ABSTRACT

In my view, we should be just as interested in oneiric manifestations in an analytic session as we are in night dreams brought after the event like a recorded television programme. Dream-like manifestations in the session are one of the pillars of Bion’s thought: in waking life as in sleep, there is a kind of ‘dreaming’, which is what enables us to form α-elements, to establish the contact barrier and to distinguish conscious from unconscious (Bion 1962, 1963, 1965).