ABSTRACT
Wilfred Bion writes: Most people think of psycho-analysis, as Sigmund Freud did, as a method of treatment for a complaint. The complaint was regarded as similar to a physical ailment which, when a person knows what it is, has to be treated in accordance with the rules of medicine. Freud must have felt he was in a position where either society was going to squeeze the life out of psychoanalysis, or else psychoanalysis was going to disrupt the conventions of society. Many of Freud’s arguments did in fact revolve more around practical issues than essential, intrinsic ones. Many of them referred to the study of medicine being unnecessary in becoming a psychoanalyst, a “roundabout road”, “an arduous and circuitous way” or due to the prospective analyst’s “impoverished material circumstances”. Bion elaborated the notion of these two aspects of reality and wrote of ‘reality sensuous and psychic’.
