovering psychoanalysis. In an important sense, a psychoanalytic
life cannot be spent in any other way. After all, psychoanalysis, both
as a set of ideas and as a therapeutic method, is from beginning to end
a process of thinking and rethinking, dreaming and re-dreaming,
discovering and rediscovering.
The thread that weaves through every page of this book is the idea
that it is the analyst’s task to engage in a process of rediscovering
psychoanalysis in everything that he or she does: in each analytic
session, in each supervisory hour, in each meeting of a psychoanalytic
seminar, in each reading of an analytic work, and so on.
Rediscovering psychoanalysis entails an act of freedom of thought
and an act of humility; an act of renewal and an act of fresh discovery;
an act of thinking for oneself and an act of recognition that

no one who attempts to put forward to-day his views on hysteria

and its psychical basis [or any other aspect of psychoanalysis] can

1
 Rediscovering psychoanalysis

avoid repeating a great quantity of other people’s thoughts . . .

Originality is claimed for very little of what will be found in the
following pages.
(Breuer and Freud, 1893–1895, pp. 185–186)

In this book, I will discuss three overlapping and interwoven forms of

my own experience of rediscovering psychoanalysis: (1) creating psy-
choanalysis freshly in the process of talking with each patient in each
analytic session; (2) rediscovering psychoanalysis in the experience
of supervising and teaching psychoanalysis; and (3) “dreaming up”
psychoanalysis for oneself in the act of reading and writing about
analytic texts and literary works. Although I discuss each of these
forms of rediscovery as separate subjects, the topics refuse to keep
an orderly queue: thoughts on supervision creep into discussions of
talking with patients; close readings of analytic texts invite themselves
into discussions of supervision and teaching; responses to creative
literature show up in analytic case discussions; and so on. In fact,
all three of these forms of rediscovering psychoanalysis are in conver-
sation with one another in each section of this chapter and in each of
the succeeding chapters of this book.

Rediscovering psychoanalysis in the experience of talking

with patients

A principal medium, perhaps the principal medium, in which I have

the opportunity and the responsibility to engage in the work of
rediscovering psychoanalysis (and, in so doing, rediscovering what it is
to be a psychoanalyst) is the work of being with and talking with
patients. Specifically, I view it as my role to create psychoanalysis
freshly with each patient in each session of the analysis. A critically
important aspect of this rediscovery of psychoanalysis is the creation
of ways of talking with each patient that are unique to that patient in
that moment of the analysis. When I speak of talking differently with
each patient, I am referring not simply to the unselfconscious use
of different tones of voice, rhythms of speech, choice of words, types
of formality and informality, and so on, but also to particular ways of
being with, and communicating with, another person that could exist
between no other two people on this planet.
There are occasions when I am more aware than usual that the

2
 Rediscovering psychoanalysis

patient and I are talking in a way that I talk with no other person in
my life. At these moments I have a strong feeling that I am a fortunate
man to be able to spend so much of my life inventing with another
person ways of talking about what is most important to the patient
and to me. In this experience, I am being drawn upon, and am draw-
ing upon myself, emotionally and intellectually, in ways that do not
occur in any other part of my life. In this regard, Searles has put into
words what I have often felt and thought but have not often had the
courage to say, much less write. In discussing an experience that
occurred in the psychotherapy of a schizophrenic patient, Searles
(1959) states (in a way that only he could have put it), “While we
were sitting in silence and a radio not far away was playing a tenderly
romantic song . . . I suddenly felt that this man [the patient] was
dearer to me than anyone else in the world, including my wife”
(p. 294). (See Chapter 8 for a discussion of this and other aspects of
Searles’s contribution to psychoanalysis.)
It requires a very long time – in my experience, something on the
order of a decade or two of full-time clinical practice – to mature as
an analyst to a point where one is able, with some consistency, to
talk with each of one’s patients in a way that is uniquely one’s own,
and unique to that moment in the analytic conversation with that
particular patient. One must have thoroughly learned psychoanalytic
technique before one is in a position to “forget it” – that is, to
rediscover it for oneself. Talking with patients in the way I am describ-
ing requires that the analyst pay very careful attention to the analytic
frame. When I am able to speak with a patient in this way, it feels to
me that I have ceased “making interpretations” and offering other
forms of “analytic interventions,” and am instead “simply talking”
with the patient. “Simply talking” to a patient, in my experience,
usually involves “talking simply” – that is, talking in a simple,
clear way that is free of cliché, jargon, and “therapeutic” and other
“knowing” tones of voice.
A recent experience in supervision comes to mind in this regard. A
seasoned analyst consulted me regarding an analysis that he felt had
“ground to a halt.” He told me about the various types of interpret-
ations that he had made, none of which seemed to be of any value to
the patient. As he spoke, I found myself feeling curious about the
analyst. He seemed like an “odd duck” in an interesting and appealing
way. Where had he grown up? Probably in the South – maybe
Tennessee. What sort of boy had he been? Maybe a little lost, doing

3
 Rediscovering psychoanalysis

the right thing, but with a rebellious streak that he kept a well-
guarded secret.
I said to the analyst that it seemed to me that the only thing he had
not tried was talking to the patient. I suggested that he stop interpre-
ting and, instead, try simply to talk with the patient as a person who
had come to him with the hope and the fear of talking about what
was most disturbing in her life. He responded by saying, “You mean I
should stop doing analysis with this patient?” I responded by saying,
“Yes, if ‘doing analysis’ means speaking and listening as the analyst
you already know how to be. Why don’t you see what it would feel
like to be an analyst with the patient who is different from the analyst
you’ve been for any other patient you’ve ever worked with?”
At the end of the consultation session, the analyst said that he felt at
a loss to know how to proceed with his patient. I thought that this
response to the consultation was a good indication that the analyst
had made use of our conversation. When we next met six weeks later,
the analyst told me that after our consultation, he felt so lost that
during the sessions with his patient that took place in the weeks
immediately following the one he had read to me, he found himself
saying very little. “Instead, I tried to listen for what I’ve been missing.
Being quiet helped clear my mind, but straining to listen in that way,
session after session, was exhausting. I found myself dreading the
patient’s sessions.” The analyst then told me that at the beginning of a
session about a month after our consultation, he finally “gave up” and
asked the patient, “How can I be of help to you today?” He said that
the patient seemed surprised by his question and responded by saying,
“I’m so glad you asked me that. I’ve been feeling like such a failure at
psychoanalysis that I’ve been thinking for a long time that I shouldn’t
waste your time. I just don’t know how to think and talk the way you
do. I was afraid before coming here today that you would tell me that
you would be ending the analysis.” The patient was silent for a couple
of minutes and then said, “If you really meant what you said, what I’d
like your help with is how to be a better mother to my children. I’ve
been a dreadful mother.”
The analyst then told me that for the first time in a very long time
he had found what the patient was saying in that session to be genu-
inely interesting. I was reminded of my own curiosity and imaginings
about the analyst in the first consultation session. It seemed to me in
retrospect that I was “dreaming up” the analyst in response to his
difficulty in “dreaming himself up” as an analyst in his own terms. The

4
 Rediscovering psychoanalysis

analyst responded to his patient by saying, “I think that you are full of
dread when you try to be a mother and that makes you feel like a
dreadful mother. I think that you find that trying to be a mother is not
at all the same as simply being a mother. I think it terrifies you to feel
that you have no idea how to go about just being a mother in a way
that feels natural to you.”
I said to the analyst that there was no doubt in my mind that he and
the patient had begun to talk with one another in a way that they had
never before talked with one another, and that it seemed possible to
me that neither of them had ever in their lives talked with anyone else
in quite that way.
In the sequence described, it was necessary for the analyst to
rediscover for himself the experience of becoming an analyst by
“giving up” on being the analyst he already knew how to be. In so
doing, the analyst began to be able to make room in himself for the
experience of being at a loss to know how to be an analyst – how to
listen to and how to talk with the patient. The patient was clearly
relieved by her conscious and unconscious perception that the analyst
had become better able to think and talk for himself and to live with
the experience of being a “dreadful analyst” who had no idea what he
was doing. It was only at that point that the patient was able to
recognize and talk about her feeling of being a dreadful mother. Of
course, what I have quoted is not taken from a transcript of what the
patient and the analyst said; rather, it is my construction of the ana-
lyst’s construction of what occurred in the session. This is not a
deficiency inherent in the method of enquiry I am using; it is an
important element of that method in that it helps capture something
of what was true to what occurred at an unconscious level in the
analysis, in the supervision, and in the relationship between the ana-
lytic experience and the supervisory experience. (In Chapter 3, I
discuss this and other aspects of the analytic supervisory experience.)
In discussing this supervisory experience, I have used the term
dreaming in the phrase ‘ “dreaming up” the analyst.’ The conception
of dreaming that underlies the idea of dreaming up another person
or dreaming oneself into being plays a fundamental role in all that
follows in this book. In the tradition of Bion (1962a), I use the term
dreaming to refer to unconscious psychological work that one does
with one’s emotional experience. This work of dreaming is achieved
by means of a conversation between different aspects of the personality
(for example, Freud’s [1900] unconscious and preconscious mind,

5
 Rediscovering psychoanalysis

Bion’s [1957] psychotic and non-psychotic parts of the personality,

Grotstein’s [2000] “dreamer who dreams the dream” and the
“dreamer who understands a dream,” and Sandler’s [1976] “dream-
work” and “understanding work”). When an individual’s emotional
experience is so disturbing that he is unable to dream it (i.e. to do
unconscious psychological work with it), he requires the help of
another person to dream his formerly undreamable experience.
Under these circumstances, it requires two people to think. In the
analytic setting, the other person is the analyst; in supervision, it is
the supervisor; and in a seminar setting, it is the group leader and the
work group mentality (Bion, 1959).
Dreaming occurs continually both during sleep and in waking
life, although we have little awareness of our dreaming while we
are awake. Reverie (Bion, 1962a; see also Ogden, 1997a,b) and
free association constitute forms of preconscious waking dreaming.
Dreaming conceived of in this way is not a process of making the
unconscious conscious (i.e. making derivatives of the unconscious
available to conscious secondary process thinking); rather, it is a pro-
cess of making the conscious unconscious (i.e. making conscious
lived experience available to the richer thought processes involved in
unconscious psychological work) (Bion, 1962a). Dreaming is the
process by which we attribute personal symbolic meaning to our
lived experience, and, in this sense, we dream ourselves and other
people into existence. By extension, when an analyst helps a patient
or a supervisee to dream his formerly undreamable experience, he is
assisting the patient or supervisee in dreaming himself into existence
(as an individual or as an analyst).
With this conception of dreaming in mind, I will turn to a form of
rediscovery of psychoanalysis that occurred in the course of my work
with patients who have very little, if any, capacity for waking dream-
ing (for example, free association) in the analytic setting. After years of
analytic work with a number of such patients, I have found myself
(without conscious intention) engaging in seemingly “unanalytic”
conversations with these analysands about books, plays, art exhibits,
politics, and so on. It took me some time to realize that many of these
conversations constituted a form of waking dreaming which I came
to think of as “talking-as-dreaming.” These conversations tended to be
loosely structured, marked by mixtures of primary and secondary
process thinking and replete with apparent non sequiturs. “Talking-as-
dreaming” superficially appears to be unanalytic; but, to my mind, in

6
 Rediscovering psychoanalysis

the analyses to which I am referring, it represented a significant

achievement in that it was often the first form of conversation to
take place in these analyses that felt real and alive to both the patient
and me.
As time went on in the work with these patients, talking-as-
dreaming became established as a natural part of the give-and-take
of the analytic relationship and began to move unobtrusively into and
out of “talking about dreaming” – that is, self-reflective talk about
what was occurring in the analytic relationship and in other parts of
the patient’s life (past and present). These patients experienced
their enhanced capacity to dream and to think and talk about their
dreaming as an experience of “waking up” to themselves. Once able
to “wake up,” their relationship to their waking and sleeping dream-
ing was profoundly altered – they could begin to think about their
dreams as expressions of personal symbolic meaning. In our “dis-
covery” of talking-as-dreaming, these patients and I were rediscover-
ing dreaming and free association.

Dreaming up psychoanalysis in analytic supervision

and teaching

Analytic supervision and the teaching of psychoanalysis in a seminar

setting have been, for me, important forms of analytic work in which
rediscovery of psychoanalysis takes place. I view not only the clinical
practice of psychoanalysis but also analytic supervision and teaching
as forms of “guided dream[ing]” (Borges, 1970a, p. 13). In analytic
supervision and in case presentations that take place in the seminar
setting, it is the task of the supervisory pair and the seminar group to
“dream up” the patient whose analysis is being discussed. The patient
being presented is not the person who lies down on the couch in the
analyst’s consulting room. Rather, the patient is a fiction, a character
in a story that the supervisee or presenter is creating (dreaming up)
in the process of presenting the case. The creation of a fiction is not to
be confused with lying. In fact, the two, in the sense I am using
the terms, are opposites. Since the analyst cannot bring the patient to
the supervisory meeting or to the seminar, he must create in words a
fiction that conveys the emotional truth of the experience that he is
living with his patient.
From this perspective, the presenter consciously and unconsciously

7
 Rediscovering psychoanalysis

not only tells, but also shows, the supervisor (or seminar group) the
limits of his capacity to dream (to do conscious and unconscious
psychological work with) what is occurring in the analysis. The func-
tion of the supervisor and the seminar group is that of helping the
analyst to dream aspects of the experience with the patient that the
analyst has been unable to dream.
Regardless of how many times I take part in the experience of
dreaming with a patient, a supervisee, or a presenter, I am each time
taken by surprise by the psychological event, and each time find that I
have rediscovered the concept of projective identification. Projective
identification at its core is a conception of one person participating
in thinking/dreaming what another person has been unable to think/
dream on his own. I have spent the past thirty-five years rediscovering
this concept.
I will close this section by briefly mentioning two areas of ongoing
discovery and rediscovery that take place in the context of my experi-
ence as an analytic supervisor and teacher of psychoanalysis. The first
of these rediscoveries, to which I alluded earlier in this chapter,
involves my recognizing that the role of the supervisor and seminar
leader is that of assisting the supervisee or seminar member to over-
come what he has learned about psychoanalysis in order genuinely to
begin the process of becoming a psychoanalyst in his own terms.
The second of these ongoing rediscoveries is my recognizing how
critical to my method of teaching psychoanalysis is my practice of
reading aloud, line by line, sentence by sentence, the entirety of the
analytic or literary text being studied (being read closely). In the next
section of this chapter, I will demonstrate what I mean by a close
reading of a piece of writing. I have found that reading texts aloud in
this way allows the seminar members and me to hear and feel the ways
in which the sound of the words, the voice of the speaker, the author’s
word choice, the rhythm and structure of the sentences, and so on,
together create emotional effects that are inseparable from the content
of what is being said. In hearing the sentences read aloud, it becomes
clear that words are not merely carrying cases for ideas. Rather, words
– whether it be the words of an analytic text, a poem, a short story, a
patient’s comment to the analyst in the waiting room, or the analyst’s
response to a patient’s dream – do not simply re-present the writer’s/
speaker’s experience, they create an experience for the first time in
the very act of being read/spoken/heard.

8
 Rediscovering psychoanalysis

Analytic reading and writing as forms of

“dreaming up” psychoanalysis

Writing about analytic works, poetry, and other imaginative literature

has been critical to my development as an analyst, and has served as an
important medium in which I continue to rediscover psychoanalysis.
In this book, I offer close readings of analytic papers by Loewald and
Searles; transcripts of clinical seminars conducted by Bion; a passage
from a short story by Lydia Davis; some comments on novels by
DeLillo and Coetzee; and a monologue from the film Raising Arizona.
In these discussions, I am not simply explicating the work of Loewald,
Searles, Bion, and others. I am “dreaming up” the works for myself and
then inviting the reader to do the same, both with the text about
which I am writing and with my “dreamt-up” version of that text.
When I speak of “dreaming up” a text, I am referring to the conscious
and unconscious psychological work of making something of one’s
own with the text one is reading. In this process, the text is the starting
point for the reader’s own creative act that is unique to him and
reflects his own “peculiar mentality” (Bion, 1987, p. 224).
When I begin to write about an analytic text, I have only a vague
sense of what I think about the aspect of psychoanalysis that the
text addresses. I write to find out what I think. I aspire in my writing
about analytic texts to do with the text something that is, in some
small measure, akin to what Glenn Gould (1974) said that he tried to
do with each piece of music he played: “I recreate the work. I turn
performance into composition.” Similarly, in writing about an ana-
lytic text (for example, individual works of Bion, Loewald, and Searles
in Chapters 5, 7, and 8, respectively) or an analyst’s life-work (Bion’s
theory of thinking in Chapter 6), I try to turn close critical reading
and writing into composition, I attempt to turn the author’s discovery
into a discovery of my own. My discovery, my act of dreaming up
the text, is different from, and sometimes at odds with, the discovery/
dream that the author is making.
Let me elaborate here on the way I am using the term dreaming.
In waking life, our conscious thinking is, to a very large extent, limited
by sequential, cause-and-effect, secondary process logic. In our dream-
life, we are able to engage in a far more profound type of thinking. In
dreaming, one is “able to imagine with a freedom . . . [one] does not
have in waking” (Borges, 1980, p. 34). We are able, while dreaming,
to view a situation from many points of view (and points in time)

9
 Rediscovering psychoanalysis

simultaneously. A single figure or situation in a dream may encompass

a lifetime of experiences – both real and imagined – with one or with
many people. The dreamer has the opportunity to rework the situ-
ation – to try it this way and that way, to view it from this perspective
and that perspective, separately and together. The dreamer brings to
bear upon his rendering of an emotional situation in a dream the
most primitive and the most mature aspects of himself, and, most
importantly, these aspects of the self talk to one another in a mutually
transformative way.
What we dream when we are asleep is a rediscovery of our waking
experience, a rediscovery that not only sheds light on that lived
experience, but transforms it into something new, something with
which we can do unconscious psychological work. That psychological
work (the work of dreaming) is work that we have not been able to
achieve in the more limited medium of waking thinking.
This broadened conception of dreaming will serve as a framework
for a greater understanding of what I mean by dreaming a text in the
act of reading it and writing about it. In writing about Loewald’s
(1979) “The Waning of the Oedipus Complex” (Chapter 7), I am not
only concerned with what Loewald thought, I am interested in what
I can do with what Loewald wrote. It might be said that Loewald had
a dream-thought, and that his act of writing his paper was his dream-
ing that thought. Once dreamt/written, Loewald’s dream/paper
becomes a “dream-thought” that I have the opportunity to dream in
the act of reading it and writing about it. It is only to the extent that I
am able to dream (“recreate”) Loewald’s paper as my dream that there
is any reason for a reader to read my work, and not simply read
Loewald’s and leave it at that.
In talking about dreaming an analytic text, I am reminded of
Borges’s comment, “Dreams . . . ask us something, and we don’t know
how to answer, they give us the answer, and we are astonished”
(Borges, 1980, p. 35). The “answer” that we get from dreaming in the
act of critical reading and writing is not the solution to a puzzle; it is
the beginning of a creative act in its own right. Moreover, in saying,
“Dreams ask us something,” Borges, I believe, is suggesting that dreams
ask something of us. For example, an analytic text, when viewed as a
dream-thought, is a thought asking to be dreamt by the critical reader
or writer. When the dream-thought is an analytic text, the “answer”
(more accurately, the response) is psychoanalysis rediscovered in the
reader’s or the critical writer’s own terms.

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 Rediscovering psychoanalysis

To illustrate what I mean when I say that reading and writing are
forms of dreaming, I will briefly discuss a couple of sentences taken
from the end of a short story by Lydia Davis (2007), “What You Learn
About the Baby”:

How responsible he is, to the limits of his capacity . . . How he is

curious, to the limits of his understanding; how he attempts to
approach what arouses his curiosity, to the limits of his motion;
how confident he is, to the limits of his knowledge; how masterful
he is, to the limits of his competence; how he derives satisfaction
from another face before him, to the limits of his attention; how he
asserts his needs, to the limits of his force.
(Davis, 2007, p. 124)

The title of the story, “What You Learn About the Baby,” frames
everything that follows, including the final lines just cited. It is a
remarkable title, not for what it says, but for what it withholds.
Virtually every word of the six-word title contributes to its somewhat
eerie emotional restraint: What [could there be a less descriptive
word?] you [a surprisingly impersonal pronoun that takes the place of
“I”] learn about [not “learn from” or “learn with,” much less “get to
know”] the [not the possessive pronouns “my” or “your,” but the
chillingly impersonal article, “the”] baby.
Despite the chill created by this use of language, these final sen-
tences of the story are quite beautiful. The repetition (seven times) of
clauses or sentences that begin with the word how, and are divided in
the middle by a comma, creates a sound and rhythm suggestive of a
lullaby. But this is no ordinary lullaby. Words are meticulously being
refined, for example, as the word responsible is qualified by the phrase to
the limits of his capacity, and the word curious is carefully pruned by the
phrase to the limits of his understanding.
And this is no ordinary mother. (The reader is never told whether
the speaker is a mother or whether the speaker is a man or a woman. I
will indicate with a question mark where I am making a conjecture
about something left in doubt in the story.) The speaker (mother?),
with her (?) highly crafted use of language, is at once tightly holding
the baby, and holding him at arm’s length; at once tender, perspi-
caciously observant, and emotionally distant; at once devoted to the
baby, and perhaps even more devoted to writing “about the baby.”
What is being raised in this passage, and in the story as a whole, is

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 Rediscovering psychoanalysis

the never spoken question, “Is the speaker a mother-who-is-a-writer

or a writer-who-is-a-mother?” No doubt the answer is both, but that
does not solve the emotional problem created in the writing: How is
the speaker to be both completely a writer (which, to my ear, is no
doubt the case) and completely a mother (about which there is some
doubt)?
The speaker succeeds in finding at least a partial solution to this
emotional problem by accepting her strangeness as a mother – what
kind of mother allows herself to talk about “the baby” (instead of
“my baby”) or parses words with such subtlety in describing her (?)
baby? The acceptance of her (?) own strangeness (as reflected in the
ease and grace with which she writes such oddly motherly things)
seems to allow the speaker also to accept the strangeness of her (?)
baby – babies are indeed very strange creatures.
The pleasure that this mother (?) takes in her (?) baby includes a
profound appreciation of the ironies that saturate his situation in life:
“How masterful he is, to the limits of his competence.” The words how
masterful carry the double meaning of a question (how masterful?)
and an appreciation (how masterful!). Whether it is a part of a ques-
tion or an expression of amazement, the word masterful bumps
awkwardly, humorously into the phrase to the limits of his competence.
The use of irony here seems to me to convey a sense of the way in
which the writerliness of the mother (?) provides a psychological/
literary sanctuary into which the speaker may go when she needs a
rest from her (?) baby, a place the infant cannot conceive of, a place
into which he is not invited.
The sequence of clauses culminates in what, for me, is the most
powerful of the observations: “how he asserts his needs, to the limits of
his force.” The word force (the final word of the story) is a surprising
word – darkly ominous. The word stands in stark contrast with
the six words that have stood in a similar place in the six previous
clauses: “capacity,” “understanding,” “motion,” “knowledge,”
“competence,” “attention.” The word force breaks the rules of con-
straint that have held sway up to this point: all bets are off, no previous
“understandings” between mother (?) and infant (or between writer
and reader) hold. The baby will use every means available to him to
get what he needs. There will be no compromises; there will be no
sanctuaries in which to find respite from the baby.
The subtle mixture of feelings and complexity of voice in this
passage defies paraphrase. Responding to this passage, in the act

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 Rediscovering psychoanalysis

of writing/dreaming it, is, for me, an experience of rediscovering

“primary maternal preoccupation” (Winnicott, 1956), the mother’s
healthy hatred of her baby, the analyst’s healthy hatred of his patient
(Winnicott, 1947); it is also an experience in psychoanalytic “ear
training” (Pritchard, 1994); and, perhaps most of all, it is an experi-
ence of emotionally responding to, and making something of my own
with, the extraordinary beauty and power of language artfully used.
I will now leave it to the reader to dream this book, to dream my
dream-thought, to make something of his or her own in the experience
of reading.

13
 2
On talking-as-dreaming

‘Auntie, speak to me! I’m frightened because it’s so

dark.’ His aunt answered him: ‘What good would that
do? You can’t see me.’ ‘That doesn’t matter,’ replied the
child, ‘if anyone speaks, it gets light.’
(Freud, 1905, p. 224, n.1)

I take as fundamental to an understanding of psychoanalysis the idea

that the analyst must invent psychoanalysis anew with each patient.
This is achieved in no small measure by means of an ongoing experi-
ment, within the terms of the psychoanalytic situation, in which
patient and analyst create ways of talking to one another that are
unique to each analytic pair at a given moment in the analysis.
In this chapter, I will focus primarily on forms of talking generated
by patient and analyst that may at first seem “unanalytic” because the
patient and analyst are talking about such things as books, poems,
films, rules of grammar, etymology, the speed of light, the taste of
chocolate, and so on. Despite appearances, it has been my experience
that such “unanalytic” talk often allows a patient and analyst who have
been unable to dream together to begin to be able to do so. I will refer
to talking of this sort as “talking-as-dreaming.” Like free association
(and unlike ordinary conversation), talking-as-dreaming tends to
include considerable primary process thinking and what appear to be
non sequiturs (from the perspective of secondary process thinking).
When an analysis is a “going concern” (Winnicott, 1964, p. 27), the
patient and analyst are able to engage both individually and with one
another in a process of dreaming. The area of “overlap” of the patient’s
dreaming and the analyst’s dreaming is the place where analysis
occurs (Winnicott, 1971, p. 38). The patient’s dreaming, under such

14
 On talking-as-dreaming

circumstances, manifests itself in the form of free associations (or, in

child analysis, in the form of playing); the analyst’s waking-dreaming
often takes the form of reverie experience. When a patient is unable
to dream, this difficulty becomes the most pressing aspect of the
analysis. It is these situations that are the focus of this chapter.
I view dreaming as the most important psychoanalytic function
of the mind: where there is unconscious “dream-work,” there is
also unconscious “understanding-work” (Sandler, 1976, p. 40); where
there is an unconscious “dreamer who dreams the dream” (Grotstein,
2000, p. 5), there is also an unconscious “dreamer who understands
the dream” (p. 9). If this were not the case, only dreams that are
remembered and interpreted in the analytic setting or in self-analysis
would accomplish psychological work. Few analysts today would
support the idea that only remembered and interpreted dreams
facilitate psychological growth.
The analyst’s participation in the patient’s talking-as-dreaming
entails a distinctively analytic way of being with a patient. It is at all
times directed by the analytic task of helping the patient to become
more fully alive to his experience, more fully human. Moreover, the
experience of talking-as-dreaming is different from other conversa-
tions that bear a superficial resemblance to it (such as talk that goes
nowhere or even a substantive conversation between a husband and
wife, a parent and child, or a brother and sister). What makes talking-
as-dreaming different is that the analyst engaged in this form of
conversation is continually observing and talking with himself about
two inextricably interwoven levels of this emotional experience:
(1) talking-as-dreaming as an experience of the patient coming into
being in the process of dreaming his lived emotional experience; and
(2) the analyst and patient thinking about and, at times, talking about
the experience of understanding (getting to know) something of the
meanings of the emotional situation being faced in the process of
dreaming.
In what follows, I will offer two clinical illustrations of talking-as-
dreaming. The first involves a patient and analyst talking together in
a way that represents a form of dreaming an aspect of the patient’s
(and, in a sense, her father’s) experience that the patient previously
had been almost entirely unable to dream. In the second clinical
example, patient and analyst engage in a form of talking-as-dreaming
in which the analyst participates in the patient’s early efforts to “dream
himself up,” to “dream himself into existence.”

15
 On talking-as-dreaming

A theoretical context

The theoretical context for the present contribution is grounded in

Bion’s (1962a, b, 1992) radical transformation of the psychoanalytic
conception of dreaming and of not being able to dream. Just as
Winnicott shifted the focus of analytic theory and practice from
play (as a symbolic representation of the child’s internal world) to the
experience of playing, Bion shifted the focus from the symbolic con-
tent of thoughts to the process of thinking, and from the symbolic
meaning of dreams to the process of dreaming.
For Bion (1962a), “alpha-function” (an as-yet-unknown, and per-
haps unknowable, set of mental functions) transforms raw “sense
impressions related to emotional experience” (p. 17) into “alpha-
elements” that can be linked to form affect-laden dream-thoughts.
A dream-thought presents an emotional problem with which the
individual must struggle (Bion, 1962a, b; Meltzer, 1983), thus supply-
ing the impetus for the development of the capacity for dreaming
(which is synonymous with unconscious thinking). “[Dream-]-
thoughts require an apparatus to cope with them . . . Thinking
[dreaming] has to be called into existence to cope with [dream-
]thoughts” (Bion, 1962b, pp. 110–111). In the absence of alpha-
function (either one’s own or that provided by another person), one
cannot dream and therefore cannot make use of (do unconscious
psychological work with) one’s lived emotional experience, past and
present. Consequently, a person unable to dream is trapped in an
endless, unchanging world of what is.
Undreamable experience may have its origins in trauma – unbear-
ably painful emotional experience, such as the early death of a parent,
the death of a child, military combat, rape or imprisonment in a death
camp. But undreamable experience may also arise from “intrapsychic
trauma” – that is, experiences of being overwhelmed by conscious
and unconscious fantasy. The latter form of trauma may stem from
the failure of the mother to adequately hold the infant and contain
his primitive anxieties or from a constitutional psychic fragility that
renders the individual in infancy and childhood unable to dream his
emotional experience, even with the help of a good-enough mother.
Undreamable experience – whether it be the consequence of pre-
dominantly external or intrapsychic forces – remains with the indi-
vidual as “undreamt dreams” in such forms as psychosomatic illness,
split-off psychosis, “dis-affected” states (McDougall, 1984), pockets of

16
 On talking-as-dreaming

autism (Tustin, 1981), severe perversions (de M’Uzan, 2003), and

addictions.
It is this conception of dreaming and of not being able to dream
that underlies my own thinking regarding psychoanalysis as a thera-
peutic process. As I have previously discussed (Ogden, 2004a, 2005a),
I view psychoanalysis as an experience in which patient and analyst
engage in an experiment within the analytic frame that is designed
to create conditions in which the analysand (with the analyst’s par-
ticipation) may be able to dream formerly undreamable emotional
experience (his “undreamt dreams”). I view talking-as-dreaming as
an improvisation in the form of a loosely structured conversation
(concerning virtually any subject) in which the analyst participates
in the patient’s dreaming previously undreamt dreams. In so doing,
the analyst facilitates the patient’s dreaming himself more fully into
existence.

Fragments of two analyses

I will now present clinical accounts of analytic work with two

patients who were severely limited in their ability to dream their
emotional experience in the form of free associations or in other
types of dreaming. In both of these analyses, the patient was eventually
able, with the analyst’s participation, to begin to engage in genuine
dreaming in the form of talking-as-dreaming.

Talking-as-dreaming formerly undreamt dreams

Ms L, a highly intelligent and accomplished woman, began analysis

because she was tormented by intense fears that her seven-year-old
son, Aaron, would fall ill and die. She also suffered from an almost
unbearable fear of dying that for periods of weeks at a time had
rendered her unable to function. These fears were compounded by
her feeling that her husband was so self-centered as to be unable to
care for their son if anything were to happen to her. Ms L was so
preoccupied with her fears concerning her son’s life and her own that
she could speak of practically nothing else in the first years of analysis.
Other aspects of her life seemed to be of no emotional significance to
her. The idea that the patient was coming to see me to think about

17
 On talking-as-dreaming

her life held virtually no meaning – she came to each of her daily
sessions with the hope that I would be able to free her of her fears.
Ms L’s dream-life consisted almost entirely of “dreams” that were not
dreams (Bion, 1962a; Ogden, 2003a); that is, she was unchanged by
the experience of the repetitive dreams and nightmares in which she
was helpless to prevent one catastrophe after another. My own reverie
experience was sparse and unusable for purposes of psychological
work (see Ogden, 1997a, b for detailed discussions of the analytic use
of reverie experience).
From the beginning of the analysis, the patient’s way of speak-
ing was distinctive. She spoke spasmodically, blurting out clumps of
words, as if trying to get as many words as she could into each breath
of air. It seemed to me that Ms L was afraid that at any moment
she would lose her breath or would be cut off by my telling her that I
had heard enough and could not stand to hear another word.
By the beginning of the second year of analysis, the patient
appeared to have lost all hope that I could be of any help to her. She
barely paused after I spoke before continuing the line of thought that
I had momentarily interrupted. She seemed hardly at all interested in
what I had to say – perhaps because she could hear almost immedi-
ately in my tone of voice and rhythm of speech that what I was about
to say would not contain the relief that she sought. The patient
responded to the combination of fear and despair that she was feeling
by flooding the sessions with clump after clump of words that had the
effect of drowning out (both for herself and me) any opportunity for
genuine dreaming and thinking. In a session that took place during
this period of the analysis, I said to Ms L that I thought that she felt
that there was so little of her that she did not have sufficient substance
to achieve change through thinking and talking. (I had in mind her
inability to speak without chopping her sentences and paragraphs
into bits. The relief that she hoped I would supply was the only means
by which she could imagine her life changing.) After I made this
observation, the patient paused slightly longer than usual before con-
tinuing with what she was saying. I commented that what I had just
said must have felt useless to her.
In the months preceding the session that I will present, the patient’s
speech had become somewhat less pressured. She was able for the first
time to talk with feeling about her childhood experience. Up to that
point, it was as if the patient felt that there was not “time” (i.e. psycho-
logical room) for thinking and talking about anything other than her

18
 On talking-as-dreaming

efforts “to cope,” to keep herself from losing her mind. The patient’s
fear of dying and her worries about Aaron diminished to the point
that she was able to read again for the first time since Aaron was born.
Reading and the study of literature had been a passion of the patient’s
in college and in graduate school. Aaron was born only a few months
after she completed her doctoral thesis.
The session that I will discuss was a Monday session that the patient
began by telling me that over the weekend she had re-read J. M.
Coetzee’s novel, Disgrace (1999). (Ms L and I had briefly spoken about
Coetzee’s work in the course of the previous year of analysis. Like
Ms L, I greatly admire Coetzee as a writer and no doubt this had
come through in the brief exchanges we had had about him.) Ms L
said, “There is something about that book [which is set in post-
apartheid South Africa] that draws me back to it. The narrator
[a college professor] tries to bring himself back to life – if he ever was
alive – by having sex with one of his students. It seems inevitable that
the girl will turn him in, and when she does, he refuses to defend
himself. He won’t even go through the motions of saying the repent-
ant words to the academic council that his friends and colleagues are
urging him to say. And so he gets fired. It is as if he has felt like a
disgrace his whole life and that this incident is only the latest evidence
of this state, evidence he cannot and will not attempt to refute.”
Although the patient was speaking in her characteristic way (blurt-
ing out words in clumps), it was unmistakable that a change was
occurring: Ms L was speaking with genuine vitality in her voice about
something that did not relate directly to her fears about Aaron’s safety
or her own health. (It must be borne in mind that this change did
not arise de novo in the session being described. Rather, it developed
over the course of years, beginning with a note of humour here,
an unintended, but appreciated, pun there, an occasional dream that
had a small measure of aliveness, and a reverie of mine that had
unexpected vitality. Very slowly such scattered events became elem-
ents of an unselfconscious way of being that came alive in the form
that I am in the process of describing.)
I did not tell the patient my thought that she, in speaking about the
narrator, may also have been speaking to herself and to me about a
psychological conflict of her own – that is, that one aspect of herself
(identified with the narrator’s refusal to lie) seemed to be at odds with
another aspect of herself (for whom fears of death crowded out the
possibility for genuine thinking, feeling, and talking). To have said any

19
 On talking-as-dreaming

of this to Ms L would have been equivalent to waking the patient

from what may have been one of her first experiences of dreaming in
the analysis in order to tell her my understanding of the dream. It
was nonetheless important that I make this interpretation to myself
silently because, as will be seen, I was at the time engaging in some-
thing very similar to what Ms L was doing in that I, too, was evading
thinking and feeling.
I said to Ms L, “Coetzee’s voice in Disgrace is one of the most
unsentimental voices I have ever read. He makes it clear in every
sentence that he deplores rounding the edges of any human experi-
ence. An experience is what it is, no more and no less.” In saying this, I
felt as if I was entering into a form of thinking and talking with the
patient that was different from any exchange that had previously
occurred in the analysis.
Ms L, somewhat to my surprise, continued the conversation by
saying, “There’s something about what’s happening between the char-
acters and in the characters – no matter how awful it is – that is
oddly right.”
I then said something that even at the time felt like a non sequitur:
“You can hear in Coetzee’s early books a writer who did not yet
know who he was as a writer or even as a person. He’s awkward,
trying this and trying that. I sometimes feel embarrassed with him.”
(I felt that the words “with him” said more of what I was feeling in
the session with Ms L than would have been conveyed by the words
“for him.” I was putting the emphasis on my own, and what I sensed
to be the patient’s, feelings of self-consciousness in response to the
awkwardness of our efforts at talking/thinking/dreaming in this new
way.)
Ms L then said, in another of our apparent non sequiturs, “Even
after the rape of the narrator’s daughter and the shooting of the dogs
that the daughter loved so much, the narrator found ways to hang
onto the fragments of his humanity that remained alive for him. After
helping the veterinarian euthanize dogs that had no one and no place
on this earth to which they belonged, he tried to spare the corpses the
indignity of being treated like garbage. He made it his business to be
there very early in the morning to put the corpses into the cremation
machine himself instead of giving the bodies to the workmen who
ran the machine. He couldn’t bear to see the workers use shovels to
smash the dogs’ legs which were stiffened and outstretched with rigor
mortis. The outstretched legs made it harder to get the corpses to fit

20
 On talking-as-dreaming

into the door of the machine.” There was sadness and warmth in
Ms L’s voice as she talked. As the patient was speaking, I was reminded
of talking with a close friend soon after he had come home from a
hospitalization during which it had seemed all but certain that he
would die. He told me that he had learned one thing from the experi-
ence: “Dying doesn’t take courage. It’s like being on a conveyor belt
taking you to the end.” He added, “Dying is easy. You don’t have to
do anything.” I remembered feeling humbled, as he and I talked, by
the dignity with which he had faced death in the hospital and by the
way he used his capacity for irony and wit, even while emotionally
and physically exhausted, to keep from being crushed by the
experience.
As I re-focused on Ms L, I responded to what she had been saying
about the handling of the dogs’ corpses (and the compassionate way
in which she had been saying it) by commenting, “The narrator kept
making that small gesture [in connection with the cremation of the
dogs] even though he knew that what he was doing was so insignifi-
cant as to be imperceptible to anybody or anything else in the uni-
verse.” As I was saying this, I began to think (in a way that was new for
me in this analysis) about the effect of the terrible deaths in Ms L’s life.
The patient had told me early on in the analysis, and then again in a
session a few months prior to the one being discussed, that her father’s
first wife and their three-year-old daughter had been killed in a car
accident. (The patient deeply loved her father and felt loved by him.)
On the two occasions that Ms L had mentioned the death of her
father’s first wife and daughter, she did so as if presenting a piece of
information that I should know about because analysts (with their
stereotypic ways of thinking) tend to make a big deal about such
things. I was able at this point to make use of the silent interpretation
that I had made earlier to myself regarding the way the patient (and I)
were evading thinking/dreaming/speaking/remembering what was
true to the emotional experience that was occurring. In my work
with Ms L, I had, for more than a year, been unable and perhaps
unwilling to think/dream/remember and keep alive in myself the
enormous (unimaginable) pain that the patient’s father and the
patient had experienced in relation to the death of his first wife and
their daughter. I was astounded by my inability to have kept alive in
me the emotional impact of those deaths.
At that point in the session I was able to begin to dream (to do
conscious and unconscious psychological work with) what I now

21
 On talking-as-dreaming

perceived to be the patient’s feelings of “disgrace” for being alive “in

place of ” her father’s wife and daughter and in place of the parts of her
father that had died with them. Ms L responded to what I said about
the narrator’s “insignificant,” but important, gestures by saying, “In
Coetzee’s books dying is not the worst thing that can happen to a
person. For some reason, I find that idea comforting. I don’t know
why, but I’m reminded of a line I love from Coetzee’s memoir. He
says near the end something like: ‘All we can do is to persist stupidly,
doggedly in our repeated failures.’ ” Ms L laughed deeply in a way I
had never heard her laugh before as she said, “Dogs are everywhere
today. I am very fond of dogs. They’re the innocents of the animal
kingdom.” She then became more pensive and said, “There’s nothing
glamorous about repeated failures while they’re happening. I feel like
such a failure as a mother. I can’t lie to myself and pretend that my
obsession with Aaron’s dying isn’t felt by him and doesn’t scare the
life out of him. I didn’t intend to put it that way – ‘scare the life out
of him’ – but that is what I feel I’m doing to him. I’m terrified that
I’m killing him with my fear – that I’m scaring the life out of him, and
I can’t stop doing it. That’s my ‘disgrace.’ ” Ms L cried as she spoke.
It seemed clear to me at this moment that Ms L’s father’s response
to his “unthinkable” losses had scared the life out of her.
I said, “I think that you’ve felt like a disgrace your whole life. Your
father’s pain was unbearable not only to him, but to you. You couldn’t
help your father with his unimaginable pain. His pain was such a
complicated thing for you – you’re still in the grip of it with him –
pain beyond what anyone can take in.” This was the first time in
the analysis that I addressed the patient’s inability not only to help her
father, but also to dream her experience of her response to his pain. I
thought, but did not say, that it felt shameful to her that she felt angry
at her father for not having been able to be the father she wished he
were. Moreover, she took that anger out on her husband in the form
of demeaning him for what she perceived to be his inadequacy as a
father to their son.
Ms L did not respond directly to what I said, and instead said, “I
think that it’s odd that I think of the characters in Coetzee’s book as
courageous. They don’t think of themselves that way. But they do feel
that way to me. In Life & Times of Michael K [Coetzee, 1983], Michael
K [a black man in apartheid South Africa] builds a cart out of scraps of
wood and metal. He wheels his dying mother toward the town where
she was born so she can die there – it is the closest thing to a home

22
 On talking-as-dreaming

that she has ever had. I don’t think Michael K felt courageous as he
was doing it. He just knew that that was what he had to do. It was a
doomed effort. I think he knew that from the beginning – I think I
did, too. But it had to be done. It was the right thing to do. I like the
fact that Coetzee’s narrators are often women. In The Age of Iron
[Coetzee, 1990], the woman narrator [a white woman living in
apartheid South Africa] took in the homeless black man and felt
guilty and pitied him and grew to admire him and became angry
with him and even loved him in her own odd way. She never once
pulled a punch in the way she talked to herself and to him. You and I
can sometimes be like that. We’ve done some of that today – not
entirely, but enough so I feel stronger now, which is not to say hap-
pier. But being stronger is what I need more than feeling happier.” I
could hear in the sound of Ms L’s voice that she felt, but could not
yet say (even to herself), that she felt admiration and anger and her
own odd brand of love for me and that she hoped that I, one day,
might feel all of this for her.
The actual course of the session had a far more meandering quality
than the account I have been able to give. The patient and I drifted
from topic to topic, book to book, feeling to feeling, without experi-
encing the need to tie one to the next, or to think in a logical way,
or to respond directly to what the other had said. We spoke of
Coetzee’s choice to live in Adelaide, Australia, John Berger’s scath-
ingly anti-capitalist Booker Prize acceptance speech, our disappoint-
ment in Coetzee’s two most recent novels, and so on. It is impossible
for me to say which of these subjects were spoken about in the session
under discussion and which were spoken about in subsequent ses-
sions. Neither can I say with any certainty which parts of the dialogue
that I have presented from the session were spoken by Ms L and
which parts by me.
As the emotional experience of this session evolved in subsequent
weeks and months, the patient told me that her father had had bouts
of severe depression as she was growing up and that she had felt
responsible for helping him to recover from them. She said that she
had often sat with him for long periods of time as “he sobbed
uncontrollably, choking on his tears.” As Ms L described these expe-
riences with her father, it occurred to me that her talking in clumps of
words, cramming as many words as she could into a breath of air,
may have been related to her experience of her father choking on his
tears while sobbing uncontrollably. Perhaps, unable to dream her

23
 On talking-as-dreaming

experience with her father, she had somatized her undreamt dreams
(and his) in her pattern of speaking and breathing.
In sum, in the session I have discussed, the way Ms L and I talked
about books served as a form of talking-as-dreaming. It was an expe-
rience in dreaming that was neither exclusively the patient’s dream
nor mine. Ms L had only rarely been able to achieve a state of waking-
dreaming to that point in the analysis. Consequently, she had been
trapped in a timeless world of split-off undreamable experience that
she feared had not only robbed her father and herself of a good deal of
their lives, but also was killing her child. Ms L had developed psycho-
somatic symptoms (her manner of speech and breathing) and intense
fears of death at the psychological point at which she was no longer
able to dream her experience of her father’s depression or her anger at
him. As the session under discussion progressed, the patient was able
to dream (in the form of talking-as-dreaming) formerly undreamable
experience of and with her father. This talking-as-dreaming moved
unobtrusively into and out of talking about dreaming. I view such
movement between talking-as-dreaming and talking-about-dreaming
as a hallmark of psychoanalysis when it is “a going concern.”

Talking-as-dreaming oneself into existence

I shall now describe a clinical experience in which talking-as-

dreaming served as a primary means through which a patient was
able to begin to develop his own rudimentary capacity “to dream
himself into being.”
Mr B grew up under circumstances of extreme neglect. He was
the youngest of five children born to an Irish Catholic family living
in a working-class suburb of Boston. The patient, as a child, was
tormented by his three older brothers who humiliated and frightened
him at every opportunity. Mr B did what he could to “become invisi-
ble.” He would spend as little time as possible at home and, while
at home, would draw as little attention to himself as he could. He
learned early on that bringing his problems to his parents’ attention
only made matters worse in that it would lead to his brothers’
redoubling their brutalizing of him. Nonetheless, he tenaciously
clung to the hope that his parents, particularly his mother, would see
what was happening without his having to tell them.
Beginning at age seven or eight, Mr B immersed himself in reading.

24
 On talking-as-dreaming

He would literally read shelf after shelf of books at the public library.
He told me that I should not mistake reading with either intelligence
or the acquisition of knowledge: “My reading was pure escapism. I
lost myself in the stories, and, a week after reading a book, I couldn’t
tell you a thing about it.” (In a previous contribution [Ogden,
1989a], I have discussed the use of reading as a sensation-dominated
experience that may serve as an autistic defense.)
Despite the fact that I liked Mr B, I found the first four years of
the analysis to be rather lifeless. Mr B spoke slowly, deliberately, as
if considering every word that he said before saying it. Over time,
he and I came to view this as a reflection of his fear that I would
either use what he said as a way of humiliating him (in the fraternal
transference) or somehow fail to recognize what was most important,
and yet unstated, in what he said (in the maternal transference).
It was not until the fifth year of this five-session-per-week analysis
that the patient began to be able to remember and tell me his
dreams. Among these early dreams was one in which there was a
single horrifying image of a shabby wax figure of a Madonna and
infant in a wax museum. What was most disturbing about the image
was the vacant stare that each was giving the other.
The session that I will describe occurred shortly after the Madonna-
and-infant dream. It was a period of analysis in which the patient
and I were beginning to be able to talk to one another in a way that
held some vitality, and yet this way of talking was still so new as to feel
brittle and, at times, a bit awkward.
Mr B began the session by saying that at work he had overheard a
woman saying to a colleague that she could not bear to watch the Coen
brothers’ film Raising Arizona because she could not see the humor in
the kidnapping of a baby.1 Mr B then asked me, “Have you seen that
movie?” This was only the second or third time in the entire analysis
that Mr B had asked me a direct question of this sort. The analytic
relationship to that point was one in which the focus was almost
entirely on the patient’s experience and state of mind, with virtually no
explicit allusion to – much less questioning or discussing – my experi-
ence. It did not feel entirely natural to simply answer his question, but I

1
In Raising Arizona, a couple (played by Nicolas Cage and Holly Hunter), unable to
conceive a baby of their own, steal one of the quintuplets recently born to Nathan Arizona
and his wife. Cage and Hunter convince themselves that a family with so many babies
would hardly notice that one of them was missing.

25
 On talking-as-dreaming

could not imagine responding by reflexively returning the question to

the patient by, for instance, asking why he had asked the question or
suggesting that he had been afraid that I would not understand the
significance of what he was about to say. I told Mr B that I had seen the
film a number of times. I was aware only as I was saying these words that
in responding in this way I was saying to the patient more than he had
asked of me. I experienced this not as a slip but as a line that I was
adding to a squiggle game. Nonetheless, I was a bit worried that what I
had added would be experienced by the patient as intrusive and would
precipitate the equivalent of a play disruption.
Mr B moved his head on the pillow of the analytic couch in a way
that conveyed a sense of surprise that I had responded as I had. It
seemed clear to both of us that we were in uncharted waters. As this
emotional shift was occurring, I had in mind a number of thoughts
about the transference-countertransference. Mr B, in asking me a
direct question, had dared to make himself less “invisible,” and I had,
without conscious intention, responded in kind. Moreover, he was
inviting me to join him in talking about the work of two brothers, the
Coen brothers, who made extraordinary things together. Making
something (becoming someone) with one’s brother was an experi-
ence that the patient had missed out on with his own brothers.
Perhaps his introducing the Coen brothers into the analysis reflected a
wish to have such an experience with me. I decided not to say any
of this to the patient because I believed that it would have distracted
from and undermined the tentative movement toward emotional
intimacy that the patient and I were making.
With an intensity of feeling in his voice that was unusual for him,
Mr B said that he thought that the woman whom he had overheard
talking about Raising Arizona was treating the film as if it were a
documentary: “It seems crazy for me to get worked up about this, but
that film is one of my favorites. I have seen it so many times that I
know the dialogue by heart, so I hate to hear the film disparaged in a
mindless way.”2
I said, “There’s irony in every frame of that film. Sometimes irony
can be frightening. You never know when it’ll be turned on you.”
(Even though the patient had unconsciously commented on what

2
I am again and again impressed by the way in which film images and narratives seem to
share some of the evocative power of dream images and narratives (see Gabbard, 1997a, b;
Gabbard and Gabbard, 1999).

26
 On talking-as-dreaming

was going on between us – our being less mindless and rigid with one
another than had been our pattern – it seemed to me that to have
responded at that level would have disrupted what I sensed was
becoming talking-as-dreaming.)
Mr B said, “The movie is not a documentary, it’s a dream. It opens
with Nicolas Cage being photographed for mug shots after being
arrested for one bungled petty crime after the next. It’s as if right from
the start two levels of reality are being introduced: the person and the
photograph. I’ve never thought of the opening of the film in that way
before. And the huge guy on the motorcycle – more an archetype
than a person – lives in the film in a parallel reality that is dis-
connected from the reality of the other parts of the film. I’m sorry
for getting so carried away.” The patient’s voice was full of the
excitement of a child.
I asked, “Why not get carried away?” (This was not a rhetorical
question. I was saying in a highly condensed way that there had been
very good reasons for the patient as a child to feel that it was danger-
ous to talk with excitement in his voice, but that those reasons were
true to another reality, the reality of the past, which for him often
eclipsed the reality of the present.)
Mr B went on without a pause to say, “My favorite part of the film
is the voice-over at the end [which takes place after Nicolas Cage
and Holly Hunter have returned the baby that they took and
Holly Hunter has told Nicolas Cage that she is leaving him]. As he lies
awake in bed next to her, he speaks in a way that is somewhere
between thinking while falling asleep and dreaming. In his voice,
there is a feeling that he’d do anything to have a second chance to get
it right, but he knows himself well enough to realize that odds are
he’ll screw it up again. Now that I think of it, the end is a repetition, in
a much richer form, of the opening scene in which the mug shots are
being taken after each of his arrests. He can never get it right. But by
the end, you know him and it hurts to see him never getting it right.
He has a good heart. In the voice-over monologue at the end, he
imagines the life of the baby, Nathan, Jr. [the baby they took and then
returned to his family]. Cage can make out vaguely in the future his
own invisible presence in the life of the child as he grows up. The
child can feel someone lovingly watching him, feeling proud of him,
but the child can’t quite connect the feeling with a particular person.”
(Of course, I heard this as the patient’s unconscious way of telling me
that he felt lovingly watched over by me. In addition, the beloved

27
 On talking-as-dreaming

baby that Mr B and I were dreaming/conceiving seemed to “embody”

the analytic experience itself that, in this session, was being freshly
“brought to life” in the process of the patient and me dreaming
together.)
I said to Mr B, “In the last scene Nicolas Cage also imagines a
couple – maybe it’s himself and Holly Hunter – with their own
children and grandchildren.”
Mr B excitedly interrupted me to say, “Yes, his dream at the end
has it both ways. I want to believe he’s looking into the future. No, it’s
a softer feeling than that. It is a feeling of maybe. Even for such a screw-
up as Cage, if he can imagine something, it might happen. No, that
sounds so trite. I can’t find the right way of putting it. It’s so frustrat-
ing. If he can dream it, it has happened in the dream. No, I can’t say
it the way I mean it.”
I chose not to focus directly on the meaning of the patient’s dif-
ficulty in finding the right words – which may have derived from his
anxiety about the love that he was feeling for me and his hope that it
was reciprocated. Instead, I made my comments within the terms of
the talking-as-dreaming that I sensed was occurring. I said, “See if this
way of putting it squares with what you have in mind. For me, the
sound of Cage’s voice as he tells his dream at the end is different from
the way his voice has sounded at any point earlier in the film. He’s not
faking a change in himself in order to get Holly Hunter to stay with
him. There’s a genuine change in who he is. You can hear it in his
voice.” It was only in the act of saying these words that I recognized
that not only was I addressing the imagery of the patient’s talking-as-
dreaming, but also I was implicitly saying that I could hear and did
appreciate the difference in the patient’s voice and my own voice, as
well as in Cage’s voice.
Mr B, with relief in his voice, said, “That’s it.”
While at that moment in the analysis neither Mr B nor I was
inclined to talk more directly about what was happening in the ana-
lytic relationship, it was clear to both of us that something new and
significant was taking place between us. Some weeks later, Mr B
spoke about his experience of that session in which we had talked
about Raising Arizona. He compared his experience during that session
with his experience of reading as a child: “The way I spoke about
Raising Arizona couldn’t have been more different from the way I
read as a kid. In reading I became a part of another person’s imaginary
world. In talking about that film in the way we did, I found that I was

28
 On talking-as-dreaming

not losing myself, I was becoming more myself. I wasn’t just talking
about what Nicolas Cage and the Coen brothers had done, I was
talking about myself and what I thought of those films.”
Still later in the analysis, Mr B spoke about that session: “I think
that it doesn’t matter what we talk about – movies or books or cars or
baseball. I used to think that there were things that we should be
talking about like sex and dreams and my childhood. But it now
seems to me that the important thing is the way we talk, not what we
talk about.”
It may be that the film, Raising Arizona, caught the patient’s
imagination because it is a story of two people who, unable to create
(dream) a life of their own, attempt in vain to steal a part of someone
else’s life. But I believe that the emotional significance of the session
did not lie primarily in the symbolic meaning of the film; rather,
what was most important to the patient and me was our experience
of talking/dreaming together. It was an experience in which Mr B
was “dreaming himself up” in the sense that he was creating a voice
that felt like his own. I think that he was right when, on looking back
on the session, he said that it did not matter what we talked about.
What was significant was the experience of his coming into being in
the very act of dreaming and talking in a voice that felt like his own.
In reading my version of the dialogue that occurred in the session,
I am struck by how difficult it is to capture in words the analytic
experience of talking-as-dreaming. The dialogue here and through-
out this chapter too often manages only to “play the notes” while
failing to “make the music” of the intimate, multi-layered exchange
that constitutes talking-as-dreaming. That “music” lies in tone of
voice, rhythm of speech, “oversounds” (Frost, 1942, p. 308) of words
and phrases, and so on. The nature of the music of talking-as-
dreaming differs widely from patient to patient and from transference
experience to transference experience. In one session, the music of
talking-as-dreaming may be the music of an adolescent girl talking
to her father at the dinner table after the rest of the family has left.
The sound is the sound that the father hears in the voice of his
daughter (who is beautiful in his eyes) as she speaks her thoughts on
anything in the world she cares to talk about. In another transference-
countertransference experience, the sound of talking-as-dreaming is
the sound of a three-year-old boy babbling as his mother does the
dishes. He speaks in a sing-song way – almost a lullaby – in semi-
coherent sentences about the fact that his brother is a jerk and that he

29
 On talking-as-dreaming

loves it when Deputy Dawg flies and that he hopes they will be
having corn on the cob again tomorrow, and on and on. And in still
another experience in the transference-countertransference, talking-
as-dreaming has the heart-wrenching sound of a 12-year-old girl,
who after having awoken in tears in the middle of the night, is telling
her mother how ugly and stupid she feels and that no boy will ever
like her and that she will never get married. It is these sorts of sounds
that are so difficult to capture in writing.

Concluding comments

I will conclude with three observations about talking-as-dreaming.

First, in the experience of talking-as-dreaming, even when the analyst
is participating in the patient’s dreaming, the dream is, in the end, the
patient’s dream. Unless this fundamental principle is borne in mind,
the analysis may become a process in which the analyst “dreams up the
patient,” instead of the patient dreaming himself up.
Second, when I engage in talking-as-dreaming, it always feels to me
as if more, not less, attention to the analytic frame is required. It seems
to me that a good deal of analytic experience is required before an
analyst can responsibly engage in talking with patients in the ways I
have described. In participating in talking-as-dreaming, it is essential
that the difference between the roles of analyst and patient remain a
solidly felt presence throughout. Otherwise, the patient is deprived of
an analyst and of the analytic relationship that he needs.
Finally, in introducing the idea of talking-as-dreaming, I am not
making a case for “breaking the rules” of psychoanalysis or for
making new rules. Rather, I think of the clinical work that I have
described as improvisations which took form in the context of my
analytic work with particular patients under particular circumstances.
In saying this, I find myself returning to what I believe to be so
fundamental to the practice of psychoanalysis: our efforts as analysts to
invent psychoanalysis freshly with each of our patients.

30
 3
On psychoanalytic super vision

Psychoanalysis has generated two forms of human relatedness that

had not previously existed: the analytic relationship and the analytic
supervisory relationship. While Freud discussed the analytic relation-
ship in elaborate detail, curiously, so far as I have been able to deter-
mine, he made not a single reference in his Complete Psychological
Works to supervision or to the supervisory relationship (with the
exception of his work with Little Hans’s father [1909]). Nonetheless,
the supervisory relationship is an outcome of Freud’s “discovery” of
psychoanalysis and has become integral to the process of becoming a
psychoanalyst (both during formal analytic training and in the course
of the graduate analyst’s ongoing efforts to become a psychoanalyst).
The psychoanalytic supervisory relationship is, consequently, an
indispensable medium through which psychoanalytic knowledge is
passed from one generation of psychoanalysts to the next.

A theoretical context

I view both the analytic relationship and the supervisory relationship

as forms of “guided dream[ing]” (Borges, 1970a, p. 13). In this chapter,
I will explore some of the forms such dreaming takes in the super-
visory setting. I will make no effort to address the multiplicity of
emotional forces at work in the supervisory relationship or to be
prescriptive regarding how supervision ought to be conducted. Rather,
I will describe several analytic supervisory experiences (one of which
is my own experience in supervision with Harold Searles) that are
illustrative of different facets of the way in which I think and work as
an analytic supervisor. Before presenting four supervisory experiences,

31
 On psychoanalytic supervision

I will briefly discuss a number of ideas that constitute essential aspects

of the theoretical framework for my work as an analytic supervisor.

Dreaming the analytic experience

In the tradition of Bion (1962a, 1970), I conceive of dreaming as the

unconscious psychological work that the individual does – both
while asleep and in waking life – with his lived emotional experience
(see Chapter 1 for further discussion of my conception of dreaming).
From this perspective, the supervisory experience is an experience in
which the supervisor attempts to help the supervisee dream the elem-
ents of his experience with the patient that the analyst has previously
been only partially able to dream (his “interrupted dreams” [Ogden,
2004a]) or has been almost entirely unable to dream (his “undreamt
dreams” [Ogden, 2004a]).
When I speak of “interrupted dreams,” I am referring to states
of mind in which unconscious thoughts become so disturbing as to
interrupt the individual’s capacity for thinking and dreaming. For
example, nightmares are dreams in which the dream-thoughts are
so frightening as to disrupt the dreamer’s capacity for dreaming,
and consequently the individual awakens in a state of fear. Similarly,
play disruptions occur when the thoughts and feelings being experi-
enced in play overwhelm the child’s capacity for playing. Neurotic
symptoms (e.g. obsessional rumination, phobias, diffuse anxiety states,
and so on) also represent types of interrupted dreaming. The patient
manifesting this type of symptomatology is able to dream (to do
unconscious psychological work) with his lived experience only up
to a point. The neurotic symptom marks the point at which the
individual ceases to be able to do unconscious psychological work,
and in the place of such work a static psychological construction/
symptom is generated.
In contrast to interrupted dreams, “undreamt dreams” reflect a
virtually complete inability to dream one’s lived experience. What
cannot be dreamt is foreclosed from unconscious psychological work.
Psychically foreclosed (undreamable) experience may manifest itself
in a variety of forms, including psychosomatic disorders and severe
perversions (de M
Uzan, 2003), night terrors (Ogden, 2004a), split-
off pockets of psychosis, dis-affected states (McDougall, 1984), and
schizophrenic states of non-experience (Ogden, 1980).

32
 On psychoanalytic supervision

A supervisee’s ability to dream his emotional experience with his

patient up to a point and no further reflects the fact that the super-
visee has been doing some genuine unconscious psychological work
with the emotional experience occurring in the analysis, but his
capacity to do that work has been disrupted by the disturbing nature
of the thoughts and feelings being generated in the analysis. Disrup-
tions of this sort are manifested in large part as a limitation of the
supervisee’s ability to generate and sustain a receptive reverie state
and make analytic use of his reverie experience. He may find, for
example, that he is no longer having utilizable associations to the
patient’s dreams and that he is experiencing a dulling of his associ-
ational linkages to what is taking place in the analytic relationship.
These psychic states (sometimes associated with actings-in, such as
mistakenly ending a session early) usually do not constitute major
breaches of ethical conduct or professional responsibility. The analyst,
with the supervisor’s help, is usually able to take notice of, think
about, and make analytic use of what is contributing to the disrup-
tion of his waking dreaming. (The first clinical vignette that I will
present involves supervisory work in which the supervisee experi-
enced this form of disruption of his capacity to dream his experience
with the analysand.)
A supervisee’s almost complete inability to dream his experience
with the patient is a far more serious matter than his being only
partially able to dream what is occurring in the analysis. The super-
visee who is unable to dream his experience is often unaware that
there is a problem in the analysis and finds it difficult to make use
of supervision. The symptomatic manifestations of an inability to
dream are usually more treatment-destructive than those associated
with interrupted dreaming. An inability to dream the experience
being generated in the analysis may take the form of the analyst’s
decision to declare the analysis a success and then to unilaterally set
a termination date (in an unconscious effort to evade facing an ana-
lytic impasse). In other instances, the analyst may develop a psycho-
somatic disorder or a countertransference psychosis. In still other
cases, the analyst may commit boundary violations such as engag-
ing in a sexual relationship or a business relationship with the
patient or soliciting the patient’s active support in realizing the
analyst’s political ambitions. (In the last of the four clinical vignettes
that I will present, I discuss a supervision in which the supervisee’s
inability to dream the analytic experience was manifested in the

33
 On psychoanalytic supervision

form of developing a psychosomatic disorder and a psychotic coun-

tertransference experience.)

Dreaming up the analysand in the supervisory setting

A second element of the theoretical context for my work as an ana-

lytic supervisor involves re-framing the question, “Who is the patient
whose analysis is the subject of the supervision?” The analyst does not
bring the analysand to the supervisory session; rather (with the help of
the supervisor), the analyst “dreams up” the patient in the supervisory
setting. In other words, the patient who is brought to life in the
supervision is not the living, breathing person who talks with the
analyst in the analyst’s consulting room. Rather, the patient who is
presented in the supervisory session is a fiction created in the medium
of words, voice, physical movements (e.g. the supervisee’s hand ges-
tures), irony, wit, unconscious communications such as projective
identifications, and so on.
All of the ways that the analyst consciously and unconsciously
brings his experience with the analysand to the supervision do not add
up to the actual presence of the patient – rather, they issue in the
creation of a fiction. By the term “fiction,” I am not referring to a lie.
Quite the opposite. In the act of presenting a case in supervision, the
supervisee “turns facts into fictions. It is only when facts become
fictions [that] . . . they become real” (Weinstein, 1998). In this sense,
creating the patient as a fiction – “dreaming up the patient” – in the
supervisory setting represents the combined effort of the analyst and
supervisor to bring to life in the supervision what is true to the ana-
lyst’s experience of what is occurring at a conscious, preconscious, and
unconscious level in the analytic relationship (Ogden, 2003b, 2005b).

The interplay of the analytic experience and the supervisory experience

A third element of the theoretical context for my work as an analytic

supervisor involves an awareness of the unconscious interplay of the
supervisory relationship and the analytic relationship. Searles (1955)
was the first to write about this aspect of the supervisory relation-
ship in “The Informational Value of the Supervisor’s Emotional
Experiences.” In this groundbreaking paper, Searles states:

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 On psychoanalytic supervision

The emotions experienced by a supervisor – including even his

private, “subjective” fantasy experiences and his personal feelings
about the supervisee – often provide valuable clarification of
[unconscious interpersonal] processes currently characterizing the
relationship between the supervisee and the patient. In addition,
these processes are often the very ones which have been causing
difficulty in the therapeutic relationship . . . The [conscious and
unconscious] processes at work currently in the relationship between
patient and therapist are often reflected in the [conscious and
unconscious] relationship between therapist and supervisor (p.
157). . . . I shall refer to this phenomenon as the reflection process.1
(1955, p. 159, italics in original)

Thus, the unconscious level of the therapeutic relationship is not

simply brought to the supervisory relationship in the form of the
supervisee’s spoken account of his work with the analysand; rather, it
is brought to life in the unconscious and preconscious dimensions
of the supervisory relationship itself. An essential part of the task of
the supervisor and supervisee is to dream (to do conscious and
unconscious psychological work with) the interplay of the super-
visory and the analytic relationships. Some aspects of this psychol-
ogical work are put into words by the supervisor and the analyst,
while other aspects of this work are left unspoken, or perhaps dis-
cussed in a displacement (for example, in the supervisor’s speaking of
an analogous experience that he has had in his own experience as a
supervisee or as an analyst). Each supervisory pair handles the discus-
sion of the relationship between the supervisory relationship and the
analytic relationship in their own unique way.2

1
The phenomenon referred to by Searles as “the reflection process” has subsequently been
termed “parallel process.” I find the latter term to be a misnomer in that the relationship
between the analytic process and the supervisory process is anything but parallel: the two
processes live in muscular tension with one another and are all the time re-contextualizing
and altering one another. The analytic relationship and the supervisory relationship consti-
tute two facets of a single set of conscious and unconscious internal and external object
relationships involving supervisor, supervisee, and patient.
2
It is beyond the scope of this chapter to review the literature on the interplay of the
supervisory relationship and the analytic relationship. Berman’s (2000) paper provides
both an overview of the subject and insightful observations on the “matrix of [conscious
and unconscious] object relations” (p. 276) constituting the analytic supervisory rela-
tionship. Other important contributions to this topic include: Anderson and McLaughlin

35
 On psychoanalytic supervision

The supervisory frame

The final element of the theoretical context underlying the clinical

discussions that follow involves the “frame” of the supervisory rela-
tionship. Analytic supervision requires the same freedoms and protec-
tions as the analytic relationship (see Gabbard and Lester, 1995, on
boundaries and boundary violations of the supervisory frame). The
supervisor is responsible for creating a frame that ensures the superv-
isee’s freedom to think and dream and be alive to what is occurr-
ing both in the analytic process and in the supervisory process. The
supervisory frame is a felt presence that affords the supervisee a sense
of security that his efforts at being honest in the presence of the
supervisor will be treated humanely, respectfully, and confidentially.3
The supervisee entrusts to the supervisor something highly personal
– his conscious, preconscious, and unconscious experience of the
intimacy and the loneliness, the sexual aliveness and the deadness, the
tenderness and the fearfulness of the analytic relationship. In return,
the supervisor shows the supervisee what it is for him to be (and
to continue to become) an analyst through the way he thinks and
dreams, the way he formulates and expresses his ideas and feelings,
the way he responds to the supervisee’s conscious and unconscious
communications, the way he recognizes the supervisee as a unique
individual for whom the supervisory relationship is being freshly
invented.

Four clinical illustrations

1. Dreaming a patient into existence

In the first hour of consultation in which Dr M discussed his work

with his patient, Ms A, he told me that he had been worried for some

(1963); Baudry (1993); Doehrman (1976); Epstein (1986); Gediman and Wolkenfeld
(1980); Langs (1979); Lesser (1984); McKinney (2000); Slavin (1998); Springmann (1986);
Stimmel (1995); Wolkenfeld (1990); and Yerushalmi (1992).
3
I find that the supervisory process is severely compromised when it takes place under
the aegis of a training program that requires the supervisor to evaluate and report to the
training program his impressions of the work of the supervisee. None of the four super-
visory experiences that I describe in this chapter took place in the context of a training
program.

36
 On psychoanalytic supervision

time about what was happening in the analysis. Ms A had begun

analysis because she was chronically depressed and experienced a ter-
rible fear of dying. She had developed a number of somatic symptoms
that included rather severe dermatitis.
Dr M told me that the patient said she felt disconnected from her
husband and children and worried that while she had managed to
“fake it” at work for a long time, she was about to be found out. In
describing her childhood, Ms A portrayed her father – who was a
teacher and a lay minister – as a man of great intelligence and depth, a
person whom she and “everyone who knew him greatly admired.”
He could also be very harsh, moralistic, and demeaning, and regularly
referred to the patient as “dumb as dirt.” The patient’s mother – a
quiet and withdrawn woman – seemed “not to notice much of life
outside of her head.” (When I quote the patient’s words, I am, of
course, not quoting the patient, but quoting Dr M’s “fiction” derived
from his conscious and unconscious experience with the patient.
Dr M did not take notes during the sessions with his patient.) Ms A
said that throughout every session she felt at a loss to understand why
Dr M would continue working with her, given the fact that she was
an intolerably boring patient.
Dr M said that, in the course of the first year of this five-session-
per-week analysis, he had talked with the patient about his sense that
she felt torn apart by, on the one hand, her wish to demonstrate to her
father (and now to Dr M) that she is not “dumb as dirt” and, on the
other, her wish to be loyal to her father (and to their toxic bond) by
proving him right with regard to his judgment that she is a worthless
failure who will do nothing with her life. Despite this interpretive
work, the patient remained depressed and extremely frightened that
she was dying.
About halfway into Dr M’s initial consultation session with me, he
said, “I’m not sure why – maybe because it feels so primitive – but I’m
embarrassed to say that I smell an acrid odor when Ms A is in my
office, and it lingers after she leaves. I’ve made excuses for her in my
own mind: maybe she has been to the gym earlier in the day and
has not had time to shower.” I said to Dr M that I could not recall
whether he had told me the patient’s age. I was not aware at the time
how this question followed from what Dr M had just been talking
about. He told me that he was not sure how old she was and had never
asked her directly. The longer the analysis went on, the more difficult
it felt to him to ask her. He said, “Very often, when I meet Ms A in the

37
 On psychoanalytic supervision

waiting room and as she leaves at the end of the session, I find myself
staring into her face trying to get a sense of how old she is. Only now
as we’re talking about it, I think that what I’m doing in looking at
her in that way is trying to see in her face what she looked like as a
child, and as an adolescent, and as a young woman. At times I see in
her face a very pretty, inquisitive, and intelligent young girl or college
student.”
I asked Dr M what the patient, when she was young, had dreamt of
becoming. He told me that she had had considerable talent as a dancer
and had been a member of a ballet company for several years after
college. She gave up dance when she developed stage fright that she
could not overcome. Ms A decided to go to law school “as a default
position.” Though she had achieved some success in corporate law,
the work held no interest for her.
I commented to Dr M that it seemed to me that the patient had not
been able to dream herself into being; I thought that her fear of dying
(given concrete form in her physical symptomatology) may be a mani-
festation of her sense that she has never been born in any real emo-
tional sense and fears that she will die before she is born. I added, “This
may be a stretch, but I think that the odor that you smell may be the
patient’s way of bringing to the sessions the smell of her own decaying.
What little she feels there is of her is dying right there in your office.”
In the initial consultation session being discussed, Dr M had man-
aged to create in the medium of words a “fiction” that brought to life
what was true to his emotional experience of Ms A, a patient who
could not dream and, instead, somatized her undreamt experience.
Dr M had been able to dream some of the dreams that the analysand
was unable to dream – for example, his dreaming Ms A as a girl and
young woman who was in the process of being and becoming a
person in her own right. His dreaming her in the consultation session
had been facilitated by my dreaming her in the form of my “out of the
blue” question about her age. My dream/question and Dr M’s dream
of Ms A in her youth stand in marked contrast to her father’s “dream-
ing” her. Her father’s “dreams” were not dreams, but virulent project-
ive identifications in which the patient served as a place or a thing
into which his disowned, denigrated, “dirty” self was housed (while he
held as his own the morally pure aspect of his split sense of self). He
needed her to serve this function, and she was frightened of losing her
value to him by refusing to play that role. At least she was “some thing”
to her father; she felt she was nothing at all to her mother.

38
 On psychoanalytic supervision

In the course of the succeeding months of analysis, the patient told

Dr M a dream: “Big chunks of my skin and muscle came off in my
hands. When I tried to put the clumps of tissue back on my body,
even more came off. It was horrible. It was as if my dermatitis had
gone crazy.” Dr M said to the patient that he thought that, as odd as
it might sound, Ms A had been working in analysis to get her derma-
titis to “go crazy” in the sense of changing it from a bodily event into a
psychological event, a feeling of going crazy, of coming apart that she
could think about and talk about with him.
Dr M never brought up with the patient the odor that he had
smelled. He told me, “It simply disappeared.” Perhaps it disappeared
when he and Ms A became able to dream her previously undreamable
experience of herself as a decaying corpse (that was in the process of
becoming dirt).

2. On the importance of having time to waste

On my return from a holiday break, Dr W, an analyst who had been

consulting with me for many years, began a supervisory session by
enquiring about how my time away had been. Not taking this as a pro
forma question that invited a mechanical response, I said that one of
the best parts of the vacation had been having time to read Don
DeLillo’s (1997) novel, Underworld. It happened that Dr W had also
recently read the book. We talked about the way in which the novel
had immediately won us over by making metaphorical use of an
actual 1951 baseball game between the Giants and the Dodgers. The
game was decided by Bobby Thompson’s bottom-of-the-ninth
home run – which the tabloids called “the shot heard round the
world.” Though legendary to those who follow baseball, that game
was a meaningless event, not only from the perspective of the history
of mid-twentieth-century America, but also in relation to other events
that occurred the same day. That day, the Russians detonated their
second atomic bomb, which was truly a “shot heard around the
world.” Every character, every event in DeLillo’s sprawling 800-page
epic, is connected in one way or another (often extremely indirectly)
to Bobby Thompson’s home-run ball.
Dr W and I talked about how the all-important, and at the same
time insignificant, events of our lives – beginning with the accident of
our birth – together constitute the infinitely complex, ever-expanding

39
 On psychoanalytic supervision

web that we come to experience as who we are. Each of us creates a

sense of what is true that is in large part determined by the “lineage”
of a feeling – the fluid history of our storied being over time. We
spoke also of the structure of the book as a whole, a book that seems
to be bursting at the seams as it strains to contain not only an extra-
ordinary assemblage of characters and ideas, but a seemingly endless
series of shifts in tone and voice. A sentence from the book came to
mind in this regard that I could only paraphrase. Later that day,
I found that sentence in the book in which DeLillo describes the
crowd emptying from the stadium after the game: “Shouts, bat-cracks,
full bladders and stray yawns, the sand-grain manyness of things that
can’t be counted” (DeLillo, 1997, p. 60).
Dr W and I each had our favorite sentences from the book in
which the speaker/narrator offers a knowing phrase concerning why
he or another character acted as he or she did, and then punctures the
illusion that we can know with any certainty why we feel and behave
as we do. Dr W recalled a sentence that read something like, “She
slavishly took care of her husband out of a profound sense of guilt – at
least that’s what she told herself.” The narrator seems dogged by the
need to be as honest as language allows him to be: he seems to try not
to allow exaggeration, nostalgia, euphemism, or any other form of
watering down the truth to slip by unnoticed. Of course, he fails, and
knows it.
We talked about how the writing captures in an extraordinarily
accurate, and yet unselfconscious, way the experience of silently talk-
ing to ourselves, sometimes in words, sometimes in shifts in perspec-
tive or feeling tone. These are our own doomed efforts at being fully
honest with ourselves. Dr W and I spoke about our experiences as
analysands in which each of us, in quite different but overlapping
ways, had very frequently felt that at least two conversations were
going on at the same time: the spoken one with the analyst and the
unspoken ones with ourselves. Both Dr W and I became aware, in a
way that felt new to each of us, that as analysands she and I had been
engaged in multiple layers of conversation, each somehow a commen-
tary on the others, each with its own unique sort of truth and its own
brand of self-deception.
Dr W said, “When I spoke to my analyst, there were almost always
unspoken counter-thoughts and counter-feelings: ‘Do I really
believe that?’ Or ‘I sound like a whiny adolescent.’ Or ‘His silence
has suddenly turned icy. He does that when he’s angry . . . or

40
 On psychoanalytic supervision

scared.’ ” She explained that she did not mean that the spoken con-
versation was a lie or a cover-up, but that when the spoken conversa-
tion was given undue authority in relation to the unspoken ones, she
had a sense that she had distracted herself and her analyst from the
effort to hold the full complexity of what was occurring. In Dr W’s
analysis, and in my own, the unspoken conversations were not often
talked about. Perhaps it was for the best that the unspoken “counter-
thoughts” be allowed their underworld life, their dream-life. To
attempt to give voice to them all would probably generate an obses-
sional paralysis of thinking. And yet, it had been unsettling for me
when I had felt that my analyst had lost touch with the cacophony
of my underworld conversations. In this part of the conversation
with Dr W, I was becoming more fully aware of the way in which my
underworld – my barely audible dream-life – is a constant presence
that gives texture to everything I think and feel. I came to experience
my analyst’s not drawing attention to my underworld as a form of
acceptance of it rather than as an obliviousness to it.
I did not feel that this supervisory session had been “wasted” in
talking about a novel. Somehow the pleasure that Dr W and I found
in reading the book led to a discussion of our own analytic under-
worlds. It was only because we were in a frame of mind akin to the
analyst’s state of reverie (Ogden, 1997a, b) that we could use the
supervisory hour in the utterly unexpected way that we did. This
sense of having all the time in the world, of having time to waste, to
my mind, is a necessary element of the emotional background for an
important kind of associative thinking in the analytic supervisory
setting. Of course, matters of clinical urgency always take precedence
in supervision, but it has been my experience that an analyst’s dutiful
presentation of clinical material may serve as a defense against a more
freely associative form of thinking, a form of thinking and imagining
that enhances the range and depth of what can be learned in the
supervisory setting.
In writing about the importance of having time to waste in the
supervisory setting, I am reminded of an experience that occurred
some forty years ago. It was an experience that made a deep impres-
sion on me at the time and has influenced the way I view both
analysis and analytic supervision. In the fall of my freshman year of
college, an English professor speaking to a group of parents was asked
by one of the fathers what his job consisted of. The professor said he
taught two classes that met for an hour and a half twice a week. The

41
 On psychoanalytic supervision

father asked what else he did, to which the professor replied, “Noth-
ing. You see that’s what I’m paid to do – nothing. Only if I have
nothing to do, do I have the freedom to go to a bookstore and ignore
‘the great books’ – the works of Shakespeare, Cervantes, Dante,
Goethe, Proust, Joyce, Yeats, and Eliot. They and a great many other
novelists, playwrights and poets are writers I would read and re-read if
I felt I had only a limited amount of time to spend. But because I have
time to waste, I am able to buy a book just because I like its title
or am intrigued by its opening sentence or by a paragraph a hundred
and fifty pages into it. Or I can read the ‘lesser’ works of Hardy or
Conrad or Updike – books that very few people consider to be worth
their time. I have time to read anything I like. How else could I
happen upon good writers whom I’ve never heard of, who have
never won a prize – even in high school – who don’t have a single
famous friend to write an ecstatic blurb for the book jacket?”
For me, it is a shame when a supervisor and supervisee never find
that they have time to “waste.” An important mode of thinking and
feeling and learning is lost.

3. Dr Searles

A little more than twenty-five years ago, I wrote to Harold Searles,

asking to meet with him while I was in Washington, D.C. He left a
message on my answering machine in which he offered a two-hour
block of time for our meeting and suggested that I read a paper that
he had published in which he discussed his work with a schizophrenic
patient whom he refers to in his writings as “Mrs Douglas.”
When I arrived at Dr Searles’s office, the door to his consulting
room was open and he motioned me to come in. He said, “You must
be Dr Ogden,” and indicated where I should sit. On the table between
us was a tape recorder on which a large reel of tape was in place. It was
already clear that there would be no words of welcome, no polite
enquiries into what I was doing in Washington, no small talk at all. He
told me in a matter of fact way that he had been taping every session
of the five-session-per-week analysis with Mrs Douglas for more than
20 years.
We listened together for about five minutes (which felt like a very
long time). Dr Searles told me that he had grown to love Mrs Douglas
despite her best efforts to infuriate him. He said, by way of example of

42
 On psychoanalytic supervision

her keenly perceptive ways of provoking him, that she had recently
decided not to go on a day-long outing organized by Chestnut Lodge
where she was an inpatient. He believed that she had somehow sensed
that he was desperate to use the 50 minutes of the session she would
have missed to work on a paper that he was close to completing.
He pressed the button to start the tape again and eased back in his
chair to listen. About 10 minutes into the recorded session, Dr Searles
(in the session with Mrs Douglas) said to the tape recorder (as if it
were a third person in the room along with him and Mrs Douglas),
“The first Dr Searles has just left the room and a second Dr Searles has
entered.” In speaking these words to the tape recorder, his voice had
the sound of a theatrical aside spoken by an actor to the audience in
the middle of a conversation with another character in the play. But it
did not seem to me that his comment was meant to be humorous. He
seemed to have a need to talk to someone, anyone, even an imaginary
third person. There was an oversound of sadness and resignation in his
voice in response to being seen not as a whole person, but as a parade
of parts of people who were constituted more by means of the
patient’s projections than by her perceptions of who he was and how
he felt about her.
Some time later (time had become analytic time as opposed to
clock time), I noticed tears rolling down Dr Searles’s face. I did not
feel surprised by this, given how rapidly and thoroughly social artifice
had been dispensed with. I remained silent and felt no need to say or
do anything in response. We continued to listen for a while longer.
Dr Searles then said that no doubt I had seen him weeping. He told
me that the time spent with me had reminded him of the recent death
of Ping-Nie Pao, an analyst at Chestnut Lodge who had been a close
friend of his for many years. He said that there were very few people
left in his life – and he suspected very few left in the world – who
would want to spend time listening to a tape recording of a session
from the twenty-first year of an analysis of a schizophrenic patient.
Dr Searles’s comment, like almost everything else that he said and did
during the time we spent together, had a quality of unguarded inti-
macy. There was something both freeing and frightening about what
was occurring. I was being wordlessly invited to experience and speak
from an unconscious level and to enter into, and simultaneously
observe, a dreamscape without knowing where the dreaming was
heading – we never do know where a dream is going.
I told Dr Searles that listening with him to the session had led me

43
 On psychoanalytic supervision

to feel an odd combination of feelings that I only now recognized as a

feeling that I often experienced in my work with a blind schizo-
phrenic man. I explained that I was at the time a full-time therapist on
the staff of a long-term analytically oriented inpatient ward. I said
that in my work with the blind patient, I had a sense that there was
nothing to be afraid of because everything horrific that could happen
had already happened. It was as if the world had already been des-
troyed and had no future and so it did not even occur to either of us
to hide from one another. There was nothing courageous about feel-
ing that way – it did not arise out of a feeling of having conquered
fear, but from a sense of utter defeat. Dr Searles said he lived with that
feeling most of the time, and added, “People sometimes mistake it for
arrogance, but it’s not – it’s the opposite of arrogance.”
We listened some more as one Dr Searles after another arrived
and left the room in the recorded session. I told Dr Searles that the
patient I had mentioned often ended his sentences with the “reassur-
ing” words, “Nothing personal.” Searles laughed deeply – the kind of
laugh that is a release of an entire lifetime of feeling that includes a
sense of welcome connection with another person (with me, for
the moment, and with Ping-Nie Pao, and I don’t know who else) and
also of unspeakable disconsolate recognition of the impossibility of
making a reliable connection with Mrs Douglas and with his own
schizophrenic mother (whom he had mentioned several times in the
course of our meeting). In the course of the consultation, we moved
fluidly between discussing my analytic work with two schizophrenic
patients and Dr Searles’s analysis of Mrs Douglas. I felt dazed when
I left Dr Searles’s office. I have not until now written down my
recollections and impressions of that meeting.
What this supervision with Dr Searles represents for me, now as I
look back on it, is a form of bringing the entirety of oneself, the full
depth and breadth of one’s emotional responsiveness, to bear not only
on an analytic relationship but also on an interaction between super-
visor and supervisee. In the experience with Dr Searles, it did not
seem to matter whether it was his or my own conscious, preconscious,
and unconscious responsiveness that took the lead at any given
moment as we talked about our analytic work and what was happen-
ing between us. Claims of “ownership” or credit due for originality
or insightfulness held no purchase. All that seemed to matter was
making a human connection and gaining a sense of what was true to
the present moment, both of the analytic work and of the supervisory

44
 On psychoanalytic supervision

work. As I mentioned earlier, there was a dream-like quality to the

consultation. In part, this was because primary process linkages were
honored. But as important was the fact that the effort to be honest
with ourselves was at every moment shaping the experience. That
experience of guided dreaming with Searles reflected the way in
which dreams cannot lie – they may disguise, but they are incapable of
being dishonest.

4. A nightmare from which the analyst could not wake up

Dr L, an analyst who had been in weekly supervision with me for

about three years, told me that her analytic work with a pediatrics
nurse was so disturbing that she did not think that she could continue
working with the patient. This state of mind was highly unusual
for Dr L, whose work had been consistently thoughtful and steady,
even while in the grip of intense transference-countertransference
dilemmas. The patient, Ms B, had consulted Dr L because she felt
continually “on the edge of going crazy.” Despite the fact that she was
morbidly obese (she weighed more than 400 pounds at the beginning
of the analysis), she insisted that her “freedom to eat” not be interfered
with.
Ms B had told Dr L that over a span of years in childhood her
parents had frequently given her enemas. She initially described the
enemas as extremely frightening, but in the course of the analysis,
admitted to herself and to Dr L that the enemas also became a source
of sexual excitement. Anal masturbation, which had begun during the
period of the enemas, continued to the present as the patient’s
exclusive form of sexual activity. During both the enemas and the
anal masturbation, the patient felt as if she were “dissolving.”
Toward the end of the second year of the analysis, Ms B spon-
taneously began a diet that resulted in a 240-pound weight loss over a
period of fourteen months. When, according to the diet regimen she
was following, the patient reached her normal weight, she began to
experience anxiety of an intensity that she had never previously felt.
The patient’s already very limited capacity for self-reflective thought
and her ability to remember her dreams all but disappeared. Ms B
filled the sessions with detailed accounts of her work as a nurse.
She described in a tone of voice saturated with thinly disguised
pleasure the details of catheterizing the bladders of small children. She

45
 On psychoanalytic supervision

described the procedures as “unfortunate necessities.” Some months

later, after being transferred to a pediatrics neonatal unit, Ms B one
day spoke of the “beauty” that she had seen in a mother’s holding in
the palms of her hands her tiny, deformed premature infant. Dr L
found Ms B’s description of this mother and infant particularly upset-
ting. It felt to Dr L that the patient was taking perverse delight in the
terrible pain that this mother was feeling.
Dr L, in the course of the years that we had worked together, had
told me that she had completed a pediatrics residency before becom-
ing a psychiatrist and then a psychoanalyst. She had also told me that
her oldest child had died of a lymphoma when he was ten years old
after lengthy treatment with chemotherapy. Dr L was of course aware
that her feelings associated with her son’s illness and death were a
source of anger, sadness, and revulsion in response to Ms B’s accounts
of her experiences as a nurse. Despite this self-awareness, Dr L found
that the effect on her of what Ms B was doing in the analysis rendered
her unable to think.
As Dr L was describing her recent experiences with her patient, my
mind wandered to a supervision during my first year of psychiatric
residency. I was presenting a patient who had come to the clinic
because of terrible headaches. Over the course of a few sessions, it
turned out that the patient’s wife had ordered him out of their bed-
room. My patient slept in the bed of his eight-year-old son, while the
son slept in the patient’s bed with the patient’s wife. I told the super-
visor that family therapy was impossible because the patient’s wife
was agoraphobic and could not leave their house. The crusty super-
visor asked me what I would do if I were walking down the street and
saw a house on fire. I said that I probably would call the fire depart-
ment. He said, “No, you’d go in to see if you could help anyone get
out.” He told me to arrange to meet with the patient and his wife and
child at their house. I worked with them each week at their house for
more than a year. After only two sessions, the son returned to his own
bedroom and the patient to his. Much more gradually, the wife’s
agoraphobia diminished in intensity, and the son made friends for the
first time in his life.
Refocusing on the conversation with Dr L, I said that it seemed
that the patient’s self-hatred embodied in her obesity (making herself
grotesque while slowly killing herself) and her insistence on maintain-
ing her “freedom to eat” had served to give the patient a feeling of
some degree of control over her savage, primitive hatred of her

46
 On psychoanalytic supervision

mother. Moreover, I felt that the patient was unconsciously fused with
(“dissolved in”) her mother. A psychotic transference had developed in
which Dr L had become, in the patient’s mind, the undifferentiated
conglomerate of herself and her mother. I told Dr L that I thought
that she was experiencing a countertransference psychosis in the form
of feeling inhabited and taken over from the inside by the patient.
Dr L said that this formulation made sense to her. But in the succeed-
ing weeks, she continued to find it almost unbearable to be in the
same room with Ms B.
I began to suspect – in part as a consequence of the reverie involv-
ing my own experience in supervision – that I was afraid of getting
fully involved with what was happening in the supervision and in
the analysis of Ms B. I had been busy calling the fire department
instead of going into the burning house. I could then see that both the
supervisory situation and the analytic situation required decisive
interventions. I told Dr L, “I think that unconsciously, and perhaps
consciously, Ms B knows or, more accurately, in a primitive way smells
the fact that you have cared for a dying child of your own. The patient
feels that she is in a position to get inside of you and torture you in the
most brutal way possible, just as she had felt that her parents had
gotten inside of her and malignantly took her over.” I went on to say
that Ms B’s savage assaults were highly destructive to herself, to Dr L,
and to the analysis, and that they had to be put to an end. Dr L then
told me that she had for some time felt that the effect of the patient on
her was so destructive that it would literally kill her. She said that she
could feel her blood pressure rise to levels that felt dangerously high
during the sessions and had on several occasions taken extra medica-
tion for her hypertension prior to her meetings with Ms B. (Dr L had
found that her blood pressure was in fact significantly elevated above
her regular baseline following her sessions with Ms B.)
Speaking more freely now, Dr L said that she felt utterly helpless
with the patient because she could not tell Ms B not to talk about her
work (which constituted practically the entirety of the patient’s life). I
said to Dr L that that was exactly what she had to do: to tell the patient
that her accounts of her work with sick children and their parents
were serving not as communications about distressing aspects of the
patient’s life, but as attacks on Dr L (which replicated the attacks Ms B
had experienced as a child). I added that I felt that it was essential that
Dr L say to the patient in her own words that from here on she will be
asking the patient not to continue to give descriptions of her duties

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 On psychoanalytic supervision

and interactions at work and, instead, to describe the feelings that her
life experiences evoke in her. I said that I expected that Ms B would
act as if she had no idea what Dr L was talking about when Dr L spoke
of the patient’s “attacks” on her and that Ms B would argue that it is
impossible to talk about her feelings without talking about the events
that elicited them. I suggested that a possible way of responding to
such retorts would be to say, “All you can do is do your best, and I will
let you know when you cross the line.”
In disbelief, Dr L said, “You mean I can tell her not to talk about her
work – about what she does to those children and her perverse distor-
tions of what the parents of the children are feeling? For weeks now
I’ve been having dreams in which I’m in my office with Ms B and am
yelling at her, ‘Get out, get out!’ My husband has had to wake me
up from these nightmares. He’s told me that I have been thrashing
around yelling, ‘Get out, get out.’ ”
I said to Dr L, “You feel trapped in a never-ending nightmare with
the patient: there is no escape, just endless fear and pain. Nightmares
ordinarily wake us up and, in so doing, release us from experiencing
dream-thoughts that are too painful to bear and too painful to work
with unconsciously.” Dr L, both in her sessions with Ms B and in her
sleep at night, had become more a figure in a dream than the dreamer
of the dream (a dreamer of the analytic relationship). She understood
that in her work with Ms B she would have to be the one to wake
herself up and wake up her patient from the endless nightmare being
played out in the sessions.
The analysis changed markedly after Dr L put a stop to the patient’s
disguised sadistic attacks on her. Dr L began to interpret the psychotic
transference in which the patient and her mother were merged and
projected into Dr L where the fused mother-patient was tortured.
Also, after the attacks were put to an end, Dr L told me that she no
longer experienced elevation of her blood pressure during or after her
sessions with Ms B. In this period of supervision, there was a complex
interplay of the unconscious levels of the supervisory relationship, the
analytic relationship, my own reverie experience, and the supervisee’s
external and internal worlds. Dr L had needed help from me to
awaken herself from the unending nightmare that she was living with
Ms B. Only then could she begin genuinely to dream her experience
in the analytic relationship.
Several months later, Dr L told me that Ms B was neither attempt-
ing to torment her nor being passively compliant; rather, for the first

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 On psychoanalytic supervision

time in this ten-year analysis, Ms B was showing interest in her inner

life, including the reasons why she had for so long been torturing
Dr L.

Concluding remarks

In sum, the role of the psychoanalytic supervisor is to facilitate the

supervisee’s work of dreaming aspects of the analytic relationship that
the supervisee has previously been unable to dream. Since the original
analytic situation cannot be brought to the supervision, the work of
the supervisory pair involves “dreaming up” the patient, creating a
“fiction” that is true to the analyst’s emotional experience with the
analysand. Such dreaming takes place within the context of a super-
visory frame that safeguards the analyst’s freedom to think about and
be alive to all that is happening in the analytic and supervisory rela-
tionships, as well as in the dynamic interplay between the two. It is
important that at least occasionally the supervisor and supervisee
feel that they have “time to waste.” Such a state of mind allows for a
less structured, more freely associative type of thinking that is akin to
the analytic state of reverie. Thinking of this sort often generates
fresh perspectives on what the supervisor and analyst felt they “already
knew.”

49
 4
On teaching psychoanalysis

Psychoanalytic teaching at its best opens a space for thinking and

dreaming in situations in which the (understandable) impulse is to
close that space. To fill that space as a teacher is to preach, to prosely-
tize, to perpetuate dogma; not to fill it is to create conditions in which
one may become open to previously inconceivable possibilities. With
regard to teaching clinical psychoanalysis, a central goal of analytic
teaching is the enhancement of the analyst’s capacity to dream those
aspects of his experience in the clinical situation that he has not
previously been able to dream.
The observations concerning analytic teaching that I offer in this
chapter are drawn primarily from my experiences in teaching two
weekly seminars, each currently in its twenty-seventh year. I will
begin by describing the setting in which I have taught and then will
discuss the following four aspects of analytic teaching that I have
found to be of particular importance in conveying what I view as
essential qualities of psychoanalysis: (1) a way of reading analytic writ-
ing; (2) clinical teaching as a form of collective dreaming; (3) reading
poetry and fiction as experiences in “ear training”; and (4) the art of
learning to forget what one has learned.

The setting

In 1982, I began to teach two weekly hour-and-a-half seminars at my

home. I co-led one of these with my colleague and friend, Bryce
Boyer, until his death in 2001. Both seminars are open-ended and
continue year-round. The format of the seminars has changed mini-
mally over the decades. Three or four consecutive seminar meetings
in which a paper is discussed alternate with three or four meetings in

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 On teaching psychoanalysis

which a seminar member presents current analytic work with one of

his or her patients. During the clinical meetings, the presenter reads
process notes from the most recent session or two, and includes as
much reverie and other countertransference experience as he or she is
comfortable in providing.
The membership of the seminars has become quite stable. The ten-
ure of the ten to twelve members of each seminar is, on average, longer
than five years. The open-ended nature of the seminars, in combin-
ation with the lengthy tenure of the participants, confers a quality of
timelessness to the seminars. There is a sense of having all the time in
the world to follow a case or read a paper or follow a tangent (as long as
it remains interesting and productive). What we do not get to one
week, we will get to the next, or perhaps the week after that.
Everything about the seminars is voluntary. The groups are not
associated with any training program; no certificate of participation is
awarded; no one is required to present a case or even to enter into the
discussions. The seminar members are free to leave the seminar at any
time without explanation and, as far as I have been able to determine,
without being viewed as disloyal to the group or as a failure. A num-
ber of people have left the seminar after several years of participation
and have returned a decade or so later. Others have attended the
seminars for only a few sessions or a few months before deciding that
the level of discussion, the group process, or some other quality of the
seminar did not suit them.
The make-up of the seminars has varied over time, but there is
always a wide range of levels of clinical experience and mastery of
psychoanalytic theory among the members. While the large majority
of seminar members have been in clinical practice for at least fifteen
years, there are always some participants who are quite new to the
field. Of late, almost all of the members of one of the seminars have
completed formal analytic training, while few of the members of the
other seminar have done so. Despite this difference, I find that both
the liveliness and the level of sophistication of the discussions that take
place in the two groups are comparable.

A way of reading analytic writing

In the course of the decades of reading analytic texts in the seminars,

I have become increasingly aware of the inseparability of an author’s

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 On teaching psychoanalysis

ideas and the way he or she uses language to present those ideas.
Having thoughts is quite a different phenomenon from speaking
one’s ideas, and speaking one’s ideas is quite different from presenting
those ideas in writing. An analytic paper must not only include ori-
ginal thinking, it must “work” as a piece of writing and as an experi-
ence in reading. To simply discuss a paraphrased version of some of
the ideas developed in an analytic paper is to lose touch with the fact
that the paper is a piece of writing. The words, syntax, voice, sentence
and paragraph structure, and so on, together contribute to the effects
created and the ideas conveyed in the medium of language. Con-
sequently, for the past nine or ten years, it has seemed to me that
when studying an analytic paper or book, it is not only preferable, but
essential, to read the paper aloud in the seminar, sentence by sentence,
paragraph by paragraph. To do otherwise feels to me equivalent to
studying a short story exclusively by means of recounting the plot.
Reading texts such as Freud’s (1917) “Mourning and Melan-
cholia,” Winnicott’s (1945) “Primitive Emotional Development” or
Berger and Mohr’s (1967) A Fortunate Man has required two or three
months of weekly seminars for each; reading Bion’s (1962a) Learning
from Experience took most of a year. It quickly became apparent in
reading papers and books in this way that good writing can stand the
test of being read aloud; mediocre writing cannot.
My experience in leading the seminars in close reading of texts is
reflected in a series of papers that I have written over the course of the
past decade (Ogden, 1997c,d, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001a,b, 2002, 2003a,
2004b; see also Chapters 7 and 8). These papers have shaped and have
been shaped by the close readings that we have done in the seminars.
(For me, teaching and writing are inseparable: I write what I teach
and teach what I write.)
I have consistently found that reading a text aloud, sentence by
sentence, has profoundly altered the nature and quality of the discus-
sions that take place in the seminars. It feels to me that we are not
simply discussing an author’s ideas, but immersing ourselves intel-
lectually and emotionally in the way the author thinks/writes, how he
talks, what he values, who he is, who he is becoming, and, perhaps
most important, who we are becoming as a consequence of the
experience of reading the work together.
When the writing is good, the author creates in the experience of
reading something like the phenomenon that he is discussing. Here,
and in subsequent sections of this chapter, I will attempt not simply to

52
 On teaching psychoanalysis

tell the reader about how I go about teaching psychoanalysis, but to

show the reader something of how I teach. For example, in reading
aloud Loewald’s (1979) “The Waning of the Oedipus Complex,” one
can hear the tension between Loewald, the earnest classical Freudian,
and Loewald, the revolutionary. Loewald does not see the Oedipus
complex as a process of internalizing parental prohibitions in the face
of the threat of castration; rather, he sees the Oedipus complex as the
fantasied and, as I will discuss, actual murder of the oedipal parents
carried out in the process of the child’s emancipating himself from
parental authority.
For Loewald, revolting against and appropriating the authority of
the parents underlie the child’s establishment of a sense of self that is
responsible for himself and to himself. Oedipal parricide is followed,
in health, by atonement for the murder and the restitution to the
parents of their (now transformed) authority as parents of a child who
is increasingly autonomous. Thus the Oedipus complex, for Loewald,
is most fundamentally a battle between parents and children that medi-
ates the succession of generations (see Chapter 7 for a close reading
of Loewald’s 1979 paper).
One can hear in the sound of Loewald’s words and sentences
his own “urge for emancipation” (p. 389) from the conventional
psychoanalytic wisdom of his time:

If we do not shrink from blunt language, in our role as children of

our parents, by genuine emancipation we do kill something vital in
them – not all in one blow and not in all respects, but contributing
to their dying. As parents of our children we undergo the same fate,
unless we diminish them.
(Loewald, 1979, p. 395)

In this passage, there is an assemblage of powerful monosyllabic words

(which is unusual for Loewald): shrink, blunt, role, kill, fate. We can
hear and feel in these words – earthy, Anglo-Saxon words – the
ongoingness of the body’s pulse, the matter-of-factness of one event
following the next in the living of everyday life. The experience that
is created in the language captures something of the at once ordinary
and extraordinary process of the succession of generations, of the
movement of life and responsibility from one generation to the next.
That movement of responsibility is taking place in the very experience
of reading in the form of the passage of ideas from one generation of

53
 On teaching psychoanalysis

analysts to the next, from Freud to Loewald, from Loewald to the

reader.
In reading aloud in the seminars the last section of Loewald’s
“The Waning of the Oedipus Complex,” it was clear that Loewald’s
sentences had become confusing, not because the ideas being pre-
sented were of greater complexity, but because the language being
used was less lucid. For example, in discussing analytic work with
borderline patients, Loewald states, “It is as though, in comparison,
the neurotic conflicts commonly encountered are, as viewed from this
uncommon ground, blurred reflections, garbled echoes of a basic
quest those patients desperately pursue in pure culture” (pp. 399–
400). The sentence structure here is painfully contorted. It took me
many readings to begin to glean a sense of what Loewald is saying, and
even then it seemed that many of the words are poorly chosen. For
example, is “uncommon ground” ground not held in common by
neurotic patients and borderline patients? And why does Loewald use
the phrase “garbled echoes,” a phrase that suggests that the conflict
experienced by the borderline patient echoes (derives from) neurotic
conflict? What is the logic of a developmental sequence that seems to
place the origins of neurotic conflict prior to that of borderline psy-
chopathology? (It is clear from the context that Loewald does not
subscribe to such an idea.)
I think that the breakdown of language in this portion of Loewald’s
paper reflects a breakdown in his thinking. Writing, after all, is a
form of thinking. Loewald, up to this point in the paper, is daring
in his willingness to deviate from both classical Freudian thinking and
American ego psychology. Earlier in his article, Loewald proposed
that a healthy (universal) “psychotic core” (p. 400) of the individual
is “an active constituent of normal psychic life” (p. 403). This concep-
tion of the importance of the archaic, undifferentiated dimension
of the Oedipus complex constitutes a radical break from the widely
held notion that the Oedipus complex and its “heir,” the superego,
are definitive of neurotic and healthy (well-differentiated) psychic
structure.
Despite the earlier clarity of his thinking in this regard, Loewald,
beginning in the murky sentence under discussion, retreats from
his unconventional, original thinking and embraces the mainstream
thinking of his time: “in the classical neuroses it [the psychotic core]
may not need specific analytic work” (p. 400). This contradicts his
previously stated notion that the psychotic core is an inherent part of

54
 On teaching psychoanalysis

the Oedipus complex and, it would seem, is always a part of a thor-

ough analysis of the Oedipus complex. Could Loewald really believe
that patients suffering from “classical neuroses” may be, to all intents
and purposes, unencumbered by psychopathology manifesting itself
in forms such as “problems of primal transference in analysis, com-
plexities of transference-countertransference phenomena, and of dir-
ect communication between the unconscious of different persons”
(p. 399)? The response of one of the seminars to Loewald’s “retreat”
was an audible groan: it felt to the group that Loewald had under-
mined his own original and creative thinking which had breathed
new life into the Oedipus complex. It was as if Loewald had broken
his word to the reader – a promise to say what he believes to be true
despite internal and external pressures to do otherwise. I believe that
this strong emotional response from the seminar members derived at
least in part from the way in which reading a paper aloud in a group
setting creates quite an immediate sense of personal connection
between the group and the writer.
Another example of the seminar’s intense response to the language
of the papers being read aloud occurred in a discussion that took as its
starting point Loewald’s (1979) idea that in emancipating ourselves
from our parents, “we do kill something vital in them – not all in one
blow and not in all respects, but contributing to their dying. As par-
ents of our children we undergo the same fate, unless we diminish
them” (p. 395). In the course of discussing this portion of the paper,
a seminar member spoke of the extremely painful and immediate fear
of death that she felt during the years after she outlived the age at
which her mother died. She went on to describe the way in which
the experience of having grandchildren had not eradicated the feel-
ing, but had transformed it. She now felt that her life is not only an
experience of making something but, as importantly, an experience
of making room for someone and something else. “My aging and the
process of my dying now seem to have a purpose, a use – which makes
dying less frightening to me. If I had read Loewald’s paper ten years
ago . . . What I was about to say isn’t true. I have read this paper many
times over the past fifteen to twenty years, but it hasn’t touched me in
the way it has this time – reading and listening to it and talking about
it here. I have been able to hear in Loewald’s writing the voice of a
parent teaching me how to be a parent in my current stage of life.”
Another seminar member then commented, “I think the word con-
tributing in that sentence refers to more than our children playing a

55
 On teaching psychoanalysis

role in pushing us along – pushing us off the edge of a cliff to our

deaths – as they seize authority from us. The word contributing suggests
to me that our children give us something of value in the sense of
helping us to learn how to grow old and die, how to be alive to
ourselves in the process of aging and dying.”
A third member of the seminar remarked that the transfer of
authority to the next generation is not simply a loss. She described the
sense of freedom she experienced in no longer being responsible in
the same way for the lives of her children. “It is as if a debt has been
paid. Growing old isn’t only a matter of parents making room for
children to become responsible adults, it is also a matter of children, in
taking responsibility for themselves, making room for their parents to
be alive and free in a new way.”
Several others in the seminar who had young children spoke of
dreading the time when their children would be leaving home. They
feared that after their children left home, they, as parents to their
children, would not have a “real” life with their children, but only the
remnants of one; this would leave them feeling terribly empty. An
older member of the group said that these fears, unfortunately, were
well founded: he had found that while there is greater freedom for
parents when children leave home, in his experience, that freedom did
not begin to compensate for the loss of vitality and joy that he experi-
enced in life: “There is nothing, for me, remotely like being trans-
ported into the world that we enter when we see things through the
eyes and ears and words and voice of a child.” In response, I quipped,
“God, in his infinite wisdom, created adolescence. No one can bear
the thought of parting from the dear souls that our children are when
they’re 6 years old (particularly as we watch them sleep). But, fortu-
nately, they become lunatics at 12 or 13, and by the time they’re 16
we begin to count the days until they vacate the premises. If it weren’t
for adolescence, we’d never let them go. In this sense, we kill our
adolescent children, we contribute to ending their lives as children, and
in so doing, help them grow up.”
Such responses to Loewald’s paper, one might argue, are not neces-
sarily the product of reading his work aloud and discussing it line
by line. That argument, in the abstract, is irrefutable. But, for me, the
fact remains that my experience in teaching Loewald’s 1979 paper
without reading it aloud had generated discussions that were far less
emotionally intense and intellectually rich than the experience I have
just described.

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 On teaching psychoanalysis

Clinical teaching as collective dreaming

I view psychoanalytic clinical teaching as a form of collective dreaming

that occurs when a seminar group is “a going concern” (Winnicott,
1964, p. 27). The members of the seminar, individually and collect-
ively, enter into a form of waking dreaming in which the group helps
the presenter to dream aspects of his clinical experience that he has
been unable to dream on his own. A group unconscious is con-
structed (a form of “the analytic third” [Ogden, 1994]), that is larger
than the sum of the unconscious minds of each participant, while, at
the same time, each participant retains his own separate subjectivity
and his own personal unconscious life. In what follows, I describe a
psychoanalytic seminar group engaged in the process of learning and
teaching by means of collective dreaming.
Dr R began her clinical presentation of an analysis that was in its
third year by saying that she found the analysand, Ms D, “fascinating,”
“intriguing,” and “a clinical challenge.” The patient had been in
analysis for most of her adult life and said that she had found each of
the analyses to be “helpful.” (The words in quotation marks are
Dr R’s rendering of her own and the patient’s words.)
The patient grew up in an upper-middle-class family that appeared
to the outside world to be “perfect,” while in fact both of her parents
were “closet alcoholics.” They would get drunk every evening and
then would viciously attack one another verbally, with particular
emphasis placed on the other’s sexual inadequacy. Often, they would,
unexpectedly and for no apparent reason, turn their venom on the
patient. By the time the patient was five or six years old, she had
learned to retreat to her room where she would turn the television up
to maximum volume or put on earphones and “blast loud music into
her head.”
As I listened to the opening few minutes of Dr R’s presentation,
I had a disturbing feeling – primarily in the form of a knot in my
stomach. As I thought about it, I became increasingly unsettled by
Dr R’s use of the words “fascinating,” “intriguing,” and “clinical chal-
lenge.” It seemed to me that there was a disjuncture between these
rather clichéd words and what she was describing. The patient’s use of
the word “helpful” to describe her previous analyses was so insipid as
to feel to me like a mockery of her analyses, past and present. These
empty words being used by Dr R and the patient felt so unexpressive
and evasive as to be maddening. I experienced a fleeting thought/

57
 On teaching psychoanalysis

image of being a helpless, passive member of an audience watching

something barbaric performed on stage.
I told Dr R that I had an uneasy feeling about the analytic scene
that she was describing. I said that even though she found the patient
“fascinating,” there seemed to me to be an undercurrent of some-
thing else that felt like the other side, the dark side, of the “helpful-
ness” of all of the previous analyses. A seminar member said that she,
too, had had the feeling that “something else” was happening. She
said that Dr R’s voice sounded different as she presented this case.
“I can’t describe the difference, maybe I’m just imagining it. I don’t
know. But you don’t sound like yourself.” There followed a silence in
the seminar that lasted almost a minute (which is very unusual).
Dr R, seemingly ignoring what had just been said, commented:
“The patient is a very bright, extremely well-read woman who can
talk with great insightfulness about novels, poetry, film, art exhibits,
and so on. Her dreams, too, are elegant and seem to convey highly
nuanced states of mind. So, in a way, everything is going well. But she
does such a good job of it that I find that I have nothing to add.
During sessions with her, several times I have found running through
my mind a comment made by an analyst during my residency as he
was presenting an analytic case of his own. His patient seemed to
be conducting the analysis by herself. One of the residents asked how
the analyst felt about that. The analyst said, ‘It’s fine with me, so long
as she does a good job of it.’ I was bothered by the glib quality of his
answer. He didn’t seem to want to think about what it meant that he
was being so thoroughly excluded from the analysis. A year or so later,
I heard that the patient had committed suicide.”
Dr R then, in a somewhat mechanical way, presented more “back-
ground material,” including an account of the patient’s many physical
illnesses. Ms D had had kidney stones once or twice a year for a decade,
in part because of chronic heartburn for which she took antacid
tablets “like a chain smoker.” The patient said that her doctor felt that
surgery would probably be necessary to remove a large stone from
her right kidney which intermittently blocked the flow of urine from
that kidney. Dr R interrupted herself and said that she had become
increasingly anxious, almost panicky, as she was presenting this part of
the patient’s history. She said that it was as if her mind had stopped
working. “I can’t tell what’s real about the patient. It seems possible
that all of what I’ve just said about her may be a series of stories that
she’s invented. I feel as if I don’t know what’s real about her and the

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 On teaching psychoanalysis

analysis and what’s not.” A wave of anxiety and concern swept over
the group in response to Dr R’s distress.
A member of the seminar said to Dr R that he had felt increasingly
anxious as she was speaking of the patient’s physical illnesses. He said
that he had been reminded of the film, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
He felt as if Dr R’s words were not communications of feelings and
ideas, but were like spores that were infecting him and would grow in
him like the patient’s kidney stones, but with a diabolical quality as if
they had a life of their own. He said he felt trapped in the room as he
listened to her and had to stifle the impulse to leave.
I said to Dr R that I thought that what she was feeling was related
to the reverie that she had described in which the analyst had been
unable to recognize the way in which he was being obliterated by the
patient. That analysis seemed to represent for Dr R the catastrophic
outcome of an analyst’s inability to hear what a patient is trying to say
without words.
Dr R said that she worried a great deal about the work with Ms D.
She had not been able to sleep deeply for the past several months and
had lain awake ruminating about what she had said and what she
should have said to Ms D in that day’s session.
I told Dr R that I imagined that when she had been told that she
did not sound like herself, she had felt alarmed. “The idea of not being
yourself (not speaking with your own voice) is, I think, a very disturb-
ing one to entertain. It is a state that feels like being taken over by
someone else. I suspect that the terror of being taken over is a feeling
that Ms D felt as her drunken parents lacerated each other and then
her. The patient, as a child, had done everything she could to discon-
nect herself not only from her parents, but also from herself and
her feelings (for example, by blasting deafening music into her ears).”
Dr R responded by saying that she could feel her anxiety draining
away as she listened to what I was saying.
At the beginning of the next seminar meeting, Dr R said that she
had had a dream the previous night. “In the dream, I was in a crowded
place. I don’t know where it was. I was holding my daughter’s hand.
She was about three in the dream. All of a sudden I realized that she
was gone. I hadn’t been aware of letting go of her hand, but she wasn’t
there. I was terrified and called out her name as loudly as I could. At
some point, a couple brought her back. I knew that they had taken
good care of her, but she looked very frightened. I hugged her and
hugged her, but we both could not stop trembling.” Dr R said that she

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 On teaching psychoanalysis

had not realized how frightened she had been for some time that she
was losing her mind and her self in the work with Ms D. It seemed to
her that the couple in the dream was the seminar group. She added
that even though there was great relief in feeling that she had
retrieved herself (with the help of the group in the previous seminar
meeting), the whole experience had left her feeling very shaky.
The psychological movement in the first of the meetings I have
described occurred in the space of about an hour of “clock time,” but
timelessly in “dream time.” The members of the group, individually
and collectively, participated (consciously and unconsciously) in help-
ing Dr R dream the experience that was being generated in the analy-
sis of Ms D. My comments to Dr R, in response to her experience of
not being able to think or to know what is real, drew heavily on the
seminar’s collective waking dreaming. These “dreams” included my
own momentary waking dream of helplessly and passively watching
something barbaric unfold; a seminar member’s experience of Dr R’s
voice as not that of Dr R; and the reverie involving the body snatchers
substituting something inhuman for what had been human.
The collective dreaming that took place in the seminar (which I
organized and tried to put into words) was of help to Dr R in dream-
ing on her own an aspect of her analytic work that she had previously
been unable to dream. A part, but only a part, of that dreaming process
took the form of Dr R’s dream in which she lost herself and was
helped by a couple to reconstitute herself. The dream did not entail a
manic flight from either the patient’s or the analyst’s lived experience.
The dream encompassed the full complexity of the emotional situ-
ation, including the fact that the horror of having lost oneself can
never be eradicated; rather, that horror lives on as a part of who one
is (as represented by the trembling that continued after Dr R was
reunited with her daughter).
The process that I have described is one in which a group partici-
pated in dreaming an aspect of a clinical experience that an analytic
colleague had not been able to dream on her own. To my mind, this
process lies at the core of psychoanalytic clinical teaching.

Reading poetry and fiction as a form of “ear training”

For many years, poetry and other forms of imaginative writing have
been essential to the dream-life of the analytic seminars that I have

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 On teaching psychoanalysis

conducted. Devoting seminar meetings to reading and discussing

a poem or a work of fiction has served multiple purposes. The pleas-
ure to be had in reading good writing and discussing how the piece
works as writing is an end in itself. At the same time, reading poetry
and fiction in an analytic seminar is an experience in “ear training”
(Pritchard, 1994) – that is, the refinement of one’s capacity to be
aware of and alive to the effects created by the way language is being
used. This may take the form of developing one’s ear for the sub-
liminal expressiveness of the sounds and “oversounds” (Frost, 1942,
p. 308) of words; for the compacting of disparate meanings in ambigu-
ity and metaphor; and for “the feats of association” (Frost, quoted by
Pritchard, 1994, p. 9) achieved in the medium of rhythm, assonance,
consonance, alliteration, and so on.
These ways in which language works also constitute a principal
medium in which patient and analyst communicate their thoughts
and feelings to one another. For example, in a previous contribution
(Ogden, 2003b), I discussed a patient who, prior to our first session,
paced for several minutes in the passageway leading to the door to my
waiting room. Despite my having given him specific directions, he
could not decide which of the two doors was the waiting-room door.
Most of the initial meeting was spent talking about this experience.
Toward the end of the session, the patient said, “Out there, I felt
so lost” (p. 604). How different the effect created by the patient’s
statement would have been had he said, “I felt very lost out there.”
The patient’s way of stating his experience had the effect of isolating
the “Out there” aspect of himself (and that part of the sentence)
from the rest of the sentence; then the words “I felt so lost” brought
those feelings – the experience of being lost – into the room with
me, into the analysis. I do not believe that the patient intentionally
constructed the sentence in this way in order to create the effects it
achieved; rather, I believe that the structure and movement of his
conscious and unconscious emotional experience shaped the way he
unselfconsciously structured the sentence.
Of the many experiences of ear training that have occurred in the
course of reading poetry and fiction in the seminars, the reading of
two short stories collected in William Carlos Williams’s (1984a) The
Doctor Stories stands out in my mind. Williams was not only one of
the major American poets of the twentieth century, he was also a full-
time doctor who practiced in a poor, rural area of New Jersey in the
1920s, 30s, and 40s. (All of The Doctor Stories are fictional but clearly

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draw on Williams’s experience as a doctor.) One of my favorites of

these short stories, “The Girl with a Pimply Face,” begins:

One of the local druggists sent in the call: 50 Summer St., second
floor, the door to the left. It’s a baby they’ve just brought from the
hospital. Pretty bad condition I should imagine . . . Going up I
found no bell so I rapped vigorously on the wavy-glass door-panel
to the left . . .
Come in, said a loud childish voice.
I opened the door and saw a lank haired girl of about fifteen
standing chewing gum and eyeing me curiously from beside the
kitchen table. The hair was coal black and one of her eyelids
drooped a little as she spoke. Well, what do you want? She said.
Boy, she was tough and no kidding but I fell for her immediately.
There was that hard, straight thing about her that in itself gives an
impression of excellence.
I’m the doctor, I said.
Oh, you’re the doctor. The baby’s inside. She looked at me.
Want to see her?
Sure, that’s what I came for.
(Williams, 1984b, pp. 42–43)1

As I read this passage aloud in the seminar, several members of the

seminar smiled, one roared with laughter. Each word of these sen-
tences is as hard-edged and, at the same time, as winning as the doctor
and the girl in the story. (The voice of the narrator is the story –
nothing the least bit interesting is happening at the level of plot in
these sentences.)
Williams, in the opening lines of his “case presentation,” sets a
standard for us as analytic writers and as presenters of analytic cases.
The members of the seminar listened, keenly aware of the skill,
experience, and labor entailed in using language to convey so pre-
cisely who the patient is and who the doctor is at each moment in this
encounter. Williams’s patient is “a lank haired girl of about fifteen
standing chewing gum.” The sound of the words lank haired conveys
all the sense of adolescent slouch – a studied droop that speaks volumes

1
By William Carlos Williams, from The Collected Stories of William Carlos Williams, copy-
right © 1938 by William Carlos Williams. Reprinted by permission of New Directions
Publishing Corp.

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 On teaching psychoanalysis

of disdain without saying a word or moving a muscle (except for the

methodical chewing of gum and the droop of an eyelid). At the same
time, the girl, despite herself, is curious about the doctor, a curiosity
hidden in her demand that he justify his taking up room in her life:
“Well, what do you want? She said.” (Williams does not use quotation
marks, which has the effect of blurring the distinction between the
spoken and the merely thought, and the distinction between himself
and the girl in whom he clearly sees himself. He is instantly attracted
to her and she to him: “Boy, she was tough and no kidding but I
fell for her immediately.” We, as readers, fall for both of them
immediately.
Not only are characters being dreamt up by Williams in the writ-
ing, and by the reader in the experience of reading, the world the girl
inhabits is also being brought to life. That world is a world of emo-
tional poverty and isolation – the girl, not an adult, meets the doctor
who has come to attend to a very sick, perhaps dying, infant. And yet,
there are sparks flying between this pair. The lank haired girl and the
doctor show not the slightest inclination to allow the poverty and
isolation of her world to deaden them. All of this is contained in a few
tightly coiled words and sentences.
Words in this story, as in analytic writing, are not ornaments, nor
are they packages in which information is transported from writer to
reader. Words in a story – whether it be a work of fiction or an
analytic narrative (which, as discussed in Chapter 3, is also necessarily
a fiction) – create experiences to be lived by the reader (see also Ogden,
2005b). The writing does not re-present what happened; it creates
something that happens for the first time in the experience of writing
and reading. Few writers are better able than Williams to teach us
something about how this is done, if we, as analytic writers and case
presenters, are willing to allow him to teach us by attending closely
(listening keenly) to what he is doing and how he is doing it.
Another of The Doctor Stories, “The Use of Force” (Williams,
1984c), creates in the writing the emotional complexity involved in
the forceful interventions doctors (and analysts) make in the course
of their clinical work. Again, the power of this story lies in the voice of
the doctor/narrator, and it is in that aspect of the writing that the
opportunity for ear training is most rich. The Doctor Stories, as a whole,
and this story, in particular, seem to be a form that Williams has
invented in an effort to talk to himself about disturbing aspects of his
life as a doctor. The narrator’s voice in this story is that of a doctor

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 On teaching psychoanalysis

being torn apart emotionally as he attempts to get a throat culture

from a frightened girl who may have diphtheria:

. . . I said, come on, Mathilda, open your mouth and let’s take a
look at your throat.
Nothing doing . . .
I had to smile to myself. After all, I had already fallen in love with
the savage brat; the parents were contemptible to me. In the ensu-
ing struggle they grew more and more abject, crushed, exhausted
while she surely rose to magnificent heights of insane fury of effort
bred of her terror of me.
(Williams, 1984c, pp. 57–58)2

What kind of doctor talks like this? What is happening in the voice of
the narrator? Is this a doctor who hides from himself by using Philip
Marlowe-style narration of his life? If not, in what ways is the voice
more complex, more interesting, more engaging, more tortured than
that of Marlowe?
In this passage, the reader, too, is being asked to look at his own
savagery which he recognizes in himself in his role as parent, spouse,
friend, analyst, and so on. It is a savagery that feels inescapable if one
is to carry out one’s responsibility as a doctor, and yet, a source of
horror, shame, and remorse. If I am honest with myself, it is a savagery
that I have acted out with every one of my long-term patients – for
example, by too often being a little late in beginning the sessions in
the analysis of a patient who had suffered extraordinary neglect as a
child.
The voice of the narrator is not a preaching voice, nor is it a
confessional one. It is the voice of a man intent on being honest with
himself. The narrator’s honesty is itself savage: “She fought, with
clenched teeth, desperately! But now I also had grown furious – at
a child. I tried to hold myself down but I couldn’t” (Williams, 1984c,
p. 59). The narrator’s recognition of the full force of his fury is fol-
lowed by a change in his voice: “I know how to expose a throat for
inspection” (p. 59). There is a self-justifying tone here, almost pleading
for respite from his emotional attacks on himself. But the unspoken

2
By William Carlos Williams, from The Collected Stories of William Carlos Williams, copy-
right © 1938 by William Carlos Williams. Reprinted by permission of New Directions
Publishing Corp.

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 On teaching psychoanalysis

plea in his voice is not compelling. It is a “doctorly” voice that has

removed itself from the emotional situation: “I know how to expose a
throat for inspection. And I did my best” (p. 59). The “savage brat” has
become “a throat.”
The reader/listener can hear in the voice of the doctor a need
(which by now has taken on a life of its own) to defeat the child (no
longer the illness) at any cost: “We’re going through with this” (p. 59).
There is far more of the truth of what is happening in the sound
of this voice than in the doctorly rationalization that preceded: “I did
my best.”
But a subliminal shift in the savage voice of the doctor is taking
place, a shift that renews our interest in arriving at a fuller response
to the question, “What kind of doctor talks like this?” Williams con-
tinues: “The child’s mouth was already bleeding. Her tongue was cut
as she was screaming in wild hysterical shrieks” (p. 59). It is no longer
“the tongue” that is bleeding, but “her tongue.” “Perhaps I should
have desisted and come back in an hour or more” (p. 59), and then,
dispensing with the evasive word perhaps, he goes on: “No doubt it
would have been better” (p. 59). The voice speaking this last sentence
has been changed by the experience of talking to himself in the
process of writing the story. The sentence is not one of raw self-
condemnation. The rhythm of the words slows here, as if the speaker
has stopped to take a breath: “No doubt it would have been better.”
The words are simple (all but one are monosyllabic) and the sounds of
the words are soft, devoid of hard consonants.
But this is not the end of the internal struggle – life is never so
simple: “But I have seen at least two children lying dead in bed of
neglect in such cases, and feeling I must get a diagnosis now or never
I went at it again” (p. 59). The self-justifying invocation of children
“dead of neglect” rings a bit hollow to the reader and to the narrator/
doctor: “But the worst of it was that I too had got beyond reason.
I could have torn the child apart in my own fury and enjoyed it. It was
a pleasure to attack her. My face is burning in it” (p. 59).
Now he has said it all – and it had to be said in its entirety. The
pleasure was already so patently, disturbingly present in the language
that if it were not said plainly, straightforwardly, there could be no
genuine resolution (even if the “resolution” can only be a “moment-
ary stay” [Frost, 1939, p. 777]). The “success” involved in the doctor’s
finally prying open the girl’s jaws, seeing the diphtheria membrane
on her tonsils, and getting a throat culture is not only life-saving in

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 On teaching psychoanalysis

intention, it is also born of frenzied, murderous fury. The story closes:

“Now truly she was furious. She had been on the defensive before but
now she attacked. Tried to get off her father’s lap and fly at me while
tears of defeat blinded her eyes” (p. 60). The question, “What kind of
doctor speaks this way?” has become all the more richly layered and
complex. No wonder analytic patients fly at us after we have pre-
maturely put into words something that for most of their lives has
been unconscious. What has been unconscious has been so for good
reason. Literal or metaphorical “tears of defeat” well up in the analy-
sand’s eyes when we know too much too soon and cannot keep it to
ourselves (Winnicott, 1968).
Bion (1962a) observed that the analyst must listen to himself listen-
ing. I would add that the analyst must also listen to himself speaking
and, in so doing, be continually asking himself, “What kind of doctor
talks like this?” “Who am I when I speak to this patient in this way?”
Listening well to oneself requires not simply a thorough analysis
and ongoing scrutiny of the countertransference, it requires “ear train-
ing.” It is for this reason that I view reading poetry and fiction in an
analytic seminar not as a dalliance or as a break from “real” analytic
reading, but as an indispensable part of teaching psychoanalysis.

The art of learning to forget what one has learned

Teaching psychoanalysis is no less an art than is the practice of psy-

choanalysis. We learn the art of psychoanalytic teaching to a very
large degree from those who have been our teachers. An experience
with one of my own psychoanalytic teachers that occurred more than
thirty years ago remains very much alive in me.
While working at a university hospital in England, I participated in a
Balint group for a period of about a year. The group was composed of
seven National Health Service general practice physicians (GPs) and a
group leader, Dr J, who was a psychoanalyst and consultant psych-
iatrist in the National Health Service. The group met for two hours
weekly and continued for a period of two years. The purpose of the
group was to help the doctors become better able to think about the
psychological dimensions of their work with their patients. GPs in
England at that time saw patients (usually without pre-arranged ap-
pointments) in their surgeries in the mornings and went on rounds
to the homes of housebound or bedridden patients in the afternoons.

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It was recognized that many (perhaps most) patients who consulted

their GPs did so not primarily for the purpose of being treated for a
physical illness. Without being aware of it, they were going to their
doctors in hopes of talking with them about an emotional problem. It
was for this reason that the GPs in England who participated in Balint
groups felt the need to learn more about how to talk with their
patients about psychological difficulties, particularly when the patient
was ostensibly consulting them about a physical problem. The seven
GPs in the group – five men and two women – were all in their mid-
thirties to mid-fifties. My role was that of a “participant observer” who,
along with the group leader, commented (in ordinary, non-technical
language) on the emotional dimension of the clinical experiences
presented by the GPs. I was in my late twenties, only a few months out
of psychiatric residency, and clearly the member of the group who
had the most to learn about becoming a doctor.
Each week Dr J would begin the meeting by saying, “Who’s got a
case?” and each week the members of the group would respond with
self-conscious silence, all looking at their shoes, trying to avoid eye
contact with Dr J. After a minute or so, one of the doctors would
describe a recent experience with a patient. In one of these meetings,
Dr L, a GP in his early forties, said that a patient of his had left a
message saying that her elderly mother (also his patient) had died in
her bed. Dr L, an hour or so later, went to “have a look.” He briefly
examined the elderly woman and confirmed that she was dead. Dr L
said that he then called for an ambulance to take the mother to the
mortuary. Dr J asked, “Why did you do that?” Dr L, surprised by the
question, replied, “Because she was dead.” The group, too, was taken
aback by Dr J’s question. Dr L stared querulously at Dr J for a
moment before Dr J asked, “Why not have a cup of tea with the
daughter?” Identifying with Dr L, the other GPs and I had thought
that common sense would dictate that the doctor, in that situation,
would make the necessary arrangements for getting the mother’s
body to the mortuary. The feeling of being with the daughter in her
flat with the mother’s body lying in the next room became real for
the group in a disturbing way – a corpse is a frightening thing unless
one has deadened oneself to the experience. We, as a group, fell silent
and simply lived for a period of time with the imagined felt presence
of the mother’s lifeless body.
Dr L (and the rest of us in identification with him) had shifted into
an operational mode in order to get the mother’s body out of there as

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 On teaching psychoanalysis

quickly as possible. It had not occurred to any of us to ask ourselves

why the daughter was alone with her mother’s body when the doctor
arrived? Did she have no husband, no children, no family to call? Or
had she simply wanted to be alone with her mother for a while?
Perhaps she was waiting for the doctor with the hope that he would
spend some time with her and her mother’s body.
To “have a cup of tea” is to keep possibilities open, to allow to
happen whatever will happen. To have a cup of tea is to allow the
event to remain timeless for a while and to allow the daughter to
dream – to do unconscious psychological work with – the experience
(with the help of the doctor). “Why not have a cup of tea with the
daughter?” – such an ordinary question, such an act of respectfulness
to the daughter, such a simple, human way of being a doctor to this
woman and her mother.
The experience in the Balint group that I have just described was
one in which Dr L and the other members of the group were learning
to forget (more accurately to overcome) what we felt we knew about
being a doctor. In this instance, what had to be overcome was the
numbing automaticity of the procedures that we have for dealing
with “the deceased.”
More broadly, this experience has contributed to my viewing
analytic learning as biphasic. First, we learn analytic “procedures,” for
example, how to conceive of, create, and maintain the analytic frame;
how to talk with a patient about what we sense to be the leading edge
of the patient’s anxiety in the transference; how to make analytic use
of our reverie experience and other manifestations of the counter-
transference. Then, we try to learn how to overcome what we have
learned in order to be free to create psychoanalysis anew with each
patient. These “phases” are in one sense sequential in that we have to
know something before we can forget/overcome it. But, in another
sense, particularly after we have completed formal analytic training,
we are continually in the process of learning and overcoming what we
have learned.
The experience in the Balint group that I have described has stood
as a model of analytic teaching for me. The feeling (palpable sensation)
that Dr J’s question, “Why not have a cup of tea with the daughter?”
evoked in me, as I look back on it, was that of a clearance created in
which there was time – dream time – in which people may be able
to live and dream an experience together. What can happen in that
clearance is unique to the situation and to the people living it.

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 On teaching psychoanalysis

The experience that occurred in the group that day has affected far
more than the way I respond to death and grieving. I find that the
idea of “Why not?” has become central to the way I think and speak
with patients. So often, I find myself asking the patient, “Why not?”
“Why not feel frightened or sad or jealous?” “Why not keep to
yourself the dream you find so embarrassing?” “Why not leave the
session early?” These are not rhetorical questions. “Why not?” is an
inquiry into the history of the patient’s ways of thinking and feeling
which have helped him to stay alive and maintain as much sanity as he
could afford under the circumstances.
In sum, teaching psychoanalysis is a paradoxical affair: someone
who is supposed to know teaches someone who wants to know what
it means not to know.

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 5
Elements of analytic style: Bion’s
clinical seminar s

For some years now, it has seemed to me that important aspects of my

way of practicing psychoanalysis are better described as an analytic
style than as an analytic technique. Though style and technique are
inseparable, for the purposes of the present discussion, I am using the
term analytic technique to refer to a way of practicing analysis that has
been, to a large extent, developed by a branch or group of branches
of one’s analytic ancestry, as opposed to being a creation of one’s own.
By contrast, analytic style is not a set of principles of practice, but a
living process that has its origins in the personality and experience of
the analyst.
The term analytic style, as I am using it, puts as much emphasis
on the word analytic as it does on the word style. Not every style that
an analyst may adopt is analytic, and not every way of practicing
psychoanalysis bears the unique mark (the “style”) of the analyst.
The idea of analytic style places greater emphasis than does the con-
cept of analytic technique on the role of (1) the analyst’s use of,
and capacity to speak from, the unique qualities of his personality;
(2) the analyst’s making use of his own experience as analyst, analy-
sand, parent, child, spouse, teacher, student, friend, and so on; (3) the
analyst’s ability to think in a way that draws on, but is independent
of, the analytic theory and clinical technique of his analyst, super-
visors, analytic colleagues, and analytic ancestors; the analyst must
learn analytic theory and technique so thoroughly that one day he
will be able to forget them; and (4) the responsibility of the analyst to
invent psychoanalysis freshly (to rediscover psychoanalysis) with each
patient.
The analyst’s style is a living, ever-changing way of being with

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himself and the patient. The entirety of the analyst’s style is present
in every session with every patient. And yet, particular elements of
his style play a greater role than others with any given patient in any
given session. Analytic style infuses the specific ways the analyst con-
ducts himself in the analysis. Style shapes and colors method, and
method is the medium in which style comes to life.
My thinking about analytic style has been strongly influenced by
Bion’s work. Of all of Bion’s published contributions, the “Clinical
Seminars” (1987), for me, provide the richest and most extensive
access available to Bion, the clinician. In the present chapter, I will
offer close readings of three of the clinical seminars. I will describe
what I view as Bion’s unique analytic style, and in so doing, illustrate
what I mean by the idea of analytic style.
In the decade between the publication of his last major psycho-
analytic work, Attention and Interpretation (1970), and his death in
1979, Bion conducted two series of clinical seminars: 24 in Brasilia in
1975, and 28 in São Paulo in 1978. In these seminars, in addition to
the analyst who presented a case to Bion, there were six or seven other
seminar members, as well as a translator. The seminars were tape-
recorded, but it was not until 1987 that the collected, transcribed, and
edited version was published. I believe that despite the fact that in
the seminars Bion is the supervisor and group leader, the “Clinical
Seminars” nonetheless afford the reader a rare opportunity to view
Bion, the clinician, at work. As will be seen, even though Bion is not
the analyst for the presenter’s patient, he is the analyst for the patient
being “dreamt up” in the clinical seminar. (As discussed in Chapters 3
and 4, I view the patient presented in analytic supervision or in
a clinical seminar as a “fiction,” an imaginary patient, dreamt up by
analyst and supervisor [or presenter and seminar group], as opposed to
the actual person with whom the analyst converses in his consulting
room.) In addition, in the clinical seminars, Bion does analytic work
both with the presenter and with the seminar group.

Three clinical seminars

1. A patient who feared what the analyst might do (Brasilia, 1975,

Seminar No. 1)

The seminar opens with the following exchange:

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 Elements of analytic style

Presenter: I would like to discuss a session I had today with a thirty-

year-old woman. She came into the consulting room and sat down;
she never lies on the couch. She smiled and said, “Today I won’t be
able to stay sitting here.” I asked her what that meant; she said she
was very agitated. I asked her what she considered as being very
agitated. She smiled and said, “My head is dizzy.” She said her
thoughts were running away, running over one another. I suggested
that when she felt like that she also felt that she was losing control
of her body. She smiled and said, “Perhaps; it looks as if that were
true.” When I continued, suggesting that when her mind was run-
ning away like that, her body had to follow her mind’s movements,
she interrupted me, saying, “Now, don’t you try to make me stand
still.”

Bion: Why should this patient think that the analyst would do
anything? You cannot stop her coming or send her away; she is a
grown woman and presumably therefore free to come and see you
if she wants to; if she doesn’t want to, she is free to go away. Why
does she say that you would try to stop her doing something? I am
not really asking for an answer to that question – although I would
be very glad to hear any answer that you have – but simply giving
an example of what my reaction is to this story.
(pp. 3–4)1

Bion inquires, “Why should this patient think that the analyst would
do anything?” This question to the presenter is, for me, quite startling
and more than a bit odd. Of the innumerable aspects of the clinical
material presented, why is Bion asking about why the patient would
think that the analyst would take action? Only after considerable
reflection did it occur to me that Bion is suggesting that the presenter
ask himself: “What kind of thinking is the patient engaging in?”
“Why is she thinking in this particular way?” Bion is drawing atten-
tion to the fact that the patient is engaged in a very limited sort of
thinking in which elements of experience that might (under other
circumstances) be transformed into thoughts and feelings are, in this
instance, being experienced and expressed in the medium of action.
The analyst’s thoughts are being treated as actions (active forces

1
Unless otherwise indicated, all page numbers in this chapter refer to “Clinical Seminars”
(Bion, 1987).

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 Elements of analytic style

emanating from the analyst) that hold the power to get the patient to
do (not think) something.
So the question, “Why should the patient think that the analyst
would do anything?” is, at its core, a question concerning the way in
which the patient is attempting to handle the emotional problem of
the moment and, perhaps, of the entire session: her fear that she is
losing her mind.
The patient’s evacuation of her unthinkable thought (her fear that
she is going mad) has precipitated a rift with external reality in the
form of the delusional belief that the analyst is trying to do something
to her – that is, “to make me stand still.” If the analyst is too frightened
to take seriously the patient’s statement that she believes in a very con-
crete way that he is trying to do something to her, he will compound
the patient’s problems by failing to think/dream (to do conscious
and unconscious psychological work with) the patient’s delusional
experience (Bion, 1962a).
Bion, in “simply giving an example of what my reaction is to this
story,” is giving an unobtrusive interpretation to the presenter. The
presenter offered the patient a verbally symbolized thought that he
hoped would help her think about her own experience: “I suggested
that when she felt like that [i.e. that her thoughts were running over
one another] she also felt that she was losing control of her body.”
The patient responded by smiling and saying, “Perhaps; it looks as
if that were true.” Her smile (the mention of which has a chilling
effect on me) is followed by a statement that seems to offer qualified
(“Perhaps”) agreement. But the words, “it looks as if that were true,”
in combination with her smile, seem to me to convey the idea that the
analyst sees only what appears to be true, and not what is in fact true to
what the patient is experiencing.
The analyst ignored the patient’s response and repeated his inter-
pretation. The patient interrupted the analyst’s repetition of his inter-
pretation by saying, “Now, don’t you try to make me stand still.” She
might as well have said, “Stop doing that to me. Stop trying to make
me into you by putting your ideas into my head and in that way
controlling my actions (making me stand still). If that happens, I won’t
be able to move my own mind at all.” Bion, in asking why the patient
would think that the analyst would do anything, is, I believe, trying to
help the presenter understand this aspect of the patient’s psychotic
thinking.
The presenter responds at a superficial level to Bion’s question

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(“Why should the patient think that the analyst would do anything?”)
by saying,

I was interested to know why she had said “Don’t try to keep me
still”. She said she didn’t know the answer to the question, so I
suggested that she was preoccupied by my being quiet, still. She said
that she did not regard me as being still, but as dominating my
movements, my mind controlling my body.
(p. 4)

The presenter’s inability to use Bion’s question/interpretation reflects,

I believe, his fear of recognizing (thinking) the full extent of his
patient’s psychosis. Because the patient cannot differentiate mind
from body (and herself from the analyst), her saying that she experi-
enced his mind as dominating his body was, I believe, equivalent
to her saying that she experienced his mind as dominating her body
and mind. In other words, he was relentless in his effort to get into
her mind and make her do things (“make me stand still” mentally and
physically).
Bion tells the seminar:

I would like to make a guess here as to what I would say to this

patient – not in the first session but later on. “We have here these
chairs, this couch, because you might want to use any of them; you
might want to sit in that chair, or you might want to lie on that
couch in case you feel that you couldn’t bear sitting there – as you
say today. That is why this couch was here when you first came.
I wonder what has made you discover this today. Why is it only
today you have found that you may not be able to sit in that chair;
that you may have to lie down or go away?” All that would be
much more appropriate if she had discovered it at the first session.
But she was too afraid to discover it.
(pp. 4–5)

This, at first, seems like a very strange thing to say. But I view it as a
reflection of Bion’s analytic style. Only Bion could have said this. If
someone else were to say this, he would be imitating Bion. So what is
Bion doing here, or, to put it in different terms, how is Bion being
Bion-the-analyst here? He is treating the encounter as if it were the
first encounter between him and the patient. He recognizes that the

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patient is predominantly psychotic and speaks to her from that vant-

age point (thereby recognizing who she is at that moment). For Bion
(1957), the psychotic aspect of the personality is a part of the self
that is unable to think, to learn from experience, or do psychological
work.
In Bion’s imagined conversation with the patient, he speaks to “the
non-psychotic part of the patient’s personality” (Bion, 1957), the part
capable of thinking and doing psychological work. Bion begins by
naming in the simplest, most literal terms the objects that are in the
consulting room (which are swirling with uncontrolled meaning for
the patient because she is frightened and unable to think): “We have
here these chairs, this couch, because you might want to use any of
them.” Bion, in this way, not only tells the patient what the objects are
– as external objects – he also tells her implicitly that they are there for
her to use as analytic objects, objects that may be used in dreaming up
an analysis, if she wishes to try to do so (with his help). He continues:
“you might want to sit in that chair, or you might want to lie on that
couch in case you feel that you couldn’t bear sitting there – as you say
today.” Here, Bion tells the patient that he thinks that she may be
frightened of using the chair today. I believe that Bion is implicitly
speculating imaginatively that the chair, for the patient, is a psychol-
ogical place that once held magical power to protect her against what
she fears would happen if she “really” were in analysis. The chair, for
some reason, has lost its power today. She might want to use the
couch (i.e. she may want to try to become the analytic patient who
she had hoped to become when she first came to see the analyst).
Bion is not trying to do something to her or to get her to do some-
thing – for example, to use the chair or the couch; he is attempting to
help her to “dream herself into existence” as an analysand and dream
him up as an analyst who may be able to help her to think: “That is
why the couch was here when you first came.” (See Chapter 1 for a
discussion of the idea of dreaming oneself into existence.)
Bion, in a way that is characteristic of him in the “Clinical Sem-
inars,” frames his inquiry in the form of the question, “I wonder what
has made you discover this today?” That is, “How have you discovered
that this is the emotional problem that is most important for you to
solve in today’s session?” He is implicitly adding that he does not have
a solution to the problem, but that she may, and that he may be able
to help her understand something of the problem that is disturbing
her, but which she, as yet, is unable to think. Further, what Bion is

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implicitly saying might be phrased as follows: “In your saying, ‘Today

I won’t be able to stay sitting here,’ you are telling me that you are
afraid that you can no longer get help here – you fear that you have
become so mad (“dizzy”) that you have lost hope of being able to
become a patient who may be able to make use of me as your analyst.”
Bion continues to wonder aloud: “[So] why is it that only today you
have found that you may not be able to sit in that chair; that you may
have to lie down or go away?” Bion’s interpretation (ostensibly to the
patient) is perhaps more an interpretation to the presenter: the pre-
senter had not recognized or spoken to the patient about her fear of
not being able to be a patient in analysis, a fear she expressed both in
her stated inability to use either the chair or the couch and in her
statement that the analyst seems to the patient to be able to perceive
only what “looks as if . . . [it] were true.” It now seems clearer to me
why I find the patient’s smile so chilling: it bespeaks the enormity
of the emotional disconnection that the patient was experiencing
between the degree of her emotional distress and her very limited
ability to think/dream it, and between herself and the analyst.
Not long after making this interpretation to the “dreamt-up”
patient (and also to the presenter), Bion says, “As the analyst, one
hopes to go on improving – as well as the patient . . . If I knew all the
answers I would have nothing to learn, no chance of learning any-
thing . . . What one wants is to have room to live as a human being
who makes mistakes” (p. 6). This, too, is a fundamental element of
Bion’s style in the “Clinical Seminars.” Though, time and again, Bion
surprises the presenter and the reader with his uncanny way of sensing
the importance of, and making analytic use of, seemingly insignificant
elements of what is happening in a session, he no less frequently states,
without contrived humility, that an analyst must “have room to live
as a human being who makes mistakes.” Only in this state of mind
is one able to learn from experience: “If you had been practicing
analysis as long as I have, you wouldn’t bother about an inadequate
interpretation – I have never given any other kind. That is real life –
not psycho-analytic fiction” (p. 49).
Before turning to the next seminar, let me draw the reader’s atten-
tion to an implicit element of Bion’s clinical approach in this seminar
and in a great many others that constitutes an important aspect of
Bion’s “method.” The question that Bion asks the presenting analyst
far more often than he asks any other question is: “Why is the patient
coming to analysis?” (See, for example, pp. 20, 41, 47, 76, 102, 143,

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168, 183, 187, 200, 225, and 234.) It seems to me that in each instance
that Bion poses this question, he is implicitly asking the presenter to
think of the patient as unconsciously bringing to each session an
emotional problem for which the patient has been unable to find a
“solution” (p. 100) – that is, a problem with which he has been unable
to do psychological work. The patient is unconsciously asking the
analyst to help him to think the disturbing thoughts and feelings
that he is unable to think and feel on his own. Though Bion, in the
seminar just discussed, does not explicitly ask the presenter why
the patient is coming to analysis, it seems to me that Bion implicitly
raises that question several times. The first instance occurs almost
immediately in the seminar when he says, “she is a grown woman and
therefore presumably free to come and see you if she wants to; if she
doesn’t want to, she is free to go away.”

2. A doctor who was not himself (Brasilia, 1975, Seminar No. 3)

This seminar is quite remarkable in the way that it generates a conver-

sation that affords Bion the opportunity not only to put into words,
but also to demonstrate so much of his conception of what it means
to be an analyst. What is more, Bion does so without using a single
technical term. This is consonant with his insistence that we speak to
our patients in “words that are as simple and unmistakable as possible”
(p. 234), in everyday language, “ordinary articulate speech” (p. 144),
and that we, as analysts, talk to one another in the same way.
The analysand being presented is a 24-year-old hospital physician
who has been unable to work for four months. He told the analyst,
“I came to the consulting room but I stopped. I couldn’t stay here. I
took the elevator, not feeling well I thought it would be too difficult
to come to the session. I thought that if I stayed here I would die”
(p. 13). The presenter says that the patient then changed the subject
and began to describe his attempt to return to work the previous day
despite intense anxiety.
Bion asks, “Was he physically ill?” (p. 13). Once again, Bion’s ques-
tion seems odd, this time because it seems so literal-minded. (There
is something surprisingly pragmatic about Bion’s way of listening to
the presenters’ accounts of their work with their patients through-
out the “Clinical Seminars.”) Perhaps, in asking whether the patient
was physically ill, Bion is pointing out that the patient, even though

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he says that he was afraid that he was dying, has come to see an
analyst, not a doctor of internal medicine. It must be that his experi-
ence to this point in analysis has led him to feel that the analyst has
helped him and that he and the analysis may be of further help
to him.
The presenter responds only to the most superficial level of Bion’s
question by saying, “He thought so [i.e. the patient was consciously
aware only of feeling physically ill] but in fact he was suffering an
anxiety crisis” (p. 13). Bion is unfazed by the presenter’s seemingly not
having understood the observation that was implicit in his question.
This event, though of no great significance in itself, reflects a critical
quality of Bion’s style as a supervisor and (I surmise) as an analyst: he
“speaks past the presenter.” That is, he speaks to that aspect of the
presenter that is able to think – the thinking aspect of the personality,
which Bion, in his theoretical writings, at times calls “the non-
psychotic part of the personality” (Bion, 1957), and, at other times,
“the unconscious.” It is this aspect of the personality that is capable of
making use of lived experience for purposes of psychological work
and growth. I use the terms “speaking past the patient,” “speaking to
the unconscious,” and “speaking to the non-psychotic part of the
personality” interchangeably in referring to the analyst’s act of
speaking to the aspect of the patient that is capable of thinking. Since
the conscious aspect of the presenter’s mind, in the instance being
discussed, is not fully able to think, Bion must speak “directly” to
the presenter’s unconscious or non-psychotic aspect of personality.
(See Grotstein, 2007, for a discussion of talking to the patient’s
unconscious.)
A member of the seminar then asks whether it might “not be
interesting to interrupt the patient at this point? I feel there is too
much material” (p. 14). Bion responds by saying that he would wait
to say something until he had “a clearer idea of what he [the patient]
was up to” (p. 14). He adds,

it’s just a suspicion working in my mind – that this patient is one of

those people who take up medicine because they are so frightened
of some catastrophe or disaster. He can then converse with other
doctors and thereby hear about all the diseases there are. Then he
won’t die, or disasters won’t happen, because he is the doctor, not
the patient.
(p. 14)

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The patient, even though he has qualified as a doctor, is not a doctor

because he has no idea about how to genuinely become a doctor –
that is, how to develop a sense of coming into being as a person who is
able to use his mind to help people (including himself) who are ill.
The same seminar member repeats his question in a slightly differ-
ent form: “Is this suspicion of yours one of those things the analyst
should keep to himself, or could he tell the patient?” (p. 14). Bion
makes an interpretation meant for the seminar member, but couched
as a statement concerning the patient. He tells the seminar member
that people can only do psychological work with a bit of their lived
experience and, in particular, analysts early in their career often feel
deluged by frightening experiences with their patients:

A common manifestation of this sort of thing happens when med-

ical students go to the dissecting room to learn anatomy. They
break down; they can’t go on with it because it causes such an
upheaval in their views and attitudes if they dissect the human
body.
(p. 14)

Bion, I believe, is saying that he suspects that the seminar member

feels compelled to interrupt the flow of thinking (dissecting) in the
seminar for fear of breaking down in the analytic “dissecting room”
(the clinical seminar). Bion’s style of interpretation is highly respectful
of the seminar member’s defenses as well as his dignity. The thinking
that Bion is offering is there to be used if and when the seminar
member is ready to make use of it. Without shaming the seminar
member, the interpretation seems to have been utilizable by him – his
unconscious fear of what he might find out in the seminar was dimin-
ished to the point that he was able not to make further interruptions
of the analytic work that was occurring in the seminar.
Immediately following Bion’s response to the seminar member just
described, the presenter says, “I have the feeling that the patient didn’t
change the subject – he only apparently changed it” (p. 14). Here
the presenter is contradicting his own statement made only a few
moments earlier. I believe that in the interim he made psychological
use of the interpretation that Bion made to the seminar member –
that is, that the analyst’s anxiety may prevent him from listening to
what the patient is unconsciously trying to communicate regarding
his fears.

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Bion replies to the presenter:

This feeling of yours is where the interpretation comes from . . .
When you begin to feel that all these different free associations are
not really different ones, because they have the same pattern, then it
becomes important to wait until you know what the pattern is.
(p. 14)
The presenter responds:
In a seminar with a training analyst, the analyst told me that every
good interpretation should contain three elements: a description of
the behaviour of the patient; the function of the behaviour; and the
theory which is behind the behaviour.
(p. 15)
The reader can almost feel Bion’s blood coming to a boil – not in
response to the presenter’s anxiety, but in response to the arrogance of
an analyst who believes that he knows how to do psychoanalysis and
believes that, if his supervisees see things as he does, they, too, will know
how to do psychoanalysis. Nevertheless, Bion’s response is a measured
one, but not completely bleached of his feeling that a supervisory style
of the sort described is destructive to the supervisee’s efforts to
become an analyst. At the same time, Bion is fully aware that he is not
hearing the ideas of the training analyst (about whom Bion knows
nothing), but the ideas and feelings of the presenter who, like his own
patient, has momentarily retreated from being a thinking doctor (an
analyst) into a passive patient who cannot think for himself.
Bion: In a sense these theories, such as the one you mention, have a
use for the particular person who mentions them. [Bion does not
identify that person as the training analyst because he is not address-
ing that person. He is addressing a split in the presenter’s personal-
ity in which one aspect of him (who uses analytic theory as a way
of not thinking) belittles another aspect of himself (who is trying to
become a thinking analyst).] Some of them [analytic theories] will
also mean something to you. [The thinking aspect of the presenter
may, at times, be able to think about analytic theories and find
them useful to him in developing his own ideas.] While you are
trying to learn, all these things are very confusing. [Being confused
is a state of mind to be experienced as opposed to being evacuated

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and replaced by a feeling that one knows how to do analysis

because one has been told how to do so by someone in authority.]
This is why I think you can [Bion does not say, “one can”] go on
too long with training and seminars. It is only after you have quali-
fied [as an analyst] that you have a chance of becoming an analyst.
The analyst you become is you and you alone; you have to respect
the uniqueness of your own personality – that is what you use, not
all these interpretations [these theories that you use to combat the
fear that you are not really an analyst and do not know how to
become one].
(p. 15)

Bion is demonstrating for the presenter, the seminar members, and the
reader what a genuine analytic conversation sounds like. Interpret-
ations do not announce themselves as interpretations. They are a part
of “a conversation” (p. 156) in which ideas are stated tactfully, respect-
fully (often as conjectures), in everyday language. It is becoming clear
here that what Bion means by interpretation is not a statement
designed to provide verbal symbolization for repressed unconscious
conflict in an effort to make the unconscious conscious. Rather, an
interpretation is a way of telling the patient a portion of what the
analyst is thinking in a form that the patient may be able to use in
thinking his own thoughts.
The reader of this seminar can hear with his or her own ears the
sound of a person who is able to speak from the uniqueness of his
personality and experience. No other analyst sounds remotely like
Bion. In a series of papers, I have offered close readings of works by
Winnicott, Freud, and Bion (Ogden, 2001a, 2002, 2004b), and will
present close readings of papers by Loewald and Searles in Chapters 7
and 8. Each of these analysts speaks/writes/thinks in a way that reflects
the uniqueness of his personality. It would be very difficult, even in
reading a short passage, not to recognize their distinctive voices.
The analyst’s ability to speak with humility from the uniqueness
of his personality, from his own “peculiar mentality” (p. 224), lies at
the core of what I am calling the analyst’s style. It must be apparent
by now that style is the opposite of fashion; it is also the opposite of
narcissism. Giving oneself over to fashion arises from the wish to be
like others (in the absence of a sense of who one is); narcissism
involves a wish to be admired by others (in an effort to combat one’s
sense of worthlessness).

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Following this “digression” in which Bion discusses the difficulties

inherent in becoming an analyst, he asks the presenter to tell him
more about the session:

Presenter: The patient had the impression that if he remained on

duty [as a doctor at the hospital the previous night] he was going to
feel ill. He was not feeling ill – he had the impression that this was
going to happen.

Bion: In other words, he wasn’t going to get cured – he would get

these illnesses. It sounds possible that he has never really considered
that he has to be very tough indeed to be a doctor at all. In this
profession you are always dealing with people at their worst; they
are frightened; they are anxious. It is no good taking up that occu-
pation if he is going to end up by being anxious, depressed and
frightened too.
(pp. 16–17)

Bion is making an indirect interpretation to the non-psychotic aspect

of the presenter’s personality. Here, again, the interpretation has a
surprisingly pragmatic feel to it: the patient has chosen a career for
which he is not emotionally equipped. The patient seems not to be
able to face other people’s fears without becoming frightened and
depressed himself. But, of course, there is more to the interpretation
than that. Bion is focusing on a striking contradiction that seems to
provide a sense of the nature of the emotional problem for which the
patient is seeking help in this session.
Why is the patient presenting the analyst with a contradiction in
this particular way, at this moment? Perhaps the patient did not simply
make a poor career choice. Is there something about himself (an
aspect of himself that is a genuine doctor) from whom the patient
feels disconnected? Bion is noticing a communication that is so obvi-
ous that it is as invisible as Poe’s purloined letter. Perhaps it is this
paradox – that the obvious is invisible – that leads Bion’s comments to
sound odd and concrete. Here, as was the case earlier in the seminar,
Bion’s observation concerning something that feels “off ” to him con-
tains an “imaginative conjecture” (p. 191) regarding the emotional
problem that the patient (with the analyst’s help) is attempting to
“solve” (p. 125) – that is, to think in this session. The question is not
simply, “What is leading the patient to feel anxious and fearful?” A

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more specific problem (or facet of the dynamic tension driving the
patient’s symptomatology) is alive in the current session. Bion, in his
comments that address the patient’s choice of profession, seems to be
trying out the idea that the patient may feel that he is not himself. He
chose to try to become a doctor, and yet he feels more drawn to being
a passive patient – a person who knows nothing, and wishes to know
nothing, about the illness from which he is suffering.
Bion’s speculation might be thought of as an interpretation spoken
to the non-psychotic aspect of his “imaginary” patient, an aspect of
personality that is both unconscious and capable of thinking.
The presenter seems to have been able to make use of this
interpretation:

Presenter: So he left the room to lie down. At this moment he

was called to the emergency ward. He went; he worked perfectly.
He thought it very curious that he could work well without any
difficulty.
(p. 17)

It might be argued that the presenter’s account of “what happened

next” constitutes a mere recitation of notes that he had written days or
weeks earlier. I find this idea unconvincing. The presenter could have
said anything in response to Bion’s “interpretation”: for example, he
could have asked a question that would have disrupted analytic think-
ing in the seminar or he could have made distracting comments about
the patient’s conscious reasons for seeking medical training. What the
presenter does say – “He thought it very curious that he could work
well without any difficulty” – involves an unintended, highly mean-
ingful ambiguity. The word curious is a euphemism for the patient’s
feeling at a loss to account for what happened; and at the same time
the word curious refers to the beginning of the patient’s capacity for
thinking (the capacity to be curious about what he does not know).
The former is a much more passive state of mind than the latter. In his
use of the word curious, the presenter conveys his growing understand-
ing of the way in which the patient simultaneously wished to think
and was afraid to think.
Bion responds by saying, “He goes off to this emergency, and
instead of having a heart attack or whatever, he finds that he can be a
doctor” (p. 17). The patient, with the analyst’s help, is finding that he is
able to become a doctor – that is, a person who is able to think and to

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use that capacity to “dream himself into existence” as a doctor and as

an analytic patient. Similarly, with the help of Bion’s interpretations,
the presenter is able to dream himself into existence as a doctor – that
is, as an analyst. He is becoming able to be curious about the patient,
a person “at his worst” (a person who is anxious and in dire need
of help).
To return to Bion’s response to the patient’s unexpectedly becom-
ing a genuine doctor, Bion observes,

Using this [event in which the patient became a doctor] not only
for this incident but for many others, you can begin to feel that the
patient may after all be a doctor or a potential analyst if, when it
comes to a crisis, the doctor emerges. But why in a crisis? If it is
really true that he may after all be a doctor, not just by title but the
thing itself, why hasn’t he discovered that till now? . . . Of course,
we believe, as analysts – rightly or wrongly – that analysis is helpful.
But that belief is liable to hide from us the extraordinary nature, the
mystery of psychoanalysis. Such a lot of analysts seem to be bored
with their subject; they have lost the capacity for wonder.
(p. 17)

Two critical elements of Bion’s style are audible in these sentences.

First, we hear Bion, the doctor, the pragmatist, a person for whom
finding “the solution to [the patient’s] problem” (p. 100) matters
greatly. Bion views his responsibility to be that of helping patients – a
rather old-fashioned idea. If we do not believe that analysis is helpful,
why are we spending our lives practicing it? How are we to ignore the
patient’s pain, for it is his pain that leads him to seek help from the
analyst? But it does not follow that the analyst’s job is to help relieve
the patient of pain. Quite the opposite. The analyst’s task, for Bion, is
to help the patient to live with his pain long enough to do analytic
work with it. There is some aspect of the patient that comes to the
analyst for analysis. Bion is continually listening for the (often very
muted) voice of that part of the patient, and for hints from the patient,
concerning what emotional problem this aspect of the patient is try-
ing to think/solve. If the patient is not using the analyst as an analyst
(for example, by behaving as if he expects the analyst to be a magician
who will turn the patient into the person who he wishes to be),
Bion asks himself (and often asks the “dreamt-up” patient) what the
patient thinks analysts do. Perhaps second only in frequency to Bion’s

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question, “Why has the patient come for analysis?” is his question,
“What does the patient think analysis is?” And he often comments in
response to the patient’s idea, “That is a very strange conception of
analysis.” Helping the patient and giving the patient the “correct”
(p. 162) analysis (a genuine analytic experience) are, for Bion, one and
the same thing.
The second important element of Bion’s analytic style that is alive
in this passage is his feeling that his awareness of how little he knows is
not a source of frustration or disappointment; it is a source of awe and
wonderment in the face of the complexity, the beauty, and the horror
that constitute human nature. (See Gabbard, 2007, for a discussion of
the role of analytic orthodoxy and the use of analytic dogma to evade
facing the full complexity and “chaos of the human condition” [p. 35]
and of the analytic enterprise.)
In response to the questions and associations that were elicited in
Bion by the patient’s having begun to develop his capacity for think-
ing, the presenter continues:

Later on in the same session he [the patient] asked himself this

question [How did he manage to genuinely become a doctor?] and
said, “If I had known that analysis could do this for me I wouldn’t
have waited for a crisis before coming.”
(p. 17)

The reader can hear in this comment a shift in the balance of power
between the patient as an assailant of his own capacity for thinking
and the patient as a thinking doctor. The doctor is now able to face
the fact that he is ill while remaining alive to his feelings; he is able to
make use of his awareness of his emotions to give direction to his
thinking; and he is able to use his thinking to become “an analyst” who
actively takes responsibility for his role in his own analysis.
Bion recognizes that the satisfaction to be taken by the patient in
this achievement is balanced by feelings of sadness that are equally
intense: “One of the peculiarities of progress is that it always makes
you feel depressed or regretful that you didn’t discover it sooner”
(p. 17). This interpretation is meant not only for the imaginary patient
being dreamt up in the seminar, but also for the presenter who, I think,
Bion feels is regretful that it has taken him so long to become an
analyst for his patient. Perhaps the presenter recognized in the course
of the seminar that he had relied for a long time on the thinking of

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others – the “training analyst” in himself – who had been afraid to

respond freshly, without preconception, to what he was perceiving
and feeling in the analytic sessions. In other words, to this point,
he had been unable to invent/rediscover psychoanalysis with this
patient.
Still another element of Bion’s analytic style can be felt in this
portion of the seminar. As we have seen, Bion is continually aware of
the way in which each patient in each analytic hour unconsciously
feels that his life is at stake (and, it seems to me, that Bion believes that,
in an important sense, the patient is correct in believing so). After all,
to the extent that a patient cannot think, he cannot be alive to his
experience. But Bion, here, takes a more radical position than he took
earlier regarding the analyst’s use of himself in his effort to help the
patient. What he adds is critical to who Bion is as an analyst:

You are an analyst, or a father or a mother, because you believe you

are capable of the affection or understanding which is so necessary
but which is felt [by the patient and the child] to be so unimportant
[i.e. it is invisible to them because it is completely taken for granted,
as it should be] . . . It is liable to be lost sight of that what we, as
doctors and psycho-analysts, are concerned with is helping human
beings . . . We may have to upset them in the course of the analysis,
but that is not what we are trying to do. With this patient it may be
very important to show him, when the time comes, that there
exists [in the analyst] some capacity for affection, sympathy, under-
standing – not just diagnoses [interpretations] and surgery, not just
analytic jargon, but interest in the person. You can’t make doctors
or analysts – they have to be born.
(p. 18)

Bion, in his characteristically understated way, is saying that, for him,

being an analyst involves more than understanding the patient and
communicating to him that understanding in a form that he can make
use of; being an analyst involves, at times, feeling and showing one’s
affection for the patient about whom the analyst cares deeply. This is
something that one cannot be taught to do; one must be born with a
capacity to do it and a wish to do it.

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3. A man who was perpetually awake (São Paulo, 1978, Seminar No. 1)

In this seminar, the patient being presented is a 38-year-old economist

who has a rather mechanical walk and conducts himself in a stiff
manner, for example, by opening a session by saying, “Very well,
Doctor,” or “I have brought you some dreams today” (p. 141).
Bion very soon asks another of his “odd” questions: “Why does he
say they are dreams?” (p. 142). Bion is immediately cutting to the core
of what he believes to be the emotional problem with which the
patient is unconsciously asking for help from the analyst: the non-
psychotic aspect of the patient recognizes that the psychotic aspect of
himself is dominating his personality and consequently he cannot
dream. Bion is suggesting with his question that, to the extent that
the patient is psychotic, he cannot differentiate dreaming from waking
perception – that is, he cannot tell whether he is asleep or awake.
For Bion (1962a), the psychotic patient (or aspect of the patient) is
unable to generate and maintain a barrier (the “contact-barrier,”
p. 21) between conscious and unconscious aspects of mind. In the
absence of differentiation between conscious and unconscious mental
experience, the individual “cannot go to sleep and cannot wake up”
(p. 7). He lives in a world in which internally generated perception
(hallucination) is undifferentiable both from perception of external
events and from dreaming. Consequently, the patient, in an effort
to protect himself from this frightening awareness, pretends to be a
person who is interested in dreams.
The presenter, like the reader, has not thought to ask himself why
the patient says he had dreams, what the patient means when he
speaks of having had dreams, and whether or not the patient, at this
moment, knows what a dream is. Nonplussed by Bion’s question,
“Why does he say they are dreams?” the presenter replies, “He simply
tells me so” (p. 142).
The element of Bion’s analytic style to which I am drawing atten-
tion here is his extraordinarily quick wit. Here, he is casting the
presenter as a straight man in a magic show in which Bion pulls a
rabbit out of the presenter’s vest pocket. Bion is perfectly straight-
faced throughout. Wit is neither an inherently good nor bad quality
of character. How it is used is what matters. At 80, Bion, in this
instance, is playing the role of enigmatic, idiosyncratic, unpredictable,
razor-sharp, old man – a role that seems to suit him. Another example
of Bion’s wit that comes to mind is a comment that he made in

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Brasilia Seminar No. 8. The presenter told Bion that the patient had
said that he had managed to control his envy, but the patient kept
moving anxiously on the couch throughout the session. Bion replied,
“He controlled envy and his envy is extremely annoyed about it”
(1987, p. 48).
It is never easy (perhaps impossible) to “read” Bion (i.e. to say with
certainty who he “really is” at a given moment). He is a thoughtful,
earnest teacher, fully aware of the limits of his knowledge and of his
personality and, at the same time, a man who means what he says and
a man who invites (and helps) students and patients to do the same.
There is also a reticence to Bion in the “Clinical Seminars.” His wit
and his penchant for enigmatic statements are parts, I believe, of an
effort to safeguard the sanctity of his privacy. This, too, is an integral
part of Bion’s analytic style, an integral part of who Bion is as an
analyst and as a person.
A few moments later in the seminar, Bion speaks at greater length
about the question that the patient was raising in Bion’s mind:

So why does the patient come to see a psycho-analyst and say he

had a dream? I can imagine myself saying to a patient, “Where were
you last night? What did you see?” If the patient told me he didn’t
see anything – he just went to bed – I would say, “Well, I still want
to know where you went and what you saw.”
(p. 142)

Bion, in this way, is saying to the non-psychotic part of the patient’s

personality that he understands that the patient does not know when
he is awake and when he is asleep. So when the patient tells him that
he went to bed, Bion treats the “dream” as an experience that has all
the qualities of waking life experience. Bion continues: “If the patient
said, ‘Ah, well, I had a dream’, then I would want to know why he
says it was a dream” (p. 142). By not accepting the patient’s use of
the word “dream” (which serves to evade the truth), Bion is helping
the non-psychotic aspect of the patient’s personality to think (which
involves facing the reality of the current hegemony of the psychotic
aspect of his personality). Bion is implicitly stating his belief that such
recognition of the truth of what is occurring influences the balance of
power between the psychotic and the non-psychotic aspects of the
personality.
Bion, a little later on, elaborates on this idea: “when he says that

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[he had a dream], he is awake and “conscious,” as we call it” (p. 142).
In other words, what the patient is calling dreams, we would call
hallucinations. The patient cannot differentiate visual events that he has
while sleeping from visual perceptions he has when he is “awake.”
Bion adds, “He is inviting you and himself to be prejudiced in favour
of a state of mind in which we are when awake” (p. 142) – that is, he
is trying to convince the analyst that there is only one state – that of
being awake – so that both patient and analyst can agree that the
patient is not psychotic and is simply reporting what he perceives in
a waking state. The patient is insisting that because there is only one
state – that of wakefulness – there is no difference between perception
and hallucination, dream-life and waking life; consequently, there is
no such thing as psychosis.
The element of Bion’s analytic style with which I am concerned
here is the absolute directness with which he speaks to the (dreamt-
up) patient. He senses almost immediately when the patient is using
words in a way that involves a slippage of meaning that prevents pain-
ful recognition of the truth. Bion, as in the instance under discussion,
then speaks to the patient in a way that restores the proper meaning to
words, which in turn allows for thinking and “ordinary human inter-
course” (p. 197) to begin or resume. To be able consistently to hear
and respond to such slippages of meaning requires a very fine ear
indeed.

Concluding comments

It is impossible to give an adequate rendering of an analyst’s style

since his style is informed by nothing less than everything that he is as
a person and as an analyst. Though I greatly admire many of the
qualities of Bion’s analytic style that are brought to life in the “Clinical
Seminars,” I do not view his style as a model to emulate. Rather,
as Bion states in the seminars, “The way I do psychoanalysis is of no
importance to anybody excepting myself, but it may give you some
idea of how you do analysis, and that is important” (p. 224).

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 6
Bion’s four pr inciples of
mental functioning

Bion’s life-work as a psychoanalytic theorist was the formulation of

a theory of thinking. Over a span of four decades, virtually every
one of Bion’s papers, books, lectures, clinical seminars, and notes to
himself (his “cogitations”) involves an effort to develop one aspect or
another of that theory of thinking. Bion experimented with a variety
of metaphors (models) in his effort to capture the nature of thinking
and its consequences. The major metaphors with which he experi-
mented include the idea of the interplay of the work group and
the basic assumption groups; an intersubjective conception of projec-
tive identification; the theory of alpha-function; the concept of the
container-contained; the theory of L, H, and K linkages and of
attacks on linking; the concept of binocular vision; the grid; psychic
transformations; and the concept of “O.”
With a body of work as extensive as Bion’s, I find it useful to state
in as few words as possible what I discern to be the fundamental tenets
running through that work. Bion (1962a), in the same spirit, com-
mented, “Psycho-analytic virtue lies not in the number of theories
the analyst can command but the minimum number with which he
can meet any contingency he is likely to meet” (p. 88). Accordingly, I
will begin by stating in a highly condensed fashion what I think of as
“the four principles of mental functioning” that I believe constitute
the core of Bion’s theory of thinking. My ideas are offered as points of
departure for thoughts about Bion’s theory of thinking, not as end
points.
After presenting, in the space of a single paragraph, my conception
of Bion’s four principles of mental functioning, I will go on to discuss
at greater length each of the principles that I have proposed. Finally, I

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will look closely at one of Bion’s clinical seminars in an effort to

demonstrate something of the way in which his clinical thinking is
informed by his theory of thinking.

Bion’s theory of thinking

Bion’s theory of thinking is built upon four overlapping and interconnecting

principles of mental functioning: (1) thinking is driven by the human need to
know the truth – the reality of who one is and what is occurring in one’s life;
(2) it requires two minds to think a person’s most disturbing thoughts; (3) the
capacity for thinking is developed in order to come to terms with thoughts
derived from one’s disturbing emotional experience; and (4) there is an inherent
psychoanalytic function of the personality, and dreaming is the principal process
through which that function is performed.

1. The human need to know the truth

Organizing Bion’s theory of thinking into four principles of mental

functioning is my own device, not Bion’s. So far as I am aware, Bion
never used the term principle of mental functioning in connection with
his own work on thinking. Freud’s (1911) “Formulations on the
Two Principles of Mental Functioning” addresses the way in which
psychological development involves the movement from the domin-
ance of the pleasure principle to the dominance of the reality prin-
ciple. Freud believed that in conceiving of psychological development
in this way he was “bringing the psychological significance of the real
external world into the structure of our theories” (p. 218). As will be
seen, each of Bion’s four principles of mental functioning is similarly
addressed most fundamentally to the individual’s relationship to
reality. But Bion’s conception of the relationship between reality and
thinking is quite different from Freud’s. Freud’s two principles begin
with the search for pleasure in the discharge of instinctual tension (the
pleasure principle) and end with the perception of, and the capacity
to adapt to, reality (the reality principle). Each of Bion’s four prin-
ciples begins not with instinctual pressure, but with lived emotional
experience in the real world, and ends with thinking and feeling that
experience. Moreover, Bion’s understanding of unconscious thinking
differs markedly from Freud’s idea, in that, for Freud (1911), the

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unconscious is characterized by an “entire disregard for reality-

testing” (p. 225), while, for Bion (1967), “. . . without [unconscious]
phantasies and without dreams you have not the means with which to
think out your problems” (p. 25).
In formulating the first of Bion’s four principles of mental func-
tioning, I will draw heavily on Bion’s earliest contribution to psycho-
analysis, Experiences in Groups and Other Papers (1959). (Though
Experiences in Groups was published in 1959, the papers included in it
were published much earlier: a “Pre-view” [written in collaboration
with John Rickman] was published in 1943; “Experiences in Groups”
is a set of seven essays that were originally published between 1948
and 1951; and “Group Dynamics: A Review” was first published in
1952. For the sake of brevity, I will refer to Experiences in Groups and
Other Papers simply as Experiences in Groups.) In that collection of
papers, Bion introduces a radical reformulation of the psychoanalytic
conception of thinking and its psychopathology. What Borges said of
his first book of poetry, Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923), might be said of
Bion’s Experiences in Groups: “I feel that all my subsequent writing has
only developed themes first taken up there; I feel that all during my
lifetime I have been re-writing that one book” (Borges, 1970b, p. 225).
Although I have read Experiences in Groups many times over the
decades, I have recently “rediscovered” this collection of papers. As a
result, the metaphors for thinking that Bion develops in Experiences in
Groups hold a particular freshness for me now, which I hope will
vitalize my attempts to articulate the essential tenets of Bion’s theory
of thinking. (When Bion speaks of thinking, he is always referring to
thinking and feeling, which he views as inseparable aspects of a single
psychological event.)
Experiences in Groups (1959) is at its core a study of the relationship
between that aspect of “group mentality” (p. 60) that is able to think
(“the work group,” p. 98) and that aspect of group mentality that is
unable to think (the “basic assumption groups,” p. 153). The ideas that
Bion develops concerning thinking in groups constitute the founda-
tion of a general theory of thinking. Bion states that he views the
psychoanalytic dyad as a small group: “The psycho-analytical situation
is not ‘individual psychology’ but ‘pair’ [psychology]” (p. 131).
Moreover, implicit in Bion’s thinking about groups is the idea that
the individual psyche might be thought of as a group comprised of
different parts of the personality. That intrapsychic “group” engages in
conversations between aspects of the personality that are able to think

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and other aspects of the personality that hate and fear thinking. (Bion,
1957, later develops the idea of intrapsychic conversations between
parts of the personality in “Differentiation of the Psychotic from the
Non-Psychotic Personalities.”)
Throughout “Experiences in Groups” (1948–1951) – the series of
papers that forms the core of Experiences in Groups – Bion eschews
psychoanalytic terminology and, instead, invents his own everyday
language for discussing the group experiences that he has observed
and in which he has participated. For example, Bion does not use the
term phantasy to refer to the shared unconscious beliefs of a group and
instead invents his own more expressive term, basic assumption. The
“basic assumptions” are the fearful orientations to reality that shape
group experience so profoundly that it is inadequate to think of them
as mere ideas. They are so basic as to warrant the term proto-mental
– thinking “in which physical and mental activity is undifferentiated”
(Bion, 1959, p. 154).
Bion describes three types of basic assumption groups – three
forms of group mentality that groups generate in an effort to evade
thinking: the dependent, the pairing, and the fight–flight basic
assumption groups. To evade thinking is to evade the task of coming
to terms with, and making efforts to modify, what is actually occur-
ring both within and outside the group. The “dependent” basic
assumption group is based on a shared assumption that the group
leader will “solve all their [the group’s] problems” (p. 82). At the same
time, the group adopts an “unshakeable indifference to everything I
[the group leader] say” (p. 83). The group members’ indifference to
the leader’s ideas derives from the fact that the members are not the
least bit interested in making use of what the leader says for the
purpose of thinking for themselves. Quite the contrary, the group
opposes thinking and insists on simply waiting for the leader to
magically set things right. Thinking and making use of one’s thoughts
to try to effect changes in the real world are the leader’s responsi-
bilities, not theirs. Interpretations are more likely to be met by “awe
than a pause for thought” (p. 85).
The “pairing” basic assumption group is based on a jointly held
assumption that two members of the group will produce “a Messiah,
be it a person, idea or Utopia” (p. 152) who (or which) will rescue the
group from their feelings of destructiveness, hatred, and despair. Again,
the group members steadfastly oppose doing any psychological work
of their own and, instead, wait to be saved.

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The “fight–flight” (p. 153) basic assumption group holds the proto-
mental and unconscious belief that all of the group’s problems can be
solved by means of fighting or taking flight from an enemy. Neither
fighting nor fleeing requires any thinking on the part of the group.
Thus, for all three types of basic assumption groups, genuine thinking
is replaced by magical thinking. This allows the group, at least tem-
porarily, to evade reality rather than attempt to think about it and
modify it.
The basic assumption groups reflect the group’s “hatred of learning
by experience” (p. 86) as well as its “hatred of a process of develop-
ment” (p. 89). These fears and hatreds are born of the group members’
fears of emotional experience “for which they do not feel prepared”
(p. 82). In other words, the basic assumption group mentalities are
founded on the wish to be able to arrive “fully equipped as an adult
fitted by instinct to know without training [i.e. without having to
learn from experience] or development exactly how to live and
move” (p. 89) as a mature adult. The group fears and hates the fact that
immaturity is an inescapable part of the human condition and that
the processes of learning and maturing require that one tolerate
feelings of not knowing, of confusion, and of powerlessness.
And yet, despite the fact that we are powerfully drawn to magical
solutions (forms of non-thinking), for Bion, groups (and individuals)
are at their core “hopelessly committed to a developmental pro-
cedure” (p. 89) – that is, to thinking, learning from experience, and
growing up. This commitment reflects what Bion believes to be a
need that is perhaps the most powerful of all human strivings: the
need for truth.

It is almost as if human beings were aware of the painful and often

fatal consequences of having to act without an adequate grasp of
reality, and therefore were aware of the need for truth as a criterion
in the evaluation of their findings [perceptions].
(1959, p. 100)

. . . a sense of reality matters to the individual in the way that food,

drink, air and excretion of waste products matter.
(1962a, p. 42)

In other words, thinking that lacks an “adequate grasp of reality,” an

adequate sense of the truth (for example, each of the various forms of

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magical thinking employed by the basic assumption groups), is useless

in one’s effort to learn from experience and to grow psychologically.
Magical ideas cannot be linked with other ideas in the process of
generating a line of thought that one can use to solve emotional
problems that arise in the course of a life lived in the real world.
One cannot construct a line of rational thought on a foundation of
ideas generated for the purpose of evading the truth. Instead, the
individual or group remains in a solipsistic world of magical thinking
– “thinking” that is based on the idea/wish that one creates the world
as one goes. A magical world is simultaneously an ideal place and
a nightmare: one cannot learn or grow; one is damned to live in an
eternal, static, directionless present. Bion interpreted a patient’s fear-
ful use of magical thinking by saying, “What a shame it is that
you have been reduced to omnipotence” (Grotstein, 2003, personal
communication).
The human need for truth leads us ultimately to loosen our reli-
ance on the illusion or delusion of safety that is provided by magical
thinking, and to attempt to engage in genuine thinking – thinking
that confronts reality in its full, unforgiving alterity. Only by means of
such a confrontation with the truth in the act of thinking is it possible
to do something with (to learn from and efficaciously attempt to
modify) the reality of one’s lived emotional experience. For Bion, the
human need to know the truth of one’s experience is the most fundamental
impetus for thinking. This conception of thinking constitutes the first
and most fundamental of what I am calling Bion’s four principles of
mental functioning.
Closely tied to Bion’s first principle of mental functioning are
three ideas that are critical to Bion’s theory of thinking. The first of
these is the idea that non-thinking (i.e. evasion of thinking) and genu-
ine thinking are inseparable and, in fact, depend upon one another.
For example, the thinking performed by the work group (the group
mentality in which genuine thinking may take place), on the one
hand, and the various forms of magical thinking that characterize the
basic assumption groups, on the other, constitute two facets of a single
experience. Primitive fears of learning by experience and of emo-
tional development are the very experiences from which a group
learns about itself and develops. In the absence of the painful psychic
reality constituted by these primitive fears, we would have nothing
to think about and nothing to learn from: no “therapy could result
unless these psychotic patterns [the basic assumptions] were laid bare

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[regardless of how psychologically healthy the members of a group

may be]” (p. 181). The essence of “developmental conflict” (p. 128)
from which the group grows is “the painful bringing together” (p. 128)
of the reality of the primitive (the “psychotic” basic assumption beliefs,
fears, and hatreds) and the “sophisticated” (p. 128) (the capacity for
genuine thinking). In other words, mature thinking is generated in
response to our most archaic fears.
The second of Bion’s ideas, which is closely associated with his first
principle of mental functioning, is the notion that genuine think-
ing requires a tolerance for not knowing, a tolerance for “being in
uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after
fact and reason” (Keats, 1817; quoted by Bion, 1970, p. 125). Genuine
thinking, though driven by the need to know what is true, is at the
same time characterized by a firm recognition that conclusions are
always inconclusive, endings are always beginnings: “Every emotional
experience of knowledge gained is at the same time an emotional
experience of ignorance unilluminated” (Bion, 1992, p. 275). This
aspect of Bion’s theory of thinking culminated in his concept of
“O” (1970, p. 26) – the unknowable, inexpressible truth of one’s
experience (see Ogden, 2004b, for a discussion of the concept of “O”
and its clinical implications).
The concept of “binocular vision” (1962a, p. 86) – “the need for
employing a technique of constantly changing points of view” (1959,
p. 86) – is the third of Bion’s ideas that I view as a “corollary” to his
first principle of mental functioning. This concept holds that thinking
necessarily involves viewing reality from multiple vantage points
(or “vertices” [Bion, 1970, p. 83]) simultaneously – for example, from
the points of view of the conscious and the unconscious mind; the
autistic-contiguous (Ogden, 1987, 1989b, c), the paranoid-schizoid,
and the depressive positions; the work group and the basic assumption
groups; the psychotic and the non-psychotic parts of the personality;
and so on. Reality viewed from a single vantage point represents a
failure to think. This can be seen in clearly pathological circumstances
such as hallucinations, delusions, perversions, and mania, as well as in
states that superficially do not appear pathological – for example,
instances of strident pacifism or rigid adherence to the views of a
school of psychoanalytic thought. Viewing reality from multiple
vantage points allows each vertex (each way of viewing reality) to
enter into a mutually mutative conversation with other ways of
seeing/knowing/experiencing.

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This idea of multiple vertices lies at the very heart of Bion’s

conception of sanity and insanity. If one has only one way of viewing
reality, one cannot think, one is psychotic. Sanity involves a capacity
for generating and maintaining a multiplicity of perspectives from
which to view/experience one’s life in the real world (including the
reality of one’s own personality). For example, a medical student in a
state of relative psychological health may be able simultaneously to
experience the cadaver that he is dissecting as the body of a once-
living human being; a non-human object constructed for the purpose
of teaching anatomy; terrifying, inescapable evidence of the reality of
death (his own death, the death of those he loves, the death of the
patients he will treat); a reflection of the generosity of the person who
granted permission for the use of his or her remains for purposes
of medical education; and the scene of a rape born of the medical
student’s unconscious belief that his violent entry into the body of
the cadaver is tantamount to rape, and, at an even deeper level, his
feeling raped by the cadaver (in the form of the cadaver forcefully
entering his psyche as the formaldehyde enters his body, leaving its
color and odor on him and in him). Thinking, so conceived, is a
process in which ideas and feelings live in continual conversation with
one another, a conversation in which thoughts are forever in the
process of being transformed (de-integrated) and formed anew as a
consequence of shifting organizations of meaning.

2. It takes two minds to think one’s disturbing thoughts

Bion (1959) introduced what I am calling his second principle of mental

functioning in the course of discussing the relationship between the
group leader and the group. As mentioned earlier, the analyst leading
the group is as subject to the draw of basic assumption “thinking” as
are the other members of the group. This is not a reflection of the
analyst’s psychopathology, inexperience, or ineptitude; rather, the ana-
lyst’s participation in the basic assumption groups is indispensable
to his attempt to understand what is true to what is occurring in
the group:

. . . many interpretations, and amongst them the most important,

have to be made on the strength of the analyst’s own emotional
reactions . . . The analyst feels he is being manipulated so as to be

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playing a part, no matter how difficult to recognize, in somebody

else’s phantasy . . . [The analyst has] a sense of experiencing strong
feelings and at the same time a belief that their existence is quite
adequately justified by the objective situation [i.e. he believes that
his feelings are a reasonable response to what is occurring in the
group].
(1959, p. 149)

Bion, in this passage, is articulating for the first time the clinical
basis for his radical revision of Klein’s (1946) concept of projective
identification (see Ogden, 1979, 1982). Klein insisted that projective
identification is strictly an intrapsychic phenomenon. Nevertheless,
the language she used to describe projective identification suggests an
interpersonal dimension: “Split-off parts of the ego are . . . projected
on to the mother or, as I would rather call it, into the mother” (Klein,
1946, p. 8, italics in original). In Bion’s psychological-interpersonal
version of projective identification, the analyst must be able to experi-
ence himself in accord with the feelings elicited in him by the real
interpersonal pressure that accompanies “somebody else’s phantasy”;
yet, it is critical that the analyst at the same time be able

to shake [him]self out of the numbing feeling of reality that is a

concomitant of this state [which ability] is the prime requisite of
the analyst in the group: if he can do this he is in a position to give
what I believe is the correct interpretation, and thereby to see its
connection with the previous interpretation, the validity of which
he has been caused to doubt.
(Bion, 1959, pp. 149–150)

In other words, when in the grip of projective identification, the

analyst loses touch with the logic of his previous thoughts because his
capacity to think has been compromised (“numbed”). He has unwit-
tingly participated, for example, in the evasion of reality (the non-
thinking or anti-thinking) that is occurring in a group. In shaking
himself out of the psychic reality engendered in him, the analyst is not
“regaining” his earlier capacity to think. Rather, having been changed
by the experience of participating in the particular paralysis of, or
attack on, thinking that characterized the specific intersubjective
state (the basic assumption) of the group, the analyst is now in a new
position (i.e. he has developed a new vertex) from which to understand

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what is occurring. Based on that new understanding, he may be able

to communicate to the group something of what he believes to be
the nature of the fears and hatreds that the group is experiencing.
The aim of the analyst in putting such thoughts into words is not to
solve the emotional problems of the group; rather, he offers interpret-
ations in an effort to help the group do the work of thinking the truth
(the reality) of the emotional experience that is unfolding.
A decade later, in “A Theory of Thinking” (1962b) and Learning
from Experience (1962a), Bion fleshes out his conception of thinking as
an intersubjective experience:
Ordinarily the personality of the infant, like other elements of the
environment [such as the provision of holding, feeding, and loving],
is managed by the mother. If mother and child are adjusted to
each other projective identification plays a role in the management
[of the infant’s personality] through the operation of a rudimentary
and fragile reality sense.
(Bion, 1962b, p. 114)
Thus, in the process of healthy projective identification, mother and
infant think together and, in so doing, the infant achieves “a rudimen-
tary and fragile reality sense,” a rudimentary capacity to perceive
himself, his mother, and the world realistically.
Bion continues:
As a realistic activity [i.e. an actual interaction involving two people]
it [the infant’s contribution to the projective identification] shows
itself as behaviour reasonably calculated to arouse in the mother
feelings of which the infant wishes to be rid. If the infant feels it is
dying [i.e. feels as if he is losing his rudimentary sense of self as a
consequence of his inability to cope with his disturbing emotional
experience] it can arouse fears that it is dying in the mother. A
well-balanced mother can accept these and respond therapeuti-
cally: that is to say in a manner that makes the infant feel it is
receiving its frightened personality [no longer dissolving or frag-
menting] back again but in a form that it can tolerate – the fears are
manageable by the infant personality.
(Bion, 1962b, pp. 114–115)
In this way, mother and infant together think thoughts that had pre-
viously been so disturbing as to be unthinkable by the infant on his

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own: “The activity we know as ‘thinking’ was in origin . . . projective

identification” (Bion, 1962a, p. 31).
In reconceptualizing projective identification in this way, Bion is
expressing what I view as his second principle of mental functioning:
it requires two minds to think one’s most disturbing thoughts. The two
minds engaged in thinking may be those of the mother and infant, the
group leader and group member, the patient and analyst, the super-
visor and supervisee, the husband and wife, and so on. The two minds
may also be two “parts” of the personality: the psychotic and non-
psychotic parts of the personality (Bion, 1957); “the dreamer who
dreams the dream” and “the dreamer who understands the dream”
(Grotstein, 2000); the “dream-work” and the “understanding-work”
(Sandler, 1976, p. 40); and so forth. When the thinking capacity of
the parts of the personality in conversation with one another proves
inadequate to the task of thinking one’s troubling experience,
the minds of two separate people are required for thinking one’s
previously unthinkable thoughts.
Since every stage of development involves facing emotional expe-
rience for which one feels unprepared, we are throughout our lives
in need of other people with whom to think. As Bion (1987) puts it,
“the human unit is a couple; it takes two human beings to make one”
(p. 222). Winnicott (1960) famously puts it in his own way: “There is
no such thing as an infant” [apart from the mother] (p. 39fn).

3. Thinking develops in order to cope with thoughts

Bion introduced in “A Theory of Thinking” (1962b) and developed

in Learning from Experience (1962a) what I view as his third principle
of mental functioning: “Thinking is a development forced on the psyche
by the pressure of thoughts and not the other way round ” (1962b, p. 111,
italics added). This is a theory that “differs from any theory . . .
[that views] thought as a product of thinking” (p. 111).
In earliest post-natal life, all experience – even what we later view
as soothing experience – is disturbing in that it is utterly new and
unexpected. For example, air as a medium in which to live has no
equivalent in intrauterine life. And breast-feeding, for which the
infant is instinctually “hard wired,” almost always proves to be difficult
at first. The breast for which the infant has a “pre-conception” (Bion,
1962b, p. 111) is not the real breast that the infant encounters (even

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when the mother is highly sensitive to the infant’s psychosomatic

state). The infant’s (metaphorical) first thought is not of the breast, but
of the “no-breast” (1962b, p. 112) – the absent breast or that part of the
experience of the actual breast that differs (beyond tolerable limits)
from the pre-conceived breast: “If [the infant’s] capacity for toleration
of frustration [with the help of the mother] is sufficient the ‘no-breast’
[experience] inside becomes a thought and an apparatus for ‘think-
ing’ it develops” (p. 112). Alternatively, if the infant is unable to
tolerate the tension and psychic pain associated with frustration
(even with the mother’s help), the experience of the “no-breast” is
short-circuited. What might have become a thought becomes either
an evacuation of tension (for example, in the form of action or exces-
sive projective identification) or an evasion of thinking (for example,
in the form of omnipotent “thinking”). What might have become
an apparatus for thinking a thought becomes an “hypertrophic . . .
apparatus of projective identification” (p. 112).
Bion’s theory of alpha-function is an elaboration of the third
principle of mental functioning – the idea that thoughts give rise to
thinking. Bion posits that the individual’s encounters with reality
generate “beta-elements,” “sense-impressions related to an emotional
experience” (1962a, p. 17). These sense impressions (in the absence of
further transformation) cannot be linked in the process of thinking
and are fit only for evacuation – for example, by means of projective
identification. But we must not lose sight of the fact that beta-
elements constitute our sole psychological connection with reality.
Beta-elements might be thought of as “those unthoughtlike thoughts
that are the souls of thought” (Poe, 1848, p. 80). Bion hypothesizes
that “alpha-function” (1962a, p. 6) (an as-yet-unknown, and probably
unknowable, set of mental operations) serves to transform beta-
elements into alpha-elements that can be linked to form dream-
thoughts. Dream-thoughts are the symbolic representation of the
disturbing experience that was originally registered primarily in sens-
ory terms (i.e. as beta-elements). The capacities for alpha-function,
dreaming, thinking, and remembering are “called into existence to
cope with thoughts” (1962b, p. 111).
In addition to the theory of alpha-function, a second important
line of Bion’s thinking, the concept of the “container-contained”
(1962a, 1970; see also Ogden, 2004c), represents an extension of
Bion’s third principle of mental functioning. The third principle –
the idea that thinking develops in order to cope with thoughts – is in

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essence a conception of the way mental functioning inherently

involves a forceful dynamic interplay between thoughts and the
capacity for thinking. The “container” (1962a, p. 90), in Bion’s theory
of the container-contained, is not a thing but a process: it is the
unconscious psychological work of dreaming, operating in concert
with preconscious dream-like thinking (reverie) and conscious sec-
ondary process thinking. The term contained (p. 90) refers to thoughts
and feelings that are in the process of being derived from one’s lived
emotional experience.
When the relationship between container and contained is a
healthy one, growth occurs in both and is reflected in the enhance-
ment of the individual’s capacity for “tolerated doubt” (p. 92). So far
as the container is concerned, there is an expansion of the capacity for
doing unconscious psychological work (i.e. dreaming one’s lived
experience). The growth of the contained is reflected in an enrich-
ment of the range and depth of thoughts that one is able to derive
from one’s lived experience in the world.
Under pathological conditions, the container may become destruc-
tive to the contained, resulting in a limitation of what one is able to
“retain [of one’s] . . . knowledge and experience” (1962a, p. 93). What
one has learned from experience is no longer available to oneself;
one feels as if important parts of oneself are missing. Conversely, the
contained may overwhelm and destroy the container – for example,
in nightmares, when the dream-thought becomes so disturbing as
to overwhelm the capacity for dreaming, and, as a result, the dreamer
wakes up in a state of fright. Similarly, in children’s play disruptions,
the thought being “worked on” in play (the contained) overwhelms
the container (the capacity for playing). (For further discussion of the
concept of the container-contained and its relationship to Winnicott’s
concept of holding, see Ogden, 2004c.)
Viewing thoughts as the impetus for thinking leads the analyst in
the clinical setting to be continually asking himself what disturbing
(unthinkable) thought the patient at any given moment in the analysis
is asking the analyst to help him to think. The analyst is also aware that
even as the patient is asking for help in thinking, the patient fears and
hates the analyst for attempting to do just that: “Patients hate having
feelings at all . . .” (Bion, 1987, p. 183).
The idea that the development of an apparatus for thinking takes
place as a response to disturbing thoughts also contributes to a theory
of the therapeutic process: the analyst’s being receptive to, and doing

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psychological work with, the patient’s unthinkable thoughts serves

not as a substitute or replacement for the patient’s capacity for think-
ing, but as an experience of thinking with the patient in a way that serves
to create conditions in which the patient may be able to further
develop his own inborn rudimentary capacity for thinking (his own
inborn capacity for alpha-function).
Thus, the goal of the psychoanalytic process is not that of helping
the patient resolve unconscious intrapsychic conflict (or any other
emotional problem); rather, the aim of psychoanalysis is to help the
patient develop his own capacity for thinking and feeling his experi-
ence. Once that process is under way, the patient is in a position to
begin to confront and come to terms with his own emotional prob-
lems. The patient is increasingly able to think with people other than
the analyst and to engage in kinds of “conversations” with them and
with himself that involve different aspects of his own personality that
previously had not been available to him for the purpose of conscious,
preconscious, and unconscious psychological work.

4. Dreaming and the psychoanalytic function of the personality

The fourth of what I think of as Bion’s principles of mental function-

ing is the idea that there exists an inherent psychoanalytic function of the
personality, and dreaming is the principal process for performing that function.
In positing “a psycho-analytic function of personality” (1962a,
p. 89), Bion is proposing that the human personality is constitutionally
equipped with mental operations that generate personal symbolic
meaning, consciousness, and the potential for unconscious psycho-
logical work with one’s emotional problems. All three of these
components of the psychoanalytic function of the mind mediate
psychological growth. What makes this function of the personality
“psycho-analytic” is the fact that the psychological work is achieved
to a large extent by means of viewing an emotional situation simul-
taneously from the perspective of the conscious and unconscious
mind. For Bion, dreaming (which is synonymous with unconscious
thinking) is the principal psychological form in which this work is
performed.
Dreaming occurs continuously both while we are awake and while
we are asleep (Bion, 1962a). Just as the stars remain in the sky even
when their light is obscured by the glare of the sun, so, too, dreaming

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is a continuous function of the mind that persists even when our

dreams are obscured from consciousness by the glare of waking life.
Dreaming is the most free, most inclusive, and most deeply penetrat-
ing form of psychological work of which human beings are capable.
In conceiving of the psychoanalytic function of the personality in this
way, Bion is radically revising Freud’s understanding of the work of
dreaming and of the analytic process. For Freud, the goal of dreaming
and of psychoanalysis is that of making the unconscious conscious –
that is, making derivatives of unconscious experience available to
conscious (secondary process) thinking.
In contrast, for Bion, the unconscious is the seat of the psycho-
analytic function of the personality, and, consequently, in order to do
psychoanalytic work, one must make the conscious unconscious –
that is, make conscious lived experience available to the unconscious
work of dreaming. The work of dreaming, for Bion, is the psychol-
ogical work by means of which we create personal, symbolic meaning
thereby becoming ourselves. In other words, we dream ourselves into
existence. In the absence of the capacity for dreaming, we are unable
to create meaning that feels personal to us: we cannot differentiate
between hallucination and perception, between our own perceptions
and those of others, and between our dream-life and our waking life.
In this psychological state, one “cannot go to sleep and cannot wake
up . . . the psychotic patient behaves as if he were in precisely this
state” (Bion, 1962a, p. 7).
Moreover, from Bion’s perspective, dreaming is the psychological
activity through which we achieve consciousness. Dreaming “makes a
barrier against [unconscious] mental phenomena which might over-
whelm the patient’s awareness [for example] that he is talking to a
friend, and, at the same time, makes it impossible for [conscious] aware-
ness that he is talking to a friend to overwhelm his [unconscious]
phantasies” (Bion, 1962a, p. 15). Dreaming is not a product of the
differentiation of the conscious and unconscious mind; it is the
dreaming that creates and maintains that differentiation, and, in so
doing, generates human consciousness.
In sum, Bion’s fourth principle of mental functioning holds that
dreaming constitutes the central component of the psychoanalytic
function of the personality. Dreaming is our profoundest form of
thinking and constitutes the principal medium through which we
achieve human consciousness, psychological growth, and the capacity
to create personal, symbolic meaning from our lived experience.

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I will end this section by returning to its beginning. I view Bion’s

theory of thinking as a theory built upon four fundamental principles of mental
functioning: (1) the impetus for all thinking is the human need to know the
truth – the reality of who one is and what is occurring in one’s life; (2) it takes
two minds to think one’s most disturbing thoughts; (3) the capacity for
thinking develops in order to come to terms with thoughts derived from one’s
disturbing emotional experience; and (4) there is an inherent psychoanalytic
function of the personality, and dreaming is the principal process through which
that function is performed.

Bion’s clinical thinking

I will now offer an illustration of the way in which Bion’s clinical

thinking is informed by his theory of thinking and the four principles
of mental functioning that I believe underlie that theory. The clinical
work that I will discuss is taken from the sixteenth of the clinical
seminars that Bion conducted in São Paolo in 1978 (Bion, 1987,
pp. 200–202).
The seminar begins:

Presenter: The patient lay down on the couch and started to talk.
“Mrs J is the owner of the house where I live. She is eighty-eight
years old. I dreamt that she was walking along the road, talking
about the rental agreement.” Then she started shouting, “What are
you doing there behind me? Tell me immediately. You are a dishonest
liar!” This took me by surprise.
(p. 200)

This opening paragraph is confusing to me each time I read it. The

pronoun she is ambiguous in the phrase, “Then she started shouting
. . .” Is the presenter using the pronoun she to continue telling the
dream in the patient’s words, in which case “she” (who is shouting)
refers to a figure in the dream? Or has the presenter begun to tell the
dream to Bion in his own words, in which case “she” is the patient, and
the sentences in quotation marks that follow are the words that the
patient shouted at the presenter: “What are you doing there behind
me? Tell me immediately. You are a dishonest liar!” It is impossible for
Bion (who is listening to the presentation, not reading it) to know
whether Mrs J in the dream is shouting at the patient or whether the

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patient in waking life is shouting at the presenter. Each time I read this
passage, it is only after taking pains to figure out what the quotation
marks are indicating that I am able to determine that the patient is
interrupting her own telling of her dream to shout at the analyst. The
analyst remarks to Bion, “This took me by surprise.” This took me by
surprise, too, because of the way the presenter is making it difficult for
the reader, and impossible for Bion, to know what is dream-life and
what is waking life.
Bion responds:
I wonder what the difficulty is. If she knows that you are a dis-
honest liar, then obviously you would be telling lies behind her back.
At the same time, why ask you what you are doing behind her
back? Presumably you will only tell her more lies.
(p. 200)
The presenter is not a liar, but he has made it very difficult to under-
stand what has happened in the session. Perhaps this confusing render-
ing of the session led Bion to say, “I wonder what the difficulty is?”
In so doing, Bion leaves open the possibility that he is asking the
presenter what his difficulty is (in addition to asking about the patient’s
difficulty).
Bion continues:
Alternatively, is she afraid that you do not tell lies? If she thinks that
there is a chance that you speak the truth, that would explain why
she asks you what you are doing.
(p. 200)
Bion is suggesting that the patient is afraid of (and, at the same
time, highly values) the way the analyst thinks – a way of thinking that
is concerned with what is true to the emotional experience that is
occurring between them. What is being suggested here reflects Bion’s
first principle of mental functioning – the idea that the need to know
the truth is the most fundamental impetus for the development of
thinking. At this moment in the session, that truth involves the recog-
nition that the patient is unable to differentiate between being awake
and dreaming – that is, that the patient is psychotic.
The patient attempts to prevent the analyst from thinking, not
only by surprising him by yelling at him, but also by equating think-
ing and “doing,” and by insisting that he tell her what he is doing

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immediately – that is, without thought on his part, thereby ending

genuine thinking by turning it into reflexive, fearful action. I believe
that in this part of the seminar, the presenter is not only telling Bion
about the very disturbing experience that he had with this patient, he
is showing it to Bion (and the reader) by unwittingly making it dif-
ficult for the reader, and impossible for Bion, to differentiate between
what is dream-life and what is waking life. In this way, the presenter is
engendering in Bion something like the effect on him of the patient’s
psychosis, which the presenter is unable to think on his own.
Bion goes on:

To put it another way: there is something wrong with this story:

either the patient is lying, or she is slandering the analyst. Other-
wise why should she spend her time with a dishonest liar?
(p. 200)

In pointing out the contradiction that the patient views the analyst
as a dishonest liar and yet continues to see him for analysis, Bion
(as discussed in Chapter 5) is asking the question that he asks far more
frequently than any other question in the clinical seminars: “Why has
the patient come for analysis?” This question reflects the second of
Bion’s principles of mental functioning – the idea that it takes two
minds to think one’s most disturbing thoughts (and, by extension, that
it is for this reason that patients come to analysis). For Bion, the
omnipresent clinical question is: “What is the thought, the emotional
problem, that the patient (ambivalently) is asking the analyst to help
him to think?”
The seminar continues:

Presenter: I said, “I am listening” [in response to the patient’s

demand to know immediately what the analyst was doing]. She
replied, “Yes, that’s important.” She calmed down and continued
describing her dream.

Bion: That is a very interesting sequel. Notice that the analyst

didn’t start an argument about whether or not he is a liar [he did
not angrily and fearfully offer a counterattack to the patient’s attack
on his thinking]; he didn’t get up and leave the room [he did not
evacuate thoughts in the form of action]; he didn’t lose his temper
[he maintained a state of mind in which he could think]. The effect

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on the patient seems to have been quite helpful. It is not a cure, but
a little bit of a cure; it is enough of a cure to make another minute
or two [of thinking] possible. Not only does it matter what you say
or do, it also matters what you do not say or do.
(pp. 200–201)

Bion, as ever, is understated in his response to the presenter. He refers

to the analyst’s work simply as “interesting,” but nowhere else in the
52 “Clinical Seminars” does Bion step back, as he does here, to ask the
other seminar members to “notice” what the analyst did in the clinical
situation being discussed. Although Bion does not spell it out, I
believe that what was critical to the effectiveness of the presenter’s
response was his calm refusal to accept the terms offered by the fright-
ened patient (i.e. to confess or to defend himself), either of which,
in this instance, would have constituted a reflexive form of non-
thinking. Instead, the presenter gently, undefensively reminded the
patient who he is and would continue to be – an analyst who is
listening and thinking – despite the fact that the patient was fright-
ened of the way the analyst was thinking. At the same time, she was
afraid that he would not be able to remain an analyst who may be able
to help her to regain her sanity by thinking and dreaming with her the
terrifying experience that she could not think/dream on her own. In
attempting to tell her dream to the analyst, the patient’s capacity for
thinking/dreaming fell apart – she became increasingly unable to
differentiate between being awake and dreaming, and as a result she
treated the analyst as if he were a figure in the dream.
How different it would have been had the presenter, instead of
simply saying, “I am listening,” had said, “You’re afraid that I will be so
frightened of you that I won’t be able to think when you attack me
and, as a result, I won’t be able to be an analyst who will be able to
help you to think your thoughts in a way that feels sane.” The latter is
accurate in content, but sounds to me like a rather stereotypic, analytic
way of talking. In addition, I do not believe that the patient, in her
state of severe distress, was capable of listening to more than the first
few words of such a long and complex interpretation. By contrast, the
analyst’s statement, “I am listening,” has the ring of words spoken by a
person who is thinking and talking to another person (who is very
frightened) in a manner that is genuinely his own.
The patient responded not only by saying, “Yes, that’s important”;
in addition, “She calmed down and continued describing her dream.”

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In other words, by means of the experience of having her psychotic

thoughts contained by the analyst’s thinking, the patient was able, if
only “for another minute or two,” to think (perhaps for the first time
in the session).

Presenter: She continued to describe her dream: “Mrs J wanted to

come into the house and look it over. There was a portrait of a
nude in one of the rooms and I knew that she would not like that.
So I tried to stop her coming into the house, but I couldn’t. In the
kitchen there were two blood-stained garments.”

Bion: The patient said this was a dream. Did you believe her? It
sounds very likely that she wanted to stop you from seeing what
was in her mind, leaving her feeling naked. But she wasn’t able to
lock the door; she wasn’t able to make you leave; she wasn’t able to
put a stop to the analysis right away. So now you may find out what
kind of a person she is. However, there is always a safeguard: if you
give an interpretation she can say, “It doesn’t matter – I don’t really
think like that – it was only a dream.”
(p. 201)

Bion responds here by saying, “The patient said that this was a dream.
Did you believe her?” Who other than Bion would have responded to
“the dream” in this way? Bion’s question (it seems to me) is intended
to direct the presenter’s attention to the fact that the patient is unable
to dream, unable to distinguish between internal and external reality,
and unable to distinguish between being awake and being asleep.
The patient, though seemingly describing a dream from the previ-
ous night, had not awoken from that “dream,” which was not a real
dream in the sense that it did not involve a differentiation of conscious
and unconscious experience. It seems to me that the patient was
experiencing in the session a state of mind akin to a night-terror (a
phenomenon in sleep that is not a dream, but an experience of being
unable to dream a terrifying experience). (See Ogden, 2004a, 2005a,
for discussions of genuine dreams, night-terrors, and nightmares.) The
presenter’s elegant interpretation, “I am listening,” had the effect of
helping the patient genuinely to awaken from her dream-that-was-
not-a-dream by containing the patient’s unthinkable dream-thought.
Bion then addresses what he believes to be the nature of the
patient’s previously undreamable thought. He views the dream as an

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expression of the patient’s belief that she is not able to distinguish

her thoughts from those of the analyst and, therefore, cannot stop
the analyst from “seeing what was in her mind, leaving her feeling
naked.” The experience of being seen naked against one’s will is the
opposite of feeling understood. It is closer to an experience of being
raped (perhaps it is this state that is represented in the “dream” by the
blood-stained garments).
Bion then makes a curious, somewhat enigmatic statement: “So
now [after demonstrating to the patient that you are able to continue
to think while she is yelling at you] you may find out what kind of
person she is” (p. 201). I believe that Bion is suggesting that, with the
help of the presenter’s calm and thoughtful response to the patient’s
yelling at him, the non-psychotic part of the patient’s personality may
become a stronger force in the analysis. The non-psychotic part of the
personality is that aspect of the patient that is able to think/dream, to
do something uniquely her own with her lived emotional experience.
In this sense, the patient, at this point in the session, may be in a
position to begin to dream herself into existence, thus affording the
presenter and the patient, herself, an opportunity to “find out what
kind of person she is.” This entire line of thought reflects Bion’s
fourth principle of mental functioning – the idea that even when the
patient is in the grip of a full-blown psychosis, the psychoanalytic
function of the personality remains operative, albeit in a highly cir-
cumscribed way. Such an assumption underlies analytic work, not
only with schizophrenic and other severely disturbed patients, but also
with the psychotic aspect of every patient, supervisee, or group.
But Bion cautions, “However, there is always a safeguard: if you give
an interpretation she can say, ‘It doesn’t matter – I don’t really think
like that – it was only a dream.’ ” Here Bion is commenting on the
effect of thoughts on thinking: there may be a resurgence of the
patient’s attack on the analyst’s capacity for thinking as well as on her
own. Although he does not use the term, the form of attack that Bion
is describing is what he elsewhere calls reversible perspective (Bion, 1963,
p. 50). Bion, in the clinical seminars, scrupulously avoids technical
language.
The non-thinking that Bion is pointing out involves a shift of
figure and ground in a way that undermines the analyst’s use of
his capacity for thoughtful observation: the patient claims (and believes
her own claim) that when the analyst describes “the figure” (for
example, an interpretation of personal meaning in a dream), the

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patient insists that the only reality is the ground (for example, the
“nonsensical” manifest content – “it doesn’t matter – I don’t really
think like that – it was only a dream” [p. 201]). Thus, thoughts serve to
contribute not to the development of thinking, but to the destruction
of thinking. From the perspective of still another of Bion’s ways of
conceptualizing the relationship between thoughts and thinking, the
patient’s thought that dreams mean nothing (the contained) is serving
to destroy the capacity for patient and analyst to think together
(the container). These ideas reflect Bion’s third principle of mental
functioning – the notion that thinking develops in order to come
to terms with disturbing thoughts, and that a forceful interaction
between thoughts and thinking continues throughout one’s life.
The presenter continues:

She went on, “I was afraid the house-owner wouldn’t renew the
contract, complaining that I didn’t take care of the house –
although it was in an even worse condition when I first rented it.
With a magic wand she turned the nude portrait into a Negro
woman dressed in a rose-coloured dress. The Negro woman started
to move. I saw a door I had never seen before, opened it, and found
a dying plant. I was afraid the owner would be angry because I
hadn’t taken care of it. I tried to revive it with the magic spell she
had used, but couldn’t.” Then she began to shout again, “What are
you doing there? You are a liar. You are doing something you don’t
want to tell me about. I hate you. I want to destroy you, tear you
into pieces and throw the pieces away.” She was very, very angry.
(p. 201)

There is the same confusing ambiguity in this paragraph that there

was in the opening paragraph of the seminar. Is the figure in the
dream shouting at another dream figure or is the patient shouting at
the analyst in waking life? (It is only the punctuation – the fact that
there are double quotation marks, not single quotation marks, sur-
rounding the words that are shouted – that indicates that it is the
patient who is shouting at the presenter and not a dream figure shout-
ing at the patient in the dream. Since Bion is listening to the presenta-
tion and not reading it, it is impossible for him to know who is
shouting – the patient or a figure in the patient’s dream. The distinc-
tion between being awake and being asleep is again disappearing. The
patient, herself, seems to me to be disappearing. As many times as I

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have read the words, “I . . . found a dying plant,” I still misread the
words and make them say, “I . . . found a dying patient.”
Bion responds to this portion of the case presentation:

What are you doing to her? She has continued to talk, so she is
taking off her own disguises. If you take off the black skin, there is a
person there; if you take off the dream, she herself is there. [Perhaps
Bion is suggesting that the dream is not a dream, but an assault on
the non-psychotic part of the patient’s personality. Without the
meaning-destroying and dreamer-destroying “dream,” there may be
a person capable of thinking.] I think she is worried about what
you are doing to her. Why do you make her speak the truth? It
seems that you are only talking, but she knows it isn’t only that.
You are talking in some peculiar way which makes her expose the
truth . . . So although it is horrible for the patient, it is just as well
for the analyst to remain able to think. But we cannot settle this
matter by being unable to be angry or frightened; we have to be
able to have these strong feelings and be able to go on thinking
clearly even when we have them.
(p. 202)

The seminar ends with these comments by Bion. In the segment of

the session that Bion is discussing, the patient becomes increasingly
frightened in “the dream”/hallucination. Listening to the patient in
this part of the session, for me, is like watching a person drown. The
patient feels that she is dying or losing her mind – which amount to
the same thing. Virtually word by word, we see the patient becoming
increasingly a character in her own dream; at the same time, the
figures in her dream (the landlady and the painting of the nude) are
turning into living people who seem to the patient to occupy her
waking life.
The published fragment of the seminar contains only a very brief
account of the analytic session and does not include any of the
presenter’s interventions, or even his thoughts, after he said, “I am
listening.” This artifact of the editing and tape-recording of the
seminar contributes to the distressing feeling that the patient’s dis-
integration is not being met by further attempts on the part of the
analyst to contain the patient’s terror.

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 Bion’s four principles of mental functioning

Concluding comments

I will close by stating in a slightly different way what I believe to be

the core principles of Bion’s theory of thinking.
Thinking, for Bion, derives most fundamentally from the human
need to know the truth of who one is and what is occurring in
one’s life. Disturbing thoughts (unprocessed experience) provide
the impetus for developing an apparatus for thinking (doing psychol-
ogical work with) those thoughts. There is an inborn “internal
structure” for doing psychological work with our experience that
Bion calls the psychoanalytic function of the personality. That inborn
structure is analogous to the inborn “deep structure” of language
(Chomsky, 1968) that underlies our capacity to learn how to speak.
In the course of a life-long process, we increasingly develop
the capacity for thinking/dreaming our lived emotional experience.
However, beyond a certain point (a point that varies for each indi-
vidual), we find it unbearable to think/dream our experience. Under
such circumstances, if we are fortunate, there is another person
(perhaps a mother or father, an analyst, a supervisor, a spouse, a sibling,
a close friend) who is willing and able to engage with us in a process
of dreaming our formerly undreamable experience. Dreaming –
whether on our own or with another person – is our most profound
form of thinking: it is the principal medium in which we do the
psychological work of being and becoming human in the process
of attempting to face the reality of, and come to terms with, our
emotional problems.

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 7
Reading Loewald: Oedipus reconceived

Freud’s Oedipus complex has, in the history of psychoanalysis, been

reinvented several times – for example, by Klein, Fairbairn, Lacan, and
Kohut. At the heart of Loewald’s (1979) re-conceptualization of the
Oedipus complex is the idea that it is the task of each new generation
to make use of, destroy, and reinvent the creations of the previous
generation. Loewald reformulates the Oedipus complex in a way
that provides fresh ways of viewing many of the fundamental human
tasks entailed in growing up, growing old, and, in between the two,
managing to make something of one’s own that succeeding gener-
ations might make use of to create something unique of their own.
Thus, Loewald reinvents Freud’s version of the Oedipus complex, and
it is my task to re-conceive Loewald’s version of the Oedipus com-
plex in the very act of presenting it. By means of a close reading of
Loewald’s (1979) “The Waning of the Oedipus Complex,” I will
demonstrate what it is about the way Loewald thinks that leads me to
view that paper as a watershed in the development of psychoanalytic
thought.
The sequential nature of narrative writing makes it difficult for
Loewald to capture the simultaneity of the elements of the Oedipus
complex; I, too, must struggle with this dilemma. I have elected to
discuss Loewald’s overlapping ideas in more or less the sequence he
presents them, addressing the tension between influence and original-
ity in the succession of generations; the murder of the oedipal parents
and the appropriation of their authority; the metamorphic internal-
ization of the child’s experience of the parents, which underlies the
formation of a self responsible for itself and to itself; and the tran-
sitional incestuous object relationship that mediates the dialectical
interplay between differentiated and undifferentiated forms of object

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 Reading Loewald

relatedness. I will conclude with a comparison of Freud’s and

Loewald’s conceptions of the Oedipus complex.

Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex

In order to place Loewald’s contribution in context, I will review the

major tenets of Freud’s Oedipus complex, as I understand them.
Freud’s conception of the Oedipus complex is built on a foundation
of four revolutionary ideas: (1) All of human psychology and psycho-
pathology, as well as all human cultural achievements, can be under-
stood in terms of urges and meanings that have their roots in the
sexual and aggressive instincts. (2) The sexual instinct is experienced
as a driving force beginning at birth and is elaborated sequentially in
its oral, anal, and phallic components in the course of the first five
years of life. (3) Of the multitude of myths and stories that human
beings have created, the myth of Oedipus, for psychoanalysis, is the
single most important narrative organizing human psychological
development. (4) The triangulated set of conflictual murderous and
incestuous fantasies constituting the Oedipus complex is “determined
and laid down by heredity” (Freud, 1924, p. 174) – that is, it is a
manifestation of a universal, inborn propensity of human beings to
organize experience in this particular way (see Ogden, 1986a).
The Oedipus complex for Freud (1924) is “contemporaneous”
(p. 174) with the phallic phase of sexual development. It is a web of
intrapsychic and interpersonal parent–child relationships in which
the boy, for example, takes his mother as the object of his romantic
and sexual desire, and wishes to take his father’s place with his
mother (Freud, 1910, 1921, 1923, 1924, 1925). The father is simul-
taneously admired and viewed as a punitive rival. The aggressive
instinct is manifested, for the boy, in the form of the wish to kill
his father in order to have his mother for himself. The wish to kill
the father is a highly ambivalent one, given the boy’s pre-oedipal love
for and identification with his father, as well as the boy’s erotic
attachment to his father in the negative Oedipus complex (Freud,
1921). The boy experiences guilt in response to his wish to murder
his father (in the positive Oedipus complex) and his mother (in the
negative Oedipus complex). Similarly, the girl takes her father as the
object of her desire and wishes to take her mother’s place with her
father. She, too, experiences guilt in response to her incestuous

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and murderous wishes in the complete Oedipus complex (Freud,

1921, 1925).
The child guiltily fears punishment for his or her murderous and
incestuous wishes in the form of castration at the hands of the father.
Whether or not actual castration threats are made, the threat of castra-
tion is present in the mind of the child as a “primal phantasy” (Freud,
1916–1917, p. 370), a universal unconscious fantasy that is part of the
make-up of the human psyche.
“Analytic observation[s] . . . justify the statement that the destruc-
tion of the Oedipus complex is brought about by the threat of castra-
tion” (Freud, 1924, p. 177). That is, the child, for fear of punishment in
the form of castration, relinquishes his or her sexual and aggressive
strivings in relation to the oedipal parents and replaces those “object
cathexes . . . [with] identifications” (Freud, 1924, p. 176) with parental
authority, prohibitions, and ideals, which form the core of a new
psychic structure, the superego.

The tension between influence and originality

With Freud’s conception of the Oedipus complex in mind, I will now

turn to Loewald’s reformulation. The opening sentence of Loewald’s
paper is a curious one in that it appears to make no reference to the
subject that the paper will address: “Many of the views expressed
in this paper have been stated previously by others” (Loewald, 1979,
p. 384).1 Why would anyone begin a psychoanalytic paper with a
disclaimer renouncing claims for originality? Loewald goes on imme-
diately (still not giving the reader a rationale for his odd approach) to
cite a lengthy passage from Breuer’s introduction to the theoretical
section of Studies on Hysteria:

When a science is making rapid advances, thoughts which were

first expressed by single individuals quickly become common
property. Thus no one who attempts to put forward today his
views on hysteria and its psychical basis can avoid repeating a great
quantity of other people’s thoughts, which are in the act of passing
from personal into general possession. It is scarcely possible always

1
All page references in this chapter not otherwise specified refer to Loewald’s (1979) “The
Waning of the Oedipus Complex.”

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 Reading Loewald

to be certain who first gave them utterance, and there is always a

danger of regarding as a product of one’s own what has already
been said by someone else. I hope, therefore, that I may be excused
if few quotations are found in this discussion and if no strict distinc-
tion is made between what is my own and what originates else-
where. Originality is claimed for very little of what will be found in
the following pages.
(Breuer and Freud, 1893–1895, pp. 185–186; cited
by Loewald, 1979, p. 384)

Subliminally, a sense of cyclical time is created by the juxtaposition of

Loewald’s disclaiming originality and Breuer’s virtually identical state-
ment made almost a century earlier. Loewald, before discussing his
ideas concerning the Oedipus complex, is showing them to us in our
experience of reading: no generation has the right to claim absolute
originality for its creations (see Ogden, 2003b, 2005b). And yet,
each new generation does contribute something uniquely of its own:
“Many [not all ] of the views expressed in this paper have been stated
previously” (Loewald); and “Originality is claimed for very little [but
something]” (Breuer).2
Between the lines of Loewald’s text is the idea that it is the fate of
the child (as it was the fate of the parents) that what he makes of his
own will enter a process of “passing from personal into general
possession” (Breuer). In other words, what we do manage to create
that bears our own mark will become part of the pool of collective
knowledge, and, in so doing, we become nameless, but not insignifi-
cant ancestors to succeeding generations: “there is always a danger of
regarding as a product of one’s own what has already been said by
someone else” (Breuer), an ancestor whose name has been lost to us.
Loewald’s paper goes on to explore and bring to life this tension
between one’s indebtedness to one’s forbears and one’s wish to free
oneself from them in the process of becoming a person in one’s own
terms. This tension between influence and originality lies at the core
of the Oedipus complex, as Loewald conceives of it.

2
Breuer’s words echo those written by Plato two-and-a-half millennia earlier: “Now I am
well aware that none of these ideas can have come from me – I know my own ignorance.
The only other possibility, I think, is that I was filled, like an empty jar, by the words of
other people streaming in through my ears, though I’m so stupid that I’ve even forgotten
where and from whom I heard them” (Plato, 1997, p. 514). Loewald, trained in philosophy,
no doubt was familiar with this dialogue.

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 Reading Loewald

More than a repression

Loewald’s paper seems to begin again in its second paragraph with a

definition of the Oedipus complex as the “psychic representation of a
central, instinctually motivated, triangular conflictual constellation of
child–parent relations” (p. 384). (With its several beginnings and several
endings, the paper itself embodies the multiplicity of births and deaths
that mark the endless cycle of generations.) Loewald then draws our
attention to the way in which Freud (1923, 1925), in speaking of the
fate of the Oedipus complex, uses forceful language, referring to its
“destruction” (1924, p. 177) and its “demolition” (Freud, 1925, p. 257).
Moreover, Freud (1924) insists, “If the ego has . . . not achieved much
more than a repression of the complex, the latter persists in an uncon-
scious state . . . and will later manifest its pathogenic effect” (p. 177).
This idea provides Loewald the key to his understanding of the fate
of the Oedipus complex.
The reader’s head begins to swim at this point as a consequence of
the convergence of two interrelated enigmatic ideas: (1) the notion
that the Oedipus complex is “demolished” (how are we to understand
the idea that some of the most important human experiences are, in
health, destroyed?); and (2) the idea that the demolition of the Oedipus
complex is “more than a repression” (whatever that means). The
reader, here and throughout the paper, must do a good deal of think-
ing for himself in making something of his own with the ideas that
Loewald is presenting. This, after all, is the task of each new generation
vis-à-vis the creations of its ancestors.
In an effort to find his bearings in this portion of the paper, the
reader must grapple with several questions. To begin with, the reader
must determine the meaning of the term repression as it is being used
here. Freud uses the term to refer to two overlapping but distinct ideas
in the course of his writing. At times, he uses the term to refer to
psychological operations that serve to establish “the unconscious as a
domain separate from the rest of the psyche” (Laplanche and Pontalis,
1967, p. 390), a sine qua non of psychological health. At other times –
including, I believe, the instance under discussion – the term is used
to refer to a pathogenic expulsion from consciousness of disturbing
thoughts and feelings. Not only is the repressed segregated from
the main body of conscious thought, repressed thoughts and feel-
ings are for the most part cut off from conscious and unconscious
psychological work.

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 Reading Loewald

The reader must also attempt to formulate for himself what it means
to bring the Oedipus complex to a close, not by repressing it, but by
demolishing the thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, and object-
related experiences that constitute it. To my mind – and I think that
there would be general agreement among psychoanalysts on this point
– the psychic registration of a significant experience, whether that
registration be conscious or unconscious, is never destroyed. It may be
suppressed, repressed, displaced, denied, disowned, dissociated, pro-
jected, introjected, split off, foreclosed, and so on, but never destroyed
or demolished. No experience can ever “unhappen” psychically. And
yet this is what Freud and Loewald are insisting to be the case – at
least to a significant degree – in the waning of the Oedipus complex.
The unresolved question of what it means to say that the Oedipus
complex undergoes “more than a repression” (i.e. that it is demolished)
generates in the experience of reading Loewald’s paper a tension
that is not unlike the experience of living with unresolved (but
not repressed) oedipal conflict. It unsettles everything it touches in a
vitalizing way.

Parricide: a loving murder

Having introduced these thoughts and questions regarding the demo-

lition of the Oedipus complex, Loewald proceeds to broaden the
traditional conception of the oedipal murder. He uses the term parri-
cide to refer to the act committed by “One who murders a person to
whom he stands in a specially sacred relation, as a father, mother, or
other near relative, or (in a wider sense) a ruler. Sometimes, one guilty
of treason (Webster, International Dictionary, 2nd ed.)” (cited by Loewald,
1979, p. 387).3 In the act of parricide, Loewald observes,

It is a parental authority that is murdered; by that, whatever is sacred

about the bond between child and parent is violated. If we take
etymology as a guide, it is bringing forth, nourishing, providing for,
and protecting of the child by the parents that constitute their

3
Loewald uses the word sacred as a secular term to refer to that which is solemnly,
respectfully set apart, as poetry, for Plato and Borges, is set apart from other forms of
human expressiveness – poetry is “something winged, light and sacred” (Plato, cited by
Borges, 1984, p. 32).

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 Reading Loewald

parenthood, authority (authorship), and render sacred the child’s

ties with the parents. Parricide is a crime against the sanctity of
such a bond.
(p. 387)

Loewald again and again in his paper makes use of etymology – the
ancestry of words, the history of the way succeeding generations both
draw upon and alter the meanings of words.
Parricide involves a revolt against parental authority and parental
claims to authorship of the child. That revolt involves not a ceremo-
nious passing of the baton from one generation to the next, but a
murder in which a sacred bond is severed. The child’s breaking of the
sacred bond to the parents does not represent a fearful response to the
threat of bodily mutilation (castration), but a passionate assertion of
the “active urge for emancipation” (p. 389) from the parents. Loewald’s
phrase urge for emancipation connects the word urge (which has a strong
tie to the bodily instinctual drives) with the word emancipation, thus
generating the idea of an innate drive for individuation. In the lan-
guage itself, instinct theory is being broadened by Loewald to include
drives beyond the sexual and aggressive urges (see Chodorow, 2003;
Kaywin, 1993; and Mitchell, 1998, for discussions of the relationship
between instinct theory and object relations theory in Loewald’s
work).
In the oedipal battle, “opponents are required” (p. 389). A relative
absence of genuine parental authority leaves the child with little to
appropriate. Moreover, when the parents’ authority has not been
established, the child’s fantasies lack “brakes” (Winnicott, 1945, p. 153)
– that is, the secure knowledge that his fantasies will not be allowed to
be played out in reality. When parental authority does not provide
the “brakes” for fantasy, the fantasied murder of those one loves and
depends upon is too frightening to endure. Under such pathological
circumstances, the child, in an effort to defend himself against the
danger of the actual murder of the parents, represses (buries alive) his
murderous impulses and enforces that repression by adopting a harshly
punitive stance toward these feelings. In health, paradoxically, the felt
presence of parental authority makes it possible for the child to safely
murder his parents psychically (a fantasy that need not be repressed).
Oedipal parricide does not require repression because it is ultimately
a loving act, a “passionate appropriation of what is experienced as
loveable and admirable in parents” (p. 396). In a sense, the fantasied

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 Reading Loewald

death of one’s oedipal parents is “collateral damage” in the child’s

struggle for independence and individuation. Killing one’s parents is
not an end in itself.
For Loewald, the Oedipus complex is at its core a face-off between
the generations, a life-and-death battle for autonomy, authority, and
responsibility. In this struggle, parents are “actively rejected, fought
against, and destroyed, to varying degrees” (pp. 388–389). Difficulty
arises not from parricidal fantasies per se, but from an inability to
safely commit parricide, to sever one’s oedipal ties to one’s parents.
The following brief clinical account illustrates a form of difficulty
encountered in the oedipal appropriation of parental authority.
Several years into his analysis, Mr N told me the following dream:

“I was checking in at the front desk of a hotel late at night. The man
behind the desk told me that all the rooms were booked. I said that
I had heard that hotels keep a few rooms open in case someone
shows up in the middle of the night. I thought, but did not say to
him, that those rooms are meant for important people. I knew that
I was not an important person. At the other end of the long desk,
an older woman who was checking in, said in a commanding voice,
‘He’s with me – he’ll share my room.’ I didn’t want to share a
room with her. The thought was repellent. I felt as if I couldn’t get
a breath of air and tried to find a way out of the hotel, but I
couldn’t find an exit.”
Mr N said that he felt extremely embarrassed by the dream and
had considered not mentioning it to me. He told me that even
though we had often talked about his feeling that his parents had
had no psychological room in themselves for him as a child, he was
horrified in the dream by the woman (who seemed like his
mother) offering to have him share her room and, by implication,
her bed with him.
I said to Mr N that the embarrassment he felt in response to the
dream may stem not only from his feeling horrified by the idea of
sleeping with his mother, but also from seeing himself as a perennial
child who lacks the authority to claim a place of his own among
adults – a boy who will never become a man.

By contrast, an experience in the analysis of a man in his mid-20s

captures something of the experience of a healthy oedipal succession
of generations:

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A medical student near the end of his analysis with me began

affectionately to refer to me as “a geezer” after it had become appa-
rent that I knew very little of the developments in psychopharma-
cology that had occurred in the previous twenty-five years. I was
reminded of my own first analysis, which had begun while I was a
medical student. My analyst occasionally referred to himself as an
“old buck” in response to my competitiveness with him regarding
what I was learning about current developments in psychoanalysis.
I remembered having been surprised by his seemingly calm accept-
ance of his place in the “over-the-hill” generation of analysts and of
my place in the new (and, I believed, far more dynamic) generation.
While with my medical student analysand, my memory of my
analyst’s referring to himself as an old buck struck me as both
comic and disturbing – disturbing in that, at the time he said it, he
was younger than I was at that juncture in the analysis of my
patient. I recognized how his acceptance of his place in the succes-
sion of generations was currently of great value to me in my efforts
not only to accept, but also, in a certain way, to embrace my place as
“a geezer” in the analysis of my medical student.

As parents to our children, even as we fight to maintain our parental

authority, we allow ourselves to be killed by our children lest we
“diminish them” (p. 395). In the Oedipus myth, Laius and Jocasta are
told by the oracle at Delphi that their son is destined to murder his
father. The horror of this prophecy is equivalent in present-day terms
to a hospital forewarning each couple as they enter the obstetrics ward
that their child who is about to be born will one day murder them.
Laius and Jocasta attempt to circumvent such an outcome by killing
their child. But they cannot bring themselves to commit the murder
by their own hand. They give Oedipus to a shepherd who is told to
leave the infant in the forest to die. In so doing, Laius and Jocasta
unconsciously collude in their own murder. They create a window of
opportunity for their child not only to survive, but also to grow up to
murder them.4
The dilemma faced by Laius and Jocasta is a dilemma shared not
only by all parents, but also by all analysts when we begin analysis with
a new patient. In beginning analysis, we as analysts are setting in

4
The Oedipus complex is, in a sense, a process by which the child, in killing his parents
(with their cooperation), creates his own ancestors (see Borges, 1962).

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motion a process in which the patient – if all goes well – will contri-
bute to our dying. For all to go well, we must allow ourselves to be
killed by our patients lest “we diminish them” (p. 395), for example, by
treating them as less mature than they are, by giving advice that is not
needed, supportive tones of voice that are unwanted, and interpret-
ations that are undermining of the patient’s ability to think reflect-
ively and insightfully for himself. Not to diminish one’s children (and
one’s patients) involves not a passive resignation to aging and death,
but an actively loving gesture repeated time and again in which one
gives over one’s place in the present generation to take one’s place
sadly and proudly among those in the process of becoming ancestors.
Resistance to taking one’s place as part of the past generation will not
stop the succession of generations, but it will leave a felt absence in the
lives of one’s children and grandchildren, an absence where their
ancestors might under other circumstances have been a highly valued
presence. (Loewald told his colleague Bryce Boyer that he could not
have written this paper before he became a grandfather [Boyer, 1999,
personal communication].)
Parents may try to protect themselves against giving way to the
next generation by behaving as if there is no difference between the
generations. For example, when parents do not close bedroom and
bathroom doors, or display erotic photographs as “art,” or do not wear
clothing at home because “the human body is not a shameful thing,”
they are implicitly claiming that there is no generational difference –
children and adults are equal. Children, under such circumstances,
have no genuine parental objects to kill and only a perverse version of
parental authority to appropriate. This leaves the individual a stunted
child frozen in time.
Having discussed the central role in the Oedipus complex of
the child’s loving murder of his parents, Loewald makes a remarka-
ble statement that sets this paper apart from its psychoanalytic
predecessors:

If we do not shrink from blunt language, in our role as children of

our parents, by genuine emancipation we do kill something vital in
them – not all in one blow and not in all respects, but contributing
to their dying.
(p. 395)

In the space of a single sentence, the Oedipus complex is radically

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reconceived. It had been well established by Freud (1909, 1910) that

the Oedipus complex is not simply an intrapsychic event, but a set of
living object relationships between the child and his parents. But
Loewald does not stop there. For him, the fantasied murder of the
parents that is played out in oedipal object relationships contributes to
– is part of the process of – the parents’ dying. It is tempting to water
down Loewald’s “blunt language” by saying that “their dying” is a
metaphor for parents’ relinquishing their authority over (their author-
ship of) the life of the child. But Loewald is saying more than that: he
is insisting that the living out of the Oedipus complex by children and
their parents is part of the emotional process (which is inseparable
from bodily processes) by which human beings grow up, grow old,
and die.
The battle between parents and children for autonomy and autho-
rity is most evident in adolescence and beyond, but it is, of course,
equally important in early childhood. This is true not only of the
child’s falling in love with one parent while becoming intensely
jealous of, and rivalrous with, the other. In addition, for example, the
“terrible twos” often involves the parents in a battle with their newly
ambulatory child who is relentlessly insistent on his independence.
Parents of two-year-olds frequently experience their child’s “stub-
born willfulness” as a betrayal of an unspoken agreement that the
child will remain a fully dependent, adored, and adoring baby “for-
ever.” The child’s breaking of the “agreement” constitutes an assault
on the parents’ wish to remain parents of a baby timelessly – that is,
insulated from the passage of time, aging, death, and the succession
of generations. (The relationship of the “stubborn” toddler to his par-
ents is triangulated to the degree that the child splits the parents
intrapsychically into the good and the bad parent or parents.)

The metamorphic internalization of the oedipal parents

Thus, parricide, from the point of view both of parents and of chil-
dren, is a necessary path to the child’s growing up, his coming to life as
an adult who has attained authority in his own right. Oedipal parri-
cide conceived of in this way underlies, for both Freud and Loewald,
the organization of “the superego [which is] the culmination of indi-
vidual psychic structure formation” (Loewald, 1979, p. 404). The use
of the term superego in this phrase and throughout Loewald’s paper

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represents a residue of the structural model of the mind that Loewald

is in the process of transforming. Consequently, the term, as used by
Loewald, is confusing. As I read his paper, I find it clarifying to my
thinking to “translate” the term superego into terms that are more in
keeping with the ideas that Loewald is developing. In place of the
word superego, I use the idea of an aspect of the self (derived from
appropriated parental authority) that takes the measure of, and the
responsibility for, who one is and how one conducts oneself.
Superego formation involves an “internalization” (Loewald, 1979,
p. 390) of or “identification” (p. 391) with the oedipal parents. Freud
[1921, 1923, 1924, 1925], too, repeatedly uses the terms identification,
introjection, and incorporation to describe the process of superego forma-
tion. This process brings us to what I consider to be one of the most
difficult and most important questions raised by Loewald regarding
the Oedipus complex: What does it mean to say that oedipal object
relationships are internalized in the process of superego organization?
Loewald responds to this question in a very dense passage that leaves
a great deal unsaid or merely suggested. I will offer a close reading
of this passage in which I include inferences that I have drawn from
Loewald’s statements:

The organization of the superego, as internalization . . . of oedipal

object relations, documents parricide and at the same time is its
atonement and metamorphosis: atonement insofar as the superego
makes up for and is a restitution of oedipal relationships; meta-
morphosis insofar as in this restitution oedipal object relations are
transmuted into internal, intrapsychic structural relations.
(p. 389)

To paraphrase the opening portion of this passage, the organization of

the superego “documents” parricide in the sense that superego organ-
ization is living proof of the murder of the parents. The superego
embodies the child’s successful appropriation of parental authority,
which is transformed into the child’s capacities for autonomy and
responsibility. The superego as psychic structure monitors the ego
and, in this sense, takes responsibility for the ego/“das Ich” “the I”.
That same process of superego organization not only constitutes an
internal record of parricide in the form of an alteration of the psyche
of the child, it also constitutes an “atonement” (p. 389) for the murder
of the parents. As I understand it, the organization of the superego

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represents an atonement for parricide in that, at the same moment

that the child murders the parents (psychically), he bestows upon
them a form of immortality. That is, by incorporating the child’s
experience of his parents (albeit a “transmuted” version of them) into
the very structure of who he is as an individual, the child secures the
parents a place, a seat of influence, not only in the way the child
conducts his life, but also in the way the child’s children conduct their
lives, and on and on. I am using the word children, here, both literally
and metaphorically. The alteration of the psyche involved in superego
organization influences not simply the way the grown child relates
to his own children, it affects everything that the child creates in the
course of his life – for example, the qualities of the friendships and
other love relationships in which he takes part, as well as the thinking
and creativity that he brings to the work that he does. These creations
(his literal and metaphorical children) alter those they touch, who, in
turn, alter those they touch.
The “internalization” of the parents (in a transformed state) consti-
tutes atonement for killing the parents in that this internalization
contributes to the child’s becoming like the parents. But, in another
sense, it is in the “transmutation” of the parents that an even more pro-
found form of atonement lies. To the extent that the parents have been
transformed in the internalization process, the parents have contrib-
uted to the creation of a child who is capable of being and becoming
unlike them – that is, capable of becoming a person who is, in certain
respects, more than the people who the parents have been capable of
being and becoming. What more meaningful atonement can there be
for killing one’s parents?
Loewald continues in the passage under discussion: superego
organization is an atonement for parricide “insofar as the superego
makes up for and is a restitution of oedipal object relations.” These
words are carefully chosen. The word restitution derives from the Latin
word meaning to re-establish. The formation of the superego restores
to the parents their authority as parents – but not the same authority
that they formerly held as parents. Now they are parents to a child
who is increasingly capable of being responsible for himself and to
himself as an autonomous person. The parents who are “restituted”
(re-established) are parents who had not previously existed (or, perhaps
more accurately, had existed only as a potential).
For Loewald, in the passage under discussion, superego formation
as a part of the resolution of the Oedipus complex represents not only

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an atonement for parricide and the restitution of the parents, but also
a “metamorphosis insofar as in this restitution oedipal object relations
are transmuted into internal, intrapsychic structural relations” (p. 389).
I find the metaphor of metamorphosis to be critical to Loewald’s
conception of what it means to say that the parents are internalized in
a “transmuted” form. (Loewald, in this paper, uses the word meta-
morphosis only in the sentence being cited and may not have been
aware of the full implications of his use of this metaphor.) In complete
metamorphosis (for example, in the life cycle of the butterfly), inside
the cocoon, the tissues of the caterpillar (the larva) break down. A few
clusters of cells from the breakdown of the larval tissues constitute the
beginning of a new cellular organization from which adult structures
are generated (e.g. wings, eyes, tongue, antennae, and body segments).
There is continuity (the DNA of the caterpillar and that of the
butterfly are identical) and discontinuity (there is a vast difference
between the morphology and physiology of the external and internal
structures of the caterpillar and those of the butterfly). So, too, super-
ego formation (the internalization of oedipal object relations) involves
a simultaneity of continuity and radical transformation. The parents
(as experienced by the child) are not internalized, any more than
a caterpillar sprouts wings. The child’s “internalization” of oedipal
object relationships involves a profound transformation of his experi-
ence of his parents (analogous to the breakdown of the bodily struc-
ture of the caterpillar) before they are restituted in the form of the
organization of the child’s more mature psychic structure (superego
formation).5
In other words, the child’s “internalized” Oedipal object relation-
ships (constituting the superego) have their origins in the “DNA” of
the parents – that is, the unconscious psychological make-up of the

5
A passage from Karp and Berrill’s (1981) classic, Development, underscores the aptness of
the metaphor of metamorphosis:
The completion of the cocoon signals the beginning of a new and even more remark-
able sequence of events. On the third day after a cocoon is finished, a great wave of death
and destruction sweeps over the internal organs of the caterpillar. The specialized larval
tissues break down, but meanwhile, certain more or less discrete clusters of cells, tucked
away here and there in the body, begin to grow rapidly, nourishing themselves on
the breakdown products of the dead and dying larval tissues. These are the imaginal
discs. . . . Their spurt of growth now shapes the organism according to a new plan.
New organs arise from the discs.
(p. 692)

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 Reading Loewald

parents (which in turn “documents” their own oedipal object relation-

ships with their parents). At the same time, despite this powerful
transgenerational continuity of oedipal experience, if the child (with
the parents’ help) is able to kill his oedipal parents, he creates a psychol-
ogical clearance in which to enter into libidinal relationships with
“novel” (p. 390) (non-incestuous) objects. These novel relationships
have a life of their own outside of the terms of the child’s libidinal and
aggressive relationships with his oedipal parents. In this way, genu-
inely novel (non-incestuous) relationships with one’s parents and
others become possible. (The novel object relationships are colored
by, but not dominated by, transferences to the oedipal parents.)
In a single summary sentence, which could have been written by
no one other than Loewald, the elements of the transformations
involved in superego formation (the establishment of an autonomous,
responsible self) are brought together: “The self, in its autonomy, is
an atonement structure, a structure of reconciliation, and as such a
supreme achievement” (p. 394).

The transitional incestuous object relationship

The paper begins anew as Loewald takes up the incestuous component

of the Oedipus complex. This portion of the paper, for me, lacks the
power of the foregoing discussion of imagined (and real) parricide,
guilt, atonement, and restitution. It seems to me that the centerpiece
of the paper – and Loewald’s principal interest – is the role of the
Oedipus complex in the child’s achievement of an autonomous,
responsible self. Incestuous desire is a subsidiary theme in that story.
Loewald opens his discussion of oedipal incestuous wishes by
raising the rarely asked (even a bit startling) question: “What’s wrong
with incest?” He responds, “Incestuous object relations are evil,
according to received morality, in that they interfere with or destroy
that sacred bond . . . the original oneness, most obvious in the
mother–infant dual unity” (p. 396). Incest involves the intrusion of
differentiated libidinal object relatedness into the “ ‘sacred’ innocence
of primary narcissistic unity . . . [which is] anterior to individuation
and its inherent guilt and atonement” (p. 396).
In other words, we view incest as evil because, in incest, differenti-
ated, object-related sexual desire is directed toward the very same
person (and the very same body) with whom an undifferentiated

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bond (which we hold sacred) existed and continues to exist. Thus,

for Loewald, incest is felt to be wrong, not primarily because it repre-
sents a challenge to the father’s authority and claim to the mother,
or because it denies the difference between the generations, but
because it destroys the demarcation between a fused form of mother–
child relatedness (primary identification) and a differentiated object
relatedness with the same person. Incest is felt to be evil because it
overturns the “barrier between [primary] identification [at-one-
ment] and [differentiated] object cathexis” (p. 397).
The overturning of the barrier between primary identification and
object cathexis is a matter of the greatest importance, not only
because the individual’s emerging sexuality is shaped by the way the
parents and children handle incestuous desire, but, perhaps even more
importantly, because the individual’s capacity for healthy object
relatedness of every sort – his capacity to establish a generative dia-
lectic of separateness from, and union with, other people – depends
upon the living integrity of that barrier.
Parricide is a manifestation of the oedipal child’s drive to become
an autonomous individual; incestuous wishes and fantasies represent
the concurrent need on the part of the oedipal child for unity with
the mother. From this vantage point, “The incestuous [oedipal] object
thus is an intermediate, ambiguous entity, neither a full-fledged libid-
inal objectum [differentiated object] nor an unequivocal identificatum
[undifferentiated object]” (p. 397). Loewald uses the terms incestuous
object and incestuous object relationship to refer not to actual incest, but to
external and internal object relationships in which incestuous fan-
tasies predominate. The incestuous oedipal relationship persists as an
ongoing aspect of the Oedipus complex, which mediates the tension
between the urge for autonomy and responsibility and the healthy
pull toward unity (for example, as an aspect of falling in love, empathy,
sexuality, care giving, “primary maternal preoccupation” [Winnicott,
1956, p. 300], and so on).
Both the superego and the transitional incestuous object relation-
ship are heirs to the Oedipus complex in complementary ways, each
mediating a tension between love of the parents and the wish to
emancipate oneself from them and to establish novel object relation-
ships. There are, however, important differences between the two. The
atonement (at-one-ment) that underlies superego formation involves
the metamorphic internalization of an object relationship with the
parents as whole and separate objects; by contrast, the at-one-ment

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involved in (transitional) incestuous object relatedness is that of fusion

with the parents (primary identification).
By understanding the oedipal incestuous object relationship as
constituting an intermediate position between undifferentiated and
differentiated object relatedness, Loewald is not simply amplifying a
psychoanalytic conception of pre-oedipal development. He is sug-
gesting something more. The Oedipus complex is not only a set of
differentiated object relationships that comprise “the neurotic core”
(p. 400) of the personality. The Oedipus complex “contains . . . in its
very core” (p. 399) a more archaic set of object relationships that con-
stitutes the “psychotic core” (p. 400) of the personality. From the latter,
the earliest forms of healthy separation–individuation emerge.
Thus, the Oedipus complex is the emotional crucible in which
the entirety of the personality is forged as the oedipal configuration
is reworked and reorganized on increasingly more mature planes
throughout the individual’s life (see Ogden, 1987). Loewald, not one
to claim originality for his ideas, states that while Freud “acknow-
ledged the fact [that the Oedipus complex centrally involves undif-
ferentiated object relations] long ago” (Loewald, 1979, p. 399), this
aspect of the Oedipus complex is “more [important] than was realized
by Freud” (p. 399). This more primitive aspect of the Oedipus com-
plex is not outgrown; rather, it takes its place as “a deep layer of
advanced mentality” (p. 402).
Before concluding this part of the discussion, I will revisit an idea
that remains unresolved. At the outset of the paper, Loewald (with
Freud) insisted that in health the Oedipus complex is “demolished.”
Loewald, in the course of the paper, modifies that idea:

In the abstract, as the organization of this structure [the autono-

mous self ] proceeds, the Oedipus complex would be destroyed as a
constellation of object relations or their fantasy representations.
But, in the words of Ariel in Shakespeare’s Tempest, nothing fades,
“but doth suffer a sea-change into something rich and strange.”
(p. 394)

In other words, the Oedipus complex is not destroyed, but is continu-

ally in the process of being transformed into “something rich and
strange” – that is, into a multitude of evolving, forever-problematic
aspects of the human condition that constitute “the troubling
but rewarding richness of life” (p. 400). The reader may wonder why

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Loewald does not say so from the beginning instead of invoking the
clearly untenable idea that experience can be destroyed. I believe that
Loewald begins with the more absolute and dramatic language because
there is a truth to it that he does not want the reader to lose sight of: to
the degree that one succeeds in murdering one’s parents psychically
and atones for that parricide in a way that contributes to the forma-
tion of an autonomous self, one is released from the emotional con-
fines of the Oedipus complex. The Oedipus complex is destroyed
to the extent that oedipal relationships with one’s parents no longer
constitute the conscious and unconscious emotional world within
which the individual lives as a perennial, dependent child.
The paper closes as it began, with a comment addressing writing
itself as opposed to the subject matter that has been taken up:

I am aware that, perhaps confusingly, I have shifted perspectives

several times in my presentation. I hope that the composite picture
I have tried to sketch in this fashion has not become too blurred by
my approach.
(p. 404)

The words shift[ing] perspectives, to my ear, describe a style of writing

and thinking that is always in the process of being revised, and a style
of reading that is as critically questioning as it is receptive to the ideas
being presented. What more suitable ending can one imagine for a
paper that addresses the ways in which one generation leaves its mark
on the next, and yet fosters in its descendants the exercise of their
right and responsibility to become authors of their own ideas and
ways of conducting themselves?

Loewald and Freud

I will conclude by highlighting some of the differences between

Loewald’s and Freud’s conceptions of the Oedipus complex. For
Loewald, the Oedipus complex is driven not primarily by the child’s
sexual and aggressive impulses (as it is for Freud), but by the “urge for
emancipation,” the need to become an autonomous individual. The
girl, for example, is not most fundamentally driven to take the place of
her mother in the parents’ bed, but to take her parents’ authority as
her own. The child atones for imagined (and real) parricide by means

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of a metamorphic internalization of the oedipal parents, which results

in an alteration of the self (the formation of a new psychic agency, the
superego). “Responsibility to oneself . . . is the essence of superego as
internal agency” (Loewald, 1979, p. 392). Thus, the child repays the
parents in the most meaningful terms possible – that is, by establishing
a sense of self that is responsible to oneself and for oneself, a self that
may be capable of becoming a person who is, in ways, more than the
people who the parents were capable of being and becoming.
The incestuous component of the Oedipus complex contributes to
the maturation of the self by serving as an ambiguous, transitional
form of object relatedness that holds in tension with one another
differentiated and undifferentiated dimensions of mature object ties.
The Oedipus complex is brought to an end not by a fear-driven
response to the threat of castration, but by the child’s need to atone
for parricide and to restore to the parents their (now transformed)
authority as parents.
I do not view Loewald’s version of the Oedipus complex as an
updated version of Freud’s. Rather, to my mind, the two renderings of
the Oedipus complex constitute different perspectives from which to
view the same phenomena. Both perspectives are indispensable to a
contemporary psychoanalytic understanding of the Oedipus complex.

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 8
Reading Harold Searles

Harold Searles, to my mind, is unrivaled in his ability to capture in

words his observations concerning his emotional response to what is
occurring in the analytic relationship and his use of these observa-
tions in his effort to understand and interpret the transference-
countertransference. I will offer close readings of portions of two of
Searles’s papers, “Oedipal Love in the Countertransference” (1959)
and “Unconscious Identification” (1990), in which I describe not
only what Searles thinks, but what I believe to be the essence of the
way Searles thinks and how he works in the analytic setting. Being
receptive to what is occurring at a given moment in an analysis
involves, for Searles, an exquisite sensitivity to the unconscious
communications of the patient. Such receptivity to the patient’s
unconscious communications requires of the analyst a form of laying
bare his own unconscious experience. Searles’s way of using himself
analytically very often entails a blurring of the distinction between his
own conscious and unconscious experience as well as the distinction
between his unconscious experience and that of the patient. As a
result, Searles’s comments to the patient (and to the reader) concern-
ing what he understands to be occurring between himself and the
patient are often startling to the reader, but almost always utilizable
by the patient (and the reader) for purposes of conscious and
unconscious psychological work.
In discussing “Oedipal Love in the Countertransference,” I will
focus on the way in which, for Searles, unflinchingly accurate clinical
observation spawns original clinical theory (in this instance, a
reconceptualization of the Oedipus complex). When I speak of
clinical theory, I am referring to proposed experience-near under-
standings (formulated in terms of thoughts, feelings, and behavior) of

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phenomena occurring in the clinical setting. Transference, for

example, is a clinical theory that proposes that certain of the patient’s
feelings towards the analyst, unbeknownst to the patient, have their
origins in feelings that the patient experienced in previous real and
imagined object relationships, usually childhood relationships. By
contrast, psychoanalytic theories involving higher levels of abstraction
(for example, Freud’s topographic model, Klein’s concept of the
internal object world, and Bion’s theory of alpha function) propose
spatial and other types of metaphor as ways of thinking about how the
mind works.
In my reading of “Unconscious Identification,” I suggest that
Searles has a distinctive way of thinking and working analytically that
might be thought of as a process of “turning experience inside out.”
By this I mean that Searles transforms what had been an invisible, and
yet felt, presence, an emotional context, into psychological content
about which the patient may be able to think and speak. What had
been a frightening, unnamed, fully taken-for-granted quality of the
patient’s internal and external world is transformed by Searles into a
verbally symbolized emotional dilemma about which the analytic pair
may be able to think and converse.
Finally, I will discuss what I view as the complementarity between
Searles’s work and that of Bion. I have found that reading Searles
provides a vibrant clinical context for Bion’s work, and reading Bion
provides a valuable theoretical context for Searles’s work. I will focus,
in particular, on the mutually enriching “conversation” (created in the
mind of the reader) between Searles’s clinical work and Bion’s con-
cepts of the container-contained, the fundamental human need for
truth, and Bion’s reconceptualization of the relationship between
conscious and unconscious experience.

Oedipal love in the countertransference

In the opening pages of the “Oedipal Love” paper, Searles provides a

thoughtful review of the analytic literature concerning countertrans-
ference love. The consensus on this topic current at the time was
succinctly articulated by Tower (1956, cited by Searles, 1959, p. 285):
“Virtually every writer on the subject of countertransference . . . states
unequivocally that no form of erotic reaction to a patient is to be
tolerated. . . .” With this sentiment looming in the background,

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Searles presents an analytic experience that occurred in the latter part

of a four-year analysis (which he conducted early in his career). He
tells us that the patient’s femininity had initially been “considerably
repressed” (1959, p. 290). In the last year of this analysis, Searles found
himself “having . . . abundant desires to be married to her, and
fantasies of being her husband” (p. 290). Blunt acknowledgment of
such thoughts and feelings was unprecedented in 1959 and, even
today, is a rare occurrence in the analytic literature. The word marry –
such an ordinary word – is strangely powerful as a consequence of its
connotations both of falling in love and of wishes to make a family
and to live everyday life with the person one loves. It seems to me
highly significant that the fantasies described by Searles never include
imagining sexual intercourse (or any other explicit sexual activity)
with the patient. I believe that this quality of Searles’s fantasies reflects
the nature of the conscious and unconscious fantasy life of the oedipal
child. Although drawing this parallel between the analytic experience
and the childhood experience is left largely to the reader, it seems to
me that Searles is suggesting that for the oedipal boy, the idea of
“marrying” his mother and being her “husband” are mysterious, ill-
defined, and exciting ideas. To “marry” one’s mother/patient is not
so much a matter of having her as a sexual partner as it is a matter of
having her all to oneself for one’s entire life, having her as one’s best
friend and one’s very beautiful, sexually exciting “wife” whom one
deeply loves and one feels deeply loved by. Searles’s writing does not
make it clear to what degree these feelings and fantasies are conscious
to Searles (or, by extension, to the oedipal child); that unclarity is, I
believe, fully intended and reflects an aspect of the quality of Searles’s
(and perhaps the oedipal child’s) emotional state while in the grips of
oedipal love.
In this first clinical example, Searles describes feeling anxious,
guilty, and embarrassed by his love for his patient. In response to the
patient’s saying that she felt sad about the imminent termination of
the analysis, Searles said to her that he

felt . . . much as did Mrs Gilbreth, of Cheaper by the Dozen fame,

[who] . . . said to her husband, when the youngest of their twelve
children was now passing out of the phase of early infancy, “It
surely will be strange not to be waking up, for the first time in
sixteen years, for the two-o’clock feeding!”
(p. 290)

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The patient looked “startled and murmured something about think-

ing that she had become older than that” (p. 290). Searles, in retrospect,
came to understand that his focus on the patient’s infantile needs
represented an anxious retreat from his feelings of love for her as
“an adult woman who could never be mine” (p. 290). Searles’s fear
of acknowledging to himself and (indirectly) to the patient his
oedipal love (as opposed to the love of a parent for his or her infant)
stemmed primarily from his fear that openly acknowledging such
feelings would elicit attacks from his external and internal analytic
elders:

My training had been predominantly such as to make me hold

rather suspect any strong feelings on the part of the analyst
towards his patient, and these particular emotions [romantic and
erotic wishes to marry the patient] seemed to be of an especially
illegitimate nature.
(p. 285)

Searles, even in this only partially successful management of oedipal

love in the analytic setting, is implicitly raising an important question
regarding his own experience of oedipal love for the patient. What is
countertransference love as opposed to “non-countertransference”
love? Is the former less real than the latter? If so, in what way? These
questions are left unresolved for the time being.
As Searles, over the course of time, experienced oedipal love in the
transference-countertransference as a consistent part of his analytic
work, he says,

I have grown successively less troubled at finding such responses in

myself, less constrained to conceal these from the patient, and
increasingly convinced that they augur well rather than ill for the
outcome of our relationship, and that the patient’s self-esteem
benefits greatly from his sensing that he (or she) is capable of arous-
ing such responses in his analyst. I have come to believe that there is
a direct correlation between, on the one hand, the affective intensity
with which the analyst experiences an awareness of such feelings –
and of the unrealizability of such feelings – in himself towards the
patient, and, on the other hand, the depth of maturation which the
patient achieves in the analysis.
(p. 291)

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 Reading Harold Searles

This passage illustrates the power of understatement in Searles’s work.

He leaves unspoken the central idea of the paper: in order to successfully
analyze the Oedipus complex, the analyst must fall in love with the patient
while recognizing that his wishes will never be realized. And, by extension, a
successful oedipal experience in childhood requires that the oedipal
parent fall deeply in love with the oedipal child while remaining
fully aware that this love will never leave the domain of feelings.
(In passages such as the one just cited, Searles seamlessly generates
clinical theory from clinical description of the transference-
countertransference.)
Searles’s presentation of this first clinical example suggests an essen-
tial paradox underlying healthy oedipal love: both in childhood and in
the transference-countertransference, the wished-for marriage is
treated simultaneously as a real and as an imaginary marriage. There is
at once the belief that the marriage is possible, and yet, at the same
time, the knowledge (secured by the parents’/analyst’s groundedness
in their roles as parents/analyst) that the marriage is never to be. In
the spirit of Winnicott’s (1951) conception of “transitional object”
relatedness, the question, “Does the analyst really want to marry his
patient?” is never raised. The oedipal love of the patient and the
analyst involves a state of mind suspended between reality and fantasy
(see Gabbard, 1996, for a thoughtful examination and elaboration of
this conception of transference-countertransference love).
The clinical examples that Searles provides in the remainder of his
paper are all taken from work with chronic schizophrenic patients.
Searles believes, on the basis of his extensive psychotherapeutic work
at Chestnut Lodge, that the analysis of schizophrenic patients (and
other patients suffering from psychological illnesses that have their
origins in very early life) affords a particularly fruitful way of learning
about the nature of experience that is common to all humankind.
Searles believes that successful analytic work with such patients leads
to an analytic relationship in which the most mature aspects of devel-
opment (including the resolution of the Oedipus complex) are not
only experienced and verbalized, but have a clarity and intensity, both
in the transference and the countertransference, that is rare in work
with healthier patients.
In discussing the analysis of a schizophrenic woman, Searles
acknowledges that it was disconcerting to him, late in that analysis,
to find himself feeling strong wishes to marry a woman “whom
one’s fellows might perceive as being . . . grossly ill and anything but

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attractive” (p. 292). But Searles’s capacity to see his patient as a beauti-
ful, highly desirable woman is precisely what was required of him.
Searles found that straightforwardly facing his romantic feelings for
this schizophrenic patient (while remaining clear in his own mind
that he was the therapist) contributed to

the resolution of what had become a stereotyped situation of the

patient’s being absorbed in making incestuous appeals to, or
demands upon, the therapist, in a fashion which had been throttling
the mutual investigation of the patient’s difficulties . . . [W]hen . . .
a therapist dare not even recognize such responses in himself – let
alone expressing them to the patient – the situation tends all the
more to remain stalemated at this level.
(pp. 292–293)

Searles is suggesting here that the therapist’s “candidly” (p. 292) allow-
ing the patient to see that he or she stirs in him wishes to marry the
patient does not have the effect of exacerbating the patient’s unrelent-
ing “incestuous appeals”; rather, the therapist’s acknowledgment of
“romantic love for the patient” contributes to the “resolution” of the
stalemate (the repetitive, unrelenting incestuous appeals) and the
“freeing-up” (p. 292) of the patient’s and the therapist’s capacities for
analytic work. Though Searles does not discuss the theoretical under-
pinnings of his findings, it seems that the therapeutic effect of the
expression of the therapist’s love for the patient is being conceptual-
ized not as a corrective emotional experience, but as the meeting
of a developmental need for recognition of who the patient is
(as opposed to the satisfying of an erotic desire). The latter would lead
to increased sexual excitement; the former fosters psychological mat-
uration, including the consolidation of a self that is experienced as
both loved and loving. Searles is implicitly, and only implicitly, posit-
ing a human developmental need to love and be loved and to be
recognized as a separate person whose love is valued.
Searles deepens his investigation into the role of the analyst’s feel-
ings of oedipal love of the patient by discussing a complex emotional
situation that came to a head about eighteen months into the analysis
of a “sensitive, highly intelligent, physically handsome” (p. 294)
paranoid schizophrenic man. Searles began to feel uneasy about the
intensity of his romantic feelings for this patient. He says he became
alarmed during a session

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while we were sitting in silence and a radio not far away was
playing a tenderly romantic song, when I realized that this man was
dearer to me than anyone else in the world, including my wife.
Within a few months I succeeded in finding “reality” reasons why I
would not be able to continue indefinitely with his therapy, and he
moved to a distant part of the country.
(p. 294)

Searles hypothesizes that he had been able to tolerate the patient’s

sarcasm and scorn that replicated in the transference the patient’s
experience of feeling hated by his mother and, in return, feeling
hateful toward her. What Searles had been unable “to brave” (p. 295)
was the love in the transference-countertransference that had its
origins in the love that had “prevailed [between the patient and his
mother] behind a screen of mutual rejection” (p. 295). In particular, it
was his romantic love for a man that frightened Searles so profoundly,
at that early point in his career, that he was unable to continue working
with this patient.
Searles’s description of sitting with this patient while a radio was
playing a tender love song never fails to stir me deeply. Searles does
not simply tell the reader what occurred; he shows the reader what
happened in the experience of reading: the tenderness of the music is
created in the sound of the words. In the sentence describing this
experience (cited above), the words “while we were” (three mono-
syllabic words repeating the soft “w” sound) are followed by “sitting
in silence” (a pairing of two-syllable words beginning with a soft,
sensuous “s” sound). The sentence continues to echo the soft “w”
sounds of “while we were” in the words “away,” “was,” and “when,”
and ends with three tagged-on words that explode like a hand gren-
ade: “including my wife.” At the core of the denouement is the word
“wife,” which, with its own soft “w,” conveys the feeling that this is
the word that has been adumbrated all along, the word that has lain in
wait in all that has preceded. The easy movement of sound creates in
the experience of reading the tranquility of the love that Searles and the
patient felt for one another, while the tagged-on thought, “including
my wife,” powerfully cuts through the dreamy quietude of the scene.
In this way, Searles creates in the experience of reading something
of his experience of sudden, unexpected alarm at the juncture of
the analysis being presented. The reader, too, is unprepared for this
development and wonders if Searles could really mean what he says:

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that the patient felt more dear to him than his wife. The compactness
of the phrase, “including my wife,” contributes to the unequivocal
nature of the answer to this question: yes, he does mean it. And that
fact so frightened Searles that he precipitated the premature end of
the therapy. I believe that alarming surprises to the reader such as the
one just described account for a good deal of the intense anger Searles
was notorious for eliciting from audiences to whom he presented his
work. Searles refuses to round the edges of an experience. Reading
his work is not an experience of arriving at an understanding; it is
an experience of being rudely woken up to disconcerting truths
about one’s experience with one’s patients. Successive experiences of
“waking up” to oneself on the part of the patient and analyst, for
Searles, constitute a pivotal aspect of the analytic experience. It is
when the therapist is not able to wake up to what is occurring that
acting in and acting out (on the part of both the patient and the
analyst) tend to occur. Here, too, these bits of clinical theory are
implicit in Searles’s descriptions of his clinical work.
In another analytic experience involving oedipal love for a man
(which occurred some years after the clinical experience just
described), Searles speaks of feeling a mixture of tender love and
murderous hatred toward a severely ill paranoid-schizophrenic man:

He referred to us, now in the third and fourth years of analysis, as

being married . . . When I took him for a ride in my car for one of
the sessions, I was amazed at the wholly delightful fantasy and
feeling I had, namely that we were lovers on the threshold of mar-
riage, with a whole world of wonders opening up before us; I had
visions of going . . . to look for furniture together. . . .
(p. 295)

The final detail of “going . . . to look for furniture together” poign-

antly conveys the excitement, not of sexual arousal, but of dreaming
and planning a life to be lived with the person one loves. In oedipal
love, these dreams on the part of both child and parent, patient and
analyst, cannot be lived out with the current object of one’s love:
“I was filled with a poignant realization of how utterly and tragically
unrealizable were the desires of this man who had been hospitalized
continually, now, for fourteen years” (p. 296). In this second example
of oedipal love for a man, Searles is saddened, not frightened, by his
love for the patient. By this point in the paper, it comes as a surprise to

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me, but not as a shock, that Searles took for a ride in his car a patient
for whom he was experiencing feelings of love and fantasies of
being married. In reading this passage, I feel “amazed” (p. 295), to
use Searles’s word, not shocked or horrified by Searles’s capacity to
invent psychoanalysis anew for this patient. Not only has Searles
grown emotionally in the course of the work that he has presented to
this point, perhaps I, too, as reader, have matured in the course of the
experience of reading his work.
For me, the paper builds toward a moment near its end when
Searles speaks of his own experience as a parent and as a husband.
I will quote this passage in its entirety because no paraphrase, no set
of excerpts, can convey the effect created by the force of Searles’s
carefully chosen words:

Not only my work with patients but also my experiences as a

husband and a parent have convinced me of the validity of the
current concepts which I am offering here. Towards my daughter,
now eight years of age, I have experienced innumerable fantasies
and feelings of a romantic-love kind, thoroughly complementary
to the romantically adoring, seductive behaviour which she has
shown towards her father oftentimes ever since she was about two
or three years of age. I used at times to feel somewhat worried
when she would play the supremely confident coquette with me
and I would feel enthralled by her charms; but then I came to the
conviction, some time ago, that such moments of relatedness could
only be nourishing for her developing personality as well as
delightful to me. If a little girl cannot feel herself able to win the
heart of her father, her own father who has known her so well and
for so long, and who is tied to her by mutual blood-ties, I reasoned,
then how can the young woman who comes later have any deep
confidence in the power of her womanliness?
And I have every impression, similarly, that the oedipal desires of
my son, now eleven years of age, have found a similarly lively and
wholehearted feeling-response in my wife; and I am equally con-
vinced that their deeply fond, openly evidenced mutual attraction
is good for my son as well as enriching to my wife. To me it makes
sense that the more a woman loves her husband, the more she will
love, similarly, the lad who is, to at least a considerable degree, the
younger edition of the man she loved enough to marry.
(p. 296, my italics)

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In this passage, Searles simply states, on the basis of his experience,

what “makes sense” to him about the emotional effects that people
have on one another. Simply saying what “makes sense” on the basis
of one’s experience – I cannot think of a better way of conveying
the essential core of Searles’s analytic thinking and way of practicing
psychoanalysis.
The movement of the paper as a whole, and of this passage in
particular, has the feel of a succession of photographs, each more
skillfully crafted, each more successful in capturing the core of the
subject being photographed: the analytic relationship. The words and
images that are most alive for me in this passage – words and images
that often come to my mind during analytic sessions – are the ones
that Searles uses to describe the way his daughter, as a small child,
could wrap him around her little finger: “If a little girl cannot feel
herself able to win the heart of her father . . . then how can the young
woman who comes later have any deep conviction in the power of
her womanliness?” (p. 296). But, even as his daughter is sweeping him
off his feet, Searles’s wife, who earlier had stood in the shadows of his
love for one of his patients, now takes her place in the mutual feeling
of love that she and Searles experience, which is the source of the
oedipal love that they feel for their children. In the very experience of
writing and reading the paper, there is a movement from the experi-
ence of being enthralled with the person one (oedipally) loves to the
“restitution” (Loewald, 1979, p. 393) of the parents’ adult love for one
another as the ballast for the oedipal experience.
As Searles’s paper proceeds, the reader becomes increasingly aware
of differences between Freud’s (explicit) and Searles’s (largely implicit)
conceptions of the Oedipus complex. Searles points out that in
Freud’s (1900) earliest description of the Oedipus complex (in The
Interpretation of Dreams), Freud “makes a fuller acknowledgement of
the parents’ participation in the oedipal phase of the child” (Searles,
1959, p. 297) than he does in any of his subsequent writings:

The parents too give evidence as a rule of sexual partiality: a natural

predilection usually sees to it that a man tends to spoil his little
daughters while his wife takes her sons’ part.
(Freud, 1900, pp. 257–258; cited by Searles, 1959, p. 297)

Even this statement of the parents’ oedipal love for the child is a pale
rendering of what, in Searles’s hands, is a vibrant, living thing that

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constitutes a good deal of the richness of human life, both for children
and for parents. But this is not the heart of the difference between
Searles’s and Freud’s conceptions of the Oedipus complex. For Freud
(1910, 1921, 1923, 1924, 1925), the story of the healthy Oedipus
complex is that of the child’s triangulated sexual desire and romantic
love for one parent, and his jealousy, intense rivalry, and murderous
wishes for the other parent; the child’s fearful and guilty renunciation
(in the face of castration threats) of his sexual and romantic desires
toward his parents; and the internalization of the threatening, punitive
oedipal parents in the process of superego formation.
By contrast, Searles’s version of the Oedipus complex is the story
of the child’s experience of reciprocated romantic and sexual love of
the parent (a wish “to marry” and make a family and home with that
parent). There is rivalry with, and jealousy of, the other parent, but it
is a far quieter affair than that involved in Freud’s conception of the
child’s murderous wishes for his parents. Searles’s version of the oedi-
pal experience does not end with the child’s feeling defeated by
castration threats and being left with an abiding sense of guilt and the
need to renounce and ashamedly hide sexual and romantic wishes for
the parent.
Instead, for Searles, the healthy Oedipus complex is the story of
love and loss, of reciprocated romantic parent–child love that is safe-
guarded by the parents’ firm but compassionate recognition of their
roles, both as parents and as a couple. That recognition on the part of
the parents helps the child (and the parents themselves) to accept the
fact that this intense parent–child love relationship must be given up:

The renunciation is, I think, again [like the reciprocation of the

child’s oedipal love] something which is a mutual experience for
child and parent, and is made in deference to a recognizedly greater
limiting reality, a reality which includes not only the taboo main-
tained by the rival-parent, but also the love of the oedipally desired
parent towards his or her spouse – a love which antedated the
child’s birth and the love to which, in a sense, he owes his very
existence.
(p. 302)

In this rendering of the Oedipus complex, the child emerges with a

feeling that his romantic and sexual love is accepted, valued, and
reciprocated, along with a firm recognition of a “greater limiting

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reality” within which he must live. Both elements – the love and the
loss – strengthen the child psychologically. The first element – the
reciprocated oedipal love – enhances the child’s feelings of self-worth.
The second element – the loss involved in the ending of the oedipal
romance – contributes to the child’s sense of “a recognizedly greater
limiting reality” (p. 302). This sense of a greater limiting reality involves
an enhancement of the child’s capacity to recognize and accept the
unrealizability of his desires. This maturational step has far more to
do with the maturation of reality testing and the capacity to differen-
tiate internal and external reality than with the internalization of
a chastising, threatening, punitive version of the parents (that is, super-
ego formation). For Searles, the “heir” to the Oedipus complex is
not primarily the formation of the superego, but a sense of oneself as
a loving and lovable person who recognizes (with a feeling of loss)
the constraints of external reality.
We can hear in this passage a partial response to the question raised
earlier: “Is countertransference love, for Searles, less real than other
kinds of love?” Clearly the answer is no. What makes countertransfer-
ence love different from other types of love is the analyst’s responsi-
bility to recognize that the love that he experiences for and from the
patient is an aspect of the analytic relationship, and to make use of his
awareness of these feelings to further the therapeutic work in which
he is engaged with the patient:

These feelings [of love for the patient] come to him [the analyst]
like all feelings, without tags showing whence they have come, and
only if he is relatively open and accepting of their emergence into
his awareness does he have a chance to set about finding out . . .
their significance in his work with the patient.
(pp. 300–301)

The notion that feelings come to the analyst “without tags” is pivotal
to Searles’s conception of oedipal love in the countertransference and
to his overall conception of psychoanalysis. The analyst’s task is first
and foremost to allow himself to experience the full emotional inten-
sity of all that he feels in the here-and-now of the analytic experience. Only
then is he in a position to make analytic use of his feeling state.

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Unconscious identification

I will now turn to Searles’s “Unconscious Identification” (1990), an

important but little-known paper published in a collection of papers
by fourteen analysts more than three decades after the “Oedipal Love”
paper was published. The later paper reveals Searles’s clinical thinking
in its most highly developed form. There can be no doubt that the
speaker in Searles’s 1990 paper is the same person as the speaker in
the 1959 paper, but now wiser, more artful in his work, more keenly
aware of his limitations. In his 1990 paper, Searles is even more spare
in his use of psychoanalytic theory than he was in the “Oedipal Love”
paper. So far as I am able to discern, in his 1990 paper, Searles makes
use of only two analytic theories: the concept of the dynamic
unconscious and the concept of the transference-countertransference.
The effect of Searles’s paring away of theory to its absolute minimum
is the creation of an experience in reading that is akin to reading fine
literature: emotional situations are presented in which the characters
involved are allowed to speak for themselves.
Searles begins the paper with a metaphor:

My main purpose in this chapter is to convey a generous variety of

clinical vignettes wherein one can detect unconscious identifica-
tions ramifying beneath or behind a relatively simple and obvious
conscious one, something like a sea plant can be discovered to be
flourishing far beyond and beneath the few leaves that can be seen
on the water’s surface.
(1990, p. 211)

Searles lays out in this opening sentence his conception of how he

views the relationship of conscious and unconscious experience in
the analytic relationship. Conscious experience is “relatively simple
and obvious,” if one has developed an ear with which to notice it
in oneself and frame it for oneself; “beneath or behind” conscious
experience is unconscious experience which is continuous with con-
scious experience, just as the “flourishing,” “ramifying” underwater
parts of the sea plant are continuous with “the few leaves that can be
seen at the water’s surface.” Implicit in this metaphor, as I read it, is
the idea that one need not be a marine biologist to notice a few of the
qualities of the sea plant, but the more one’s mind and senses are
capable of refined perception, the more one is likely to understand

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about the way the plant works and how it has come to work in that
way. Moreover, a person with a trained eye is also more likely to feel
curious, puzzled, and amazed by what he or she observes. And yet, as
I hope to show in the course of my discussion of this paper, Searles’s
use of this metaphor fails to capture what is most important about
Searles’s way of thinking and working.
In the first of the clinical illustrations, Searles describes his work
with an elderly woman who for many years had not heard from her
daughter. Having received a letter from her daughter (then in her 40s),
the patient brought the letter to the session, not certain how to reply
to it. She gave it to Searles to read. On thinking about it, Searles
said, “I do feel a sense of not actually being you, and therefore, I feel
uncomfortable as to how I might respond to it” (p. 214). A bit later,
Searles conversationally addresses the reader:

Actually, for me, the most memorable aspect of this interaction is

that, in the moment before reaching out to accept the letter, I felt a
very strong sense that it was not right for me to read the letter, since
I was not the person to whom the letter was addressed; the force of
this inhibition was striking to me, in light of her obvious wish that I
read it.
It then occurred to me, as I went on talking, and I said, “But I
wonder if you feel that you, likewise, are not the person to whom
that letter is addressed.” To this, she reacted in a strongly confirma-
tory fashion, saying that she had gotten a great deal of therapy over
the years since she had been involved in the kind of thing that this
letter was expressing. In essence, she strongly confirmed that my
sense of not in actuality being the intended recipient of the letter
had a counterpart in her strongly feeling, likewise, that she was not
the person to whom the letter was addressed. Her confirmation,
here, was expressed in sufficiently pent-up feeling as to let me
know that she had needed this interpretation from me to enable
her to know and express these feelings so clearly.
(pp. 214–215, italics in original)

The analytic event being presented hinges on Searles’s awareness in

the moment before he reached out to accept the letter that he felt
uncomfortable with the idea of reading a letter that was not written
to him. On the basis of this feeling/thought, Searles did something
with the situation that, for me, is astounding: he turned the experience

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“inside out” in his mind in a way that revealed something that felt true
to him, to the patient, and to me, as a reader. (With regard to my use of
the metaphor of turning experience inside out, it is important to
bear in mind that, like the surface of a Möbius strip, inside is continu-
ally in the process of becoming outside and outside becoming inside.)
Searles took his feeling that it was not right to read a letter not
addressed to him – the “inside,” in the sense that it was his own
personal response – and made it “the outside.” By “outside,” I mean
the context, the larger emotional reality, within which he was experi-
encing what was occurring between himself and the patient and,
by extension, within which the patient was experiencing herself in
relation to her daughter. It is precisely this sort of reversal that is most
surprising, often startling, about the experience of reading Searles:
there is an abrupt shift from Searles’s inner life (his extraordinarily
perceptive emotional response to what is occurring) to the invisible
psychological context within which the patient is experiencing him-
self or herself.
The reversal to which I am referring is not synonymous with
making the unconscious conscious. What Searles does is far more
subtle than that. In this example, the patient’s experience of no longer
being the person her daughter imagines her to be is not a repressed
unconscious thought and feeling; rather, it is part of the internal emo-
tional environment in which the patient lives. That as-yet-unnamed
matrix of her self had come to constitute a good deal of the truth of
who she had become. In the interaction described, it was necessary,
first, for Searles to make a transformation within himself in which
context became content: the “invisible” context of Searles’s sense of
himself (as not being the person to whom the letter was written)
became the “visible,” thinkable content. Searles, in the process of
thinking out loud, came to the feeling/idea that the patient did not
experience herself as the person to whom the letter was written: “It
then occurred to me, as I went on talking . . .” (p. 214). Searles was not
saying what he thought; he was thinking what he said. That is, in the
very act of speaking, inner was becoming outer, thinking was becom-
ing talking, unthinkable context was becoming thinkable content,
experience was being turned inside out.
I will now turn to another example of Searles turning experience
inside out. In a clinical discussion later in the paper, he recounts
instances of being asked by patients, “How are you?” Searles describes
often feeling

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that I would dearly love to be able to unburden myself, and tell him
in . . . detail of the myriad aspects of how I am feeling today; but
knowing how impossible this is, in light of our true situation here, I
react mainly with bitterly ironic amusement saying, “Just grand,” or
merely nodding.
(p. 216)

It eventually occurs to Searles, each time freshly and unexpectedly,

that the patient is feeling something very similar to Searles’s feelings –
that is, that it is impossible under the circumstances to tell Searles how
he (the patient) feels. This is so because “he [the patient] is [feeling
that he is] supposed to be the one who is helping me” (p. 216), as was
the case in the patient’s childhood relationship with his parents.
When Searles comes to this type of understanding of the situation,
he remains silent and yet his grasp of what is occurring “nonetheless
enables me . . . to foster an atmosphere wherein the patient can feel
that he is being met with more of genuine patience and empathy than
had been the case before” (p. 216).
In this clinical situation, Searles realizes that a critical aspect of
the context of his emotional experience of being the analyst for his
patient has been his (Searles’s) wish to be the patient in the analysis.
His hearing the bitterness in his own voice as he responds to the
patient’s question/invitation makes it possible for him to convert
unthinkable context into thinkable content. This transformation
allows Searles to communicate (nonverbally) an understanding of the
patient’s invisible (silent) bitterness about the fact that he does not feel
that he has the right to be the patient in his own analysis. Here, again,
Searles does the psychological work of transforming his own “inner”
emotional context (his wish that the analysis were his analysis) into
“outer” (thinkable, verbally symbolized) thoughts and feelings. This
psychological work on Searles’s part contributes to a change in the
“atmosphere” of the analytic relationship. The formerly unthinkable
context for the patient’s experience (his sense that the analysis was
not his analysis) enters a process of being consciously thought by
Searles and unconsciously thought by the patient.
I will take a piece of Searles’s self-analytic work as a final illustra-
tion of the way in which his thinking is, to a great extent, marked by
his unique way of turning experience inside out:

For many years I have enjoyed washing dishes, and not rarely have

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had the feeling that this is the one thing in my life that I feel
entirely comfortably capable of doing. I have always assumed that,
in my washing of dishes, I was identifying with my mother, who
routinely did them in my early childhood. But in recent years . . . it
has occurred to me that I have been identifying with my mother
not only in the form but also in my spirit of washing the dishes. I
had not previously allowed myself to consider the possibility that
she, too, may have felt so chronically overwhelmed, so chronically
out beyond her depth in life, that this activity, this washing of
dishes, was the one part of her life with which she felt fully
equipped to cope comfortably.
(p. 224)

This paragraph could have been written by no one other than Searles
– in part because it involves such exquisite mastery of the art of
looking deeply into seemingly ordinary conscious experience. Searles
knows in a way that few analysts have known that there is only one
consciousness and that the unconscious aspect of consciousness is in
the conscious aspect, not under it or behind it. Paradoxically, Searles
knows this in practice and makes use of it in virtually every clinical
illustration he presents, but he has not, as far as I am aware, ever
discussed this conception of consciousness in his writing. Moreover,
in the opening sentence of the paper cited earlier, Searles explicitly
contradicts this understanding of the relationship of conscious and
unconscious experience when he says that unconscious identifica-
tions lie “behind and beneath” conscious identifications. This con-
ception of the relationship between conscious and unconscious
experience (and the accompanying sea-plant metaphor) are not in
keeping with the understanding of the relationship between con-
scious and unconscious experience that Searles so powerfully illus-
trates in this paper. I believe that it would more accurately reflect what
Searles demonstrates in his clinical work to say that conscious and
unconscious experience are qualities of a unitary consciousness, and
that we gain access to the unconscious dimension of experience
by looking into conscious experience, not by looking “behind” it or
“beneath” it.
In the account of his psychological state while washing dishes,
Searles had for years thought of his enjoyment of washing dishes and
his feeling that that is the “one thing in my life that I feel entirely
comfortably capable of doing” as an identification in the “form,” but

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not in the “spirit,” of his mother washing dishes. The reader (and
Searles) is taken by surprise as Searles delves more deeply into his
experience of washing dishes. He becomes aware of what he already
“knew,” but did not know: his experience of washing dishes takes
place within a powerful, yet invisible, emotional context of feelings of
profound inadequacy. Searles transforms this formerly unthinkable
context into thinkable emotional content:

I had not previously allowed myself to consider the possibility that

she, too, may have felt so chronically overwhelmed, so chronically
out beyond her depth in life, that this activity, this washing of
dishes, was the one part of her life with which she felt fully
equipped to cope comfortably.
(p. 224)

The truth (and even beauty) of Searles’s newly created understanding

of himself and his mother is not merely described for the reader, it is
shown to the reader in the evocativeness of the imagery. The image of
Searles as a child watching his mother with a sink full of dishes in
soapy water not only captures the experience of the day-to-day life of
a boy with his depressed mother; it also conveys a sense of the emo-
tional shallowness (the very limited depth of a kitchen sink) beyond
which his mother dared not – could not – go.

Searles and Bion

I will conclude by briefly discussing a complementarity between

Searles’s thinking and that of Bion that I “discovered” to my surprise
in the course of writing this chapter. Searles was temperamentally
disinclined (and perhaps unable) to formulate his thoughts at a level of
abstraction beyond that of clinical theory. In stark contrast, Bion,
whose focus was on the development of psychoanalytic theory, gives
the reader very little sense of the way in which he makes use of his
ideas in the analytic setting. In a highly condensed way, I will address
three aspects of the work of Searles and Bion in which I suggest that
the reader requires familiarity with the work of both authors in order
to fully appreciate either one.

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The container-contained

In discussing Searles’s way of working with his patient’s request that

he read a letter written to her by her daughter, I introduced the idea
that Searles’s thinking might be thought of as “turning experience
inside out” – what begins as the invisible, unthinkable context of
experience is transformed by Searles into experiential content, about
which he and the patient may be able to think and talk. My meta-
phoric description of what Searles was doing (without my being
aware of it) drew on Bion’s (1962a) concept of the container-
contained. The concept of the container-contained provides a way of
thinking about the way in which psychological content (thoughts and
feelings) may overwhelm and destroy the very capacity for thinking
thoughts (the container) (see Chapter 6 and Ogden, 2004c, for discus-
sions of Bion’s concept of the container-contained). Searles’s patient
may have harbored feelings of guilt of such intensity that they limited
her capacity to think her thoughts concerning the ways in which she
had changed, thus leaving her without the means to do unconscious
psychological work with them. Searles was able to think (contain)
something like the patient’s unthinkable thoughts concerning his
own guilt/uneasiness about the idea of reading a letter not addressed
to him. In telling the patient that he thought that she, too, did not
experience herself as the person to whom the letter was written,
Searles helped the patient to contain/think her own previously
unthinkable thoughts and feelings concerning the psychological
growth that she had achieved.
In formulating Searles’s work in this way, I am creating a vantage
point that is lacking in Searles’s work – that is, a conception of the way
in which the analytic interaction involves at every turn the muscular
interplay of thoughts and the capacity to think one’s thoughts. At the
same time, Searles’s extraordinary capacity to describe the emotional
shifts occurring in the transference-countertransference brings to life
the experiential level of the workings of the container-contained in
ways that, to my mind, Bion was unable to achieve in his own writing.

The human need for truth

Searing honesty (with himself and with the patient) permeates

Searles’s accounts of his clinical work. Examples discussed in this

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chapter that come immediately to mind include Searles’s acknow-

ledging to himself (despite internal and external pressures to do
otherwise) his intense wishes to marry his patients when in the thick
of oedipal transference-countertransference experiences; Searles’s
alarming awareness that he felt a depth of tenderness toward a male
schizophrenic patient that was greater than the love he felt for his
wife; and his recognition of his feelings of bitterness about the fact
that he was not the patient in the analysis that he was conducting and,
consequently, did not have the right to tell the patient at length what
he was feeling. While Searles clearly believes that straightforwardly
facing the truth of what is occurring in the analytic relationship is an
indispensable element in analytic work, it took Bion to formulate this
clinical awareness at a higher level of abstraction – namely, that the
most fundamental principle of human motivation is the need to know
the truth about one’s lived emotional experience. “[T]he welfare of
the patient demands a constant supply of truth as inevitably as his
physical survival demands food” (Bion, 1992, p. 99; see also Chapter
6). Searles is without peer in demonstrating what that need for truth
looks like and feels like in the transference-countertransference and
how it shapes the analytic experience; Bion put the idea into words,
located it in relation to analytic theory as a whole, and created an
understanding of the human condition that placed the need for truth
at its core.

Reconceiving the relationship of conscious and unconscious experience

It is evident in Searles’s descriptions of his analytic work that the

relationship of the analyst’s conscious and unconscious experience is
being conceived of quite differently from the way in which that
interplay is ordinarily conceptualized. Though not stated explicitly,
Searles shows the reader what it means to make use of consciousness
as a whole – that is, to create conditions in the analytic setting in
which the analyst perceives what is occurring in the transference-
countertransference by means of a form of consciousness characterized
by a seamless continuity of conscious and unconscious experience.
Bion recognized in his own work what Searles demonstrates in his
clinical accounts, and used that recognition to revolutionize analytic
theory by radically altering the topographic model. Bion’s alteration
of the topographic model is nothing less than breathtaking in that
it had been impossible, at least for me, to imagine psychoanalysis
152
 Reading Harold Searles

without the idea of an unconscious mind somehow separate from

(“below”) the conscious mind. The conscious and unconscious
“minds,” for Bion, are not separate entities, but dimensions of a single
consciousness. The apparent separateness of the conscious and
unconscious mind is, for Bion (1962a), merely an artifact of the
vantage point from which we observe and think about human
experience. In other words, consciousness and unconsciousness are
aspects of a single entity viewed from different vertices. The
unconscious is always a dimension of consciousness whether or not it
is easily perceptible, just as the stars are always in the sky whether or
not they are obscured by the glare of the sun.
Bion (1962a) developed his concept of “reverie” (a state of recep-
tivity to one’s own and the patient’s conscious/unconscious experi-
ence) concurrently with Searles’s early descriptions (written in the
1950s and 1960s) of his work with chronic schizophrenic patients
in which he makes use of a state of mind that blurs the distinction
between conscious and unconscious aspects of experience. It is
impossible to say to what extent Bion was influenced by Searles, or
Searles by Bion. Searles makes reference only to Bion’s relatively early
work on projective identification; Bion makes no reference at all to
Searles’s work. Nonetheless, what I hope to have demonstrated is that
Searles’s work is enriched conceptually by a knowledge of Bion’s
work, and Bion’s work is brought more fully to life experientially by a
familiarity with Searles’s work.

153
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160
 Index

The Age of Iron 23 atonement 53, 125–8, 129–130, 131

aggressive instinct 115, 116 attacks on linking 90
“alpha-elements” 16, 101 attacks on thinking 107, 110
“alpha-function” 16, 90, 101, 103, Attention and Interpretation 71
134 autism 17
American ego psychology 54 autistic-contiguous position 96
analytic frame 3, 17, 30, 68 autistic defense 2
analytic impasse 33
analytic relationship 7, 30, 31, 33, 34, 35, Balint group 66–9
35n1, 35–6n2, 36, 44, 48, 49, 133, 137, basic assumption 93–4, 95, 96, 97, 98
142, 144, 145, 148, 152; and basic assumption groups 90, 92, 93, 94,
supervisory relationship 31, 34, 35, 95, 96, 97; dependent 93; fight-flight
35n1, 35–6n2, 49 93, 94; pairing 93
analytic reading: as “dreaming up” Baudry, F.D. 36
psychoanalysis 9; “ear training” 50, Berger, J. 23, 52
60–6; way of 50, 51–6; see also Berman, E. 35
psychoanalytic reading Berrill, N.J. 127n5
analytic style: vs. analytic technique “beta-elements” 16, 101
70–1; Bion’s 71–89; core of 81 binocular vision 90, 96
analytic teaching: and analytic writing Bion, W.R.: “alpha-elements” 16, 101;
52; as collective dreaming 50, 57–60; “alpha-function” 16, 90, 101, 103,
goal of 50; in seminar 50 134; analytic style 71–89; attacks on
analytic technique: vs. analytic style linking 90; attacks on thinking 107,
70–1 11; Attention and Interpretation 71,
“analytic third” 57 93–4, 95, 96, 97, 98; basic assumption
analytic training 31, 36, 51, 68 93–4, 95, 96, 97, 98; basic assumption
analytic writing: and analytic teaching groups 90, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97;
52; as “dreaming up” psychoanalysis “beta-elements” 101; binocular
9; reading 1, 2, 8, 50, 51–6; vision 90, 96; Brasilia seminars 71–86;
requirements of 52; way of reading “Brasilia seminar No. 1” 71–7;
51–6 “Brasilia seminar No. 3” 77–86;
Anderson, A. 35 “Brasilia seminar No. 8” 88; clinical
anxiety: analyst’s 59, 79, 80; diffuse states seminars 9, 70–89, 90, 91; 105–12;
32; group’s 59; leading edge of 68; “cogitations” 90; conscious-
patient’s 28, 45, 68, 77, 78 unconscious 152–3; “contact

161
 Index
barrier” 87, 104; “container- rewriting that one book” 92;
contained” 90, 101–3, 111, 134, 151; “sacred” 119n3
dependent basic assumption group boundary violations 33, 36
93; “Differentiation of the psychotic Boyer, B. 123
from the non-psychotic Brasilia: Bion in 71–86
personalities” 93; dreaming 5, 6, 16, “Brasilia seminar No. 1” 71–7
18, 32, 75, 87, 91, 101–13; dreaming “Brasilia seminar No. 3” 77–86
up works of 9; dream-thoughts 16, “Brasilia seminar No. 8” 88
32, 48, 101; Experiences in Groups and Breuer, J.: and Freud 2; Studies on
Other Papers 92, 93; fight-flight basic Hysteria 116–17
assumption group 93–4; goal of
psychoanalysis 103; the grid 90; castration 53, 116, 120, 132, 143
“imaginative conjecture” 82; cathexis 129
“individual” vs. “pair” psychology Chestnut Lodge 43, 137
92; insanity 97; interpretation 73, 74, Chodorow, N. 120
76, 79–86, 93, 97, 98, 109, 110; L, H, Chomsky, N. 113
and K linkages 90; Learning from “Clinical seminars”: Bion 9, 70–89
Experience 52, 99;”O” 90, 96; need for “cogitations” 90
truth 88, 89, 91, 94, 95, 96, 99, 105, Coetzee, J. M. 9, 19, 20, 22, 23
106, 113, 134, 151–2; “no-breast” collective dreaming 57–60
101; pairing basic assumption group Complete Psychological Works 31
93; “peculiar mentality” 9, 81; conscious-unconscious 145–150, 152–3
phantasy 93; “pre-conception” 100; “container-contained” 90, 101–3, 111,
projective identification 90, 98, 100, 134, 151
153; proto-mental thinking 93; “contact barrier” 87, 104
psychic transformations 90; corrective emotional experience 138
psychoanalytic function of countertransference 51, 66; love
personality 15, 91, 103–5, 113; 134–144; making use of 68; psychosis
psychotic and non-psychotic parts of 33, 47; see also transference-
personality 6, 75, 78, 82, 83, 87, 88, 96, countertransference
100, 110, 112; relationship between
group and group leader 97, 100; “das Ich” 125
reverie 6, 102, 153; reversible Davis, L. 9, 11
perspective 110; São Paulo seminars DeLillo, D. 9, 39, 40
87–9; “São Paulo seminar No. 1” delusion 76, 95, 96
87–9; and Searles 134, 150–3; style of De M’Uzan, M. 17, 32
psychoanalysis 89; theory of thinking dependent basic assumption group 93
9, 16, 71, 83, 90–113; “A theory of depressive position 96
thinking” 99, 100; “tolerated doubt” Development 127n5
102; topographic model 134, 152–3; “Differentiation of the psychotic from
vertices 96, 153; work group 6, 90, the non-psychotic personalities” 93
92, 95, 96 disaffected states 32
borderline patients 54 Disgrace 19, 20–1
Borges, J. L.: ancestors 122n4; “dreams The Doctor Stories 61–5
. . . ask us something” 10; Fervor de Doehrman, M. J. 36
Buenos Aires 92; freedom in dreaming dreaming: Bion 5, 6, 16, 18, 32, 75, 87,
9; “guided dreaming” 7, 31; “. . . 91, 101–13; Borges 7, 9, 10, 31;

162
 Index
collective 8, 57–60; “container- the group 99; vs. physical problem 67;
contained” 102, 111; continuous 103; psychoanalytic function of the
dream-thoughts 16, 32, 48, 101; personality 103; of the session 73, 75,
emotional experience 5–6, 15, 16–7, 77, 82, 84, 87, 107; in writing 12
21, 32, 33, 110, 113; emotional emotional truth 7, 21, 99, 106, 152
problem 107, 113; as free association Epstein, L. 36
6, 7, 14–5, 17; as generating human Experiences in Groups and Other Papers
consciousness 104; Freud 5, 92, 93
104;Grotstein 6, 15, 100; “guided
dreaming” 7, 31, 45; interrupted Fairbairn, W. R. D. 114
dreams 32; into existence 6, 15, 16, fantasy 16, 116, 120, 135, 137
24, 36, 75, 84, 110; nightmares 18, 32, “feats of association” 61
48, 102, 109; not being able to dream Fervor de Buenos Aires 92
6, 8, 14, 15, 16–7, 23–4, 32–3, 38–9, fiction: as creating experience 63; vs. lie
49, 50, 57, 60, 109; as psychoanalysis 34; as “ear training” 50, 60–6; patient
17; as projective identification 8; as 7, 34, 37–8, 49, 71; “psychoanalytic
psychoanalytic function of the fiction” 76; and teaching
personality 15, 91, 103–5, 113; as psychoanalysis 66
reading 9, 10, 11, 13; as reverie 6; fight-flight basic assumption group 93,
Sandler’s “dream-work” 6, 15, 100; 94
as thinking 113; “undreamt dreams” “Formulations on the two principles of
16, 17, 24, 32, 38; waking 6, 33, mental functioning” 91
57, 60; works of Bion, Loewald, A Fortunate Man 52
Searles 9 frame: analytic 3, 17, 30, 68; supervisory
“dream-thought” 10, 13, 16, 32, 48, 101, 36, 49
102, 109 free association 6, 7, 14–15, 17, 80
“dream-work” 6, 15, 100 Freud, S.: aggressive instinct 115, 116;
dynamic unconscious 145 and Breuer 2; castration 116, 143;
Complete Psychological Works 31; “das
“ear training” 13, 50, 60–6 Ich”125; discovering psychoanalysis 1;
the ego 118, 125 dreaming 5, 104;the ego 118, 125;
ego psychology 54 “Formulations on the two principles
emotional experience: and “alpha- of mental functioning” 91; “the I”
function” 16, 101; analyst’s 38, 49, 125; internalization 143, 144; The
148; and “beta-elements” 16, 101; Interpretation of Dreams 142;
“contained” 102; corrective 138; and Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis
dreaming 5–6, 15, 16–7, 21, 32, 33, 1; Little Hans 31; and Loewald 54;
110, 113; fears of 94; and fiction 38; “Mourning and melancholia” 52;
group’s 94, 99; patient’s 61; Searles Oedipus complex 114, 115–16, 118,
148; of session 23, supervisee’s 33; 119, 124, 130; 131–2, 142–3; phallic
and thinking 91, 95, 99, 100, 102, 105, phase 115; pleasure principle 91;
106, 110, 113; trauma 16–17; truth of psychoanalysis 1, 104; reality
152 principle 91; reality testing 92;
emotional problem and aim of repression 118; sexual instinct 115;
psychoanalysis 103; in a course of a Studies on Hysteria 116–17; superego
life 95; “dream-thought “ 16; and 116, 124, 125, 143; supervision 31;
dreaming and thinking 107, 113; of topographic model 134, 152–3;

163
 Index
unconscious and preconscious interpretation: Bion 73, 74, 76, 79–86,
mind 5; and the unconscious 5, 91–2, 93, 97, 98, 109, 110; Searles 146; silent
116, 118 20, 21; vs. talking 3, 108
Frost, R.: “feats of association” 61; The Interpretation of Dreams 142
“momentary stay” 65; “oversounds” interrupted dreams: neurotic symptoms
29, 61 32; nightmares 32; in supervision
32–3
Gabbard, G. 36, 85, 137 Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis 1
Gediman, H. K. 36 introjection 125
“The girl with a pimply face” 62–3 The Invasion of the Body Snatchers 59
“going concern” 14, 24, 57
Gould, G. 9 Karp, G. 127n5
the grid 90 Kaywin, R. 120
Grotstein, J.: dreaming 6, 15, 100; Keats, J. 96
magical thinking 95; talking to the Klein, M.: internal object world 134;
unconscious 78 Oedipus complex 114; projective
group: “analytic third” 57; basic identification 98
assumption group 90, 92; emotional Kohut, H. 114
experience of 94, 99; emotional
problem of 99; fears and hatred of 99; L, H, K linkages 90
“group mentality” 92; as individual Lacan, J. 114
psyche 92; relationship to group Langs, R. 36
leader 97, 100; work group 92; Laplanche, J. 118
unconscious of 57; unconscious Learning from Experience 52, 99
beliefs of 93–4 learning from experience 76, 94, 95;
“guided dreaming” 7, 31, 45 hatred of 94
learning to forget 66–9
hallucination as a dream 112; vs. a dream Lesser, R. 36
89; as failure to think 96; internally Lester, E. 36
generated perception 87; vs. Life & Times of Michael K 22
perception 104 linking: attacks on 90
holding 102 Little Hans 31
Loewald, H.: atonement 53, 125–8,
“the I” 125 129–130, 131; “dream-thought” 10;
identification 115, 116, 125, 129, 130, dreaming up works of 9;
133, 134, 145, 149 emancipation 131; incest 128–131;
“imaginative conjecture” 82 incestuous object 114, 128, 129–30;
impasse 33 incestuous object relationship 114,
incest 128–131 128–30; internalization 124–7, 129,
incestuous object 114, 128, 129–30 132; metamorphosis 125, 127; object
incestuous object relationship 114, cathexis 129; Oedipus complex 10,
128–30 53–5, 114–132; parricide 53,
incorporation 125 119–128, 129, 131–2; primary
insanity 97 identification 129, 130; reading
internalization: Freud 143, 144; 114–132; repression 118, 119, 120;
Loewald 124–7, 129, 132 restitution 53, 125, 126, 127, 128, 142;
internal object world 134 superego 124–8, 129, 132; “The

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waning of the Oedipus complex” 10; Oedipus myth 115, 122
53–6; 114–132
pairing basic assumption group 93
mania 96 Pao, P. - N. 43, 44
McDougall, J. 16, 32 parricide 53, 119–128, 129, 131–2
McKinney, M. 36 parallel process 35
McLaughlin, F. 35 paranoid-schizoid position 96
Meltzer, D.: dream-thought 16 personality: Bion’s psychotic and non-
metamorphosis 125, 127, 127n5 psychotic parts 6, 75, 78, 82, 83, 87,
metaphor: “ear training” for 61; for the 88, 96, 100, 110; Freud’s unconscious
mind 134; for thinking 90, 92 and preconscious mind 5; neurotic
Mitchell, S. 120 core of 130; psychoanalytic function
Möbius strip 147 of 15, 91, 103–5, 113; psychotic core
Mohr, J. 52 of 54–5; 130; reality of 97
“momentary stay” 65 perversions 17, 32, 96
“Mourning and melancholia” 52 phallic phase 115
phantasy 92, 93, 104
narcissism 81 Plato 117n3, 119n3
neuroses 55 playing 15, 16, 32, 102
neurotic conflict 54 pleasure principle 91
neurotic core 130 Poe, E. A. 101
neurotic symptom: as interrupted poetry: reading as “ear training” 60–6;
dreaming 32 as “sacred” 119n3; in seminar group
nightmares: 18, 48, 109; “contained” 60–6
overwhelms “container” 102; Pontalis, J. - B. 118
interrupted dreaming 32 “pre-conception” 100
night terrors: as undreamable dreams 32, primary identification 129, 130
109 “primary maternal preoccupation” 13,
“no-breast” 101 129
non-psychotic part of personality 6, primary process thinking 14, 45
75, 78, 82, 83, 87, 88, 96, 100, 110, “Primitive emotional development” 52
112 Pritchard, W. H. 13, 61
non-thinking 94, 95, 108, 110 projective identification: Bion’s 90, 98,
not being able to dream 6, 8, 14, 15, 16–7, 100, 101; Klein’s 98; rediscovering
23–4, 32–3, 38–9, 49, 50, 57, 60, 109 concept of 8
proto-mental thinking 93, 94
“O” 90, 96 psychic transformations 90
object cathexis 129 psychoanalysis: aim of 103, 104; Bion’s
oedipal boy 135 style of 89; as dreaming 17;
“Oedipal love in the “dreaming up” 2, 7, 9; as form of
countertransference” 133, 134–144 treatment 1; Freud 1, 104; as a “going
Oedipal parricide 53 concern” 14, 24; mystery of 84;
Oedipus complex: Freud 114, 115–16, originality in 2; rediscovering 1–13,
118, 119, 124, 130; 131–2; 142–3; 70, 86; rules of 30; Searles
Loewald 10, 53–5, 114–132; Searles contribution to 3, 31–49, 142, 144; as
133, 134–144 set of ideas 1; teaching 2, 7, 8, 50–69;
“oversounds” 29, 61 as therapeutic method 1, 17

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psychoanalytic function of personality “São Paulo seminar No. 1” 87–9
15, 91, 103–5, 113 schizophrenic states: as “undreamt
psychological work 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 16, 21, dreams” 32
32, 33, 35, 68, 73, 102, 103, 118, 133, Searles, H.: acting in 140; acting out
151 140; and Bion 134, 150–3; Chestnut
psychosis: as only waking state 89; and Lodge 43, 137; conscious-
psychoanalytic function of unconscious 145–150, 152–3;
personality 110; as “undreamt “container-contained” 151;
dreams” 32 contribution to psychoanalysis 3,
psychosomatic illness 16, 32 31–49, 142, 144; dreaming up works
psychotic core 54–5, 130 of 9; dynamic unconscious 145;
psychotic parts of personality 6, 75, 78, emotional experience of being an
82, 83, 87, 88, 96, 100, 110, 112 analyst 3, 148; “inside out”
psychotic thinking 73 experience 146–9; interpretation
146; need for truth 151–2; oedipal
Raising Arizona 9, 25, 26–29 boy 135; “Oedipal love in the
reading: analytic writing 1, 2, 8, 50, countertransference” 133, 134–144;
51–6; as autistic defense 25; close Oedipus complex 133; reading
reading 8, 50, 51–6, 71, 81; as 133–154; and reality 143–4;
dreaming 9, 10, 11, 13; Loewald “reflection process” 35; renunciation
114–132; poetry as “ear training” 143–4; supervisory relationship 34–5;
60–6; Searles 133–153; in seminar supervision with 31, 42–5;
51–6 transference-countertransference
reality: “adequate grasp of” 94; of death 133, 134–144, 145, 151, 152;
97; encounters with 101; evading 94, “Unconscious identification” 133,
98; external 73, 109, 144; facing 88, 134, 145–150; “waking up” to
113; and fantasy 120, 137; individual’s oneself 140
relationship to 91; internal 109; of secondary process thinking 6, 9, 14
lived emotional experience 95; seminar group: as “analytic third” 57;
orientation to 93; of the primitive 96; Bion’s clinical seminars 9, 70–89,
psychic 95, 98; of one’s personality 90, 91;105–12; close reading 51–7;
97; principle 91; in Raising Arizona as collective dreaming 8, 57–60;
27; and Searles’s renunciation 143–4; as “going concern” 57; poetry
testing 92; and thinking 91, 95, 96–7; and fiction in 60–6; rediscovering
as truth 91, 99, 105 psychoanalysis in 1, 7; setting
“reflection process” 35 50–1; teaching in 50; thinking
renunciation 143–4 in 6
repression 118, 119, 120 sense impressions 101
restitution 53, 125, 126, 127, 128, 142 sexual instinct 115
reverie 6, 15, 18, 33, 41, 49, 51, 68, 102, Shakespeare, W. 130
153 Slavin, J. 36
reversible perspective 110 Springmann, R. R. 36
Rickman, J. 92 Stimmel, B. 36
Studies on Hysteria 116–17
Sandler, J. 6, 15, 100 style: vs. technique 70–1
sanity 97 superego 54, 116, 124–8, 129, 132, 143,
São Paulo: Bion in 87–9, 105 144

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supervision: dreaming “undreamt trauma 16–7
dreams” 8; dreaming up the analyst 4; truth: emotional 7, 21, 99, 106, 152;
dreaming up the patient 7, 34, 71; as need for 88, 89, 91, 94, 95, 96, 99, 105,
“guided dreaming” 7, 31, 45; 106, 113, 134, 151–2; and reality 91,
interrupted dreams 32–3; as 99, 105
“reflection process” 34–5 Tustin, F. 17
supervisory frame 36, 49
supervisory relationship 31; and analytic unconscious: “analytic third” 57; aspect
relationship 35, 35n1, 35–6n2, 49; of consciousness 149; aspects of mind
frame of 36, 49; Freud 31; in training 87; belief 97; beliefs of group 93–4;
program 36 communications 34, 36, 55, 133;
conflict 81; and conscious experience
teaching psychoanalysis 2, 7, 8, 50–69 145–150, 152–3; “dreamer who
technique 70–1 dreams the dream” 15; “dreamer
Tempest 130 who understands the dream” 15;
“A theory of thinking” 99, 100 “dream-work” 15; dynamic 145;
theory of thinking 9, 16, 71, 83, emotional experience 61; emotional
90–113 world 131; fantasy 16, 116, 135; fear
thinking: apparatus for 101, 102, 113; 79; Freud and 5, 91–2, 116, 118;
attacks on 98; 107, 110; Bion’s theory group 57, 93–4; identification 133–4,
of 16, 71, 83, 90–113; as dreaming 145–9; internal and external object
113; emotional experience 91, 95, relations 35n1; interpersonal
99, 100, 102, 105, 106, 110, 113; processes 35; interplay of supervisory
emotional problem 107, 113; failure and analytic relationships 34;
to 96; and goal of psychoanalysis 103; intrapsychic conflict 103; level in
impetus for 16, 95, 102, 105, 106, analytic relationship 34, 35, 36; level
113; magical 94, 95; primary process in supervisory relationship 35, 48;
14, 45; as projective identification making conscious 6, 81, 104, 147;
100; and reality 91, 95, 96–7; mental experience 87; mental
secondary process 6, 9, 14; in seminar phenomena 104; and conscious
group 6; two minds 6, 97–100; minds 96, 103, 104, 153; object
unconscious 16, 91, 103; with the relations 35n1, 35–6n2; phantasies 92,
patient 103 104; presenter’s 78; psychological
“tolerated doubt” 102 makeup 127–8; psychological work 5,
topographic model 134, 152–3 6, 8, 9, 10, 16, 21, 32, 33, 35, 68, 73,
Tower, L. E. 134 102, 103, 118, 133, 151; registration
training: See analytic training 119; repressed thought 147; speaking
transference 29, 68, 134; see also to 78; thinking 16, 91, 103; thinking
transference-countertransference aspect of personality 78, 83; thoughts
transference-countertransference: 32; “understanding-work” 15; work
dilemmas 45; Gabbard 137; Loewald of dreaming 104
55; Searles 133, 134–144, 145, 151, “Unconscious identification” 133, 134,
152; and “talking-as-dreaming” 26, 145–150
29–30 “understanding-work” 15
transformation: absence of 101; psychic Underworld 39–40
90; in superego formation 127, 128 “undreamt dreams”: 6, 16–17, 24, 32,
“transitional object” 137 38, 39; as night terrors 32; as

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perversions 32; as psychosis 32; “What you learn about the baby”
as psychosomatic illness 32; 11–13
schizophrenic states of non- Williams, W. C. 61–5
experience 32; supervision 8 Winnicott, D. W.: fantasy 120; “going
unthinkable thought 73 concern” 14, 24; holding 102;
“The use of force” 63–6 knowing too much 66; “. . . no such
thing as an infant . . .” 100; playing
16; “primary maternal
vertex 96, 98
preoccupation” 13, 129; “Primitive
vertices 96–7, 153
emotional development” 52;
“transitional object” 134
waking dreaming 6, 15, 33, 57, 60 Wolkenfield, F. 36
“The waning of the Oedipus complex” work group 6, 90, 92, 95, 96
10; 53–6; 114–132
Weinstein, A. 34 Yerushalmi, H. 36

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