ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on one strand of Wilfred Bion’s elaborate tapestry: a tension between learning from emotion and from experience of what Bion calls evolution. By evolution, Bion means a surprising moment of sudden direct experience, one that may take many different forms that neither analyst nor patient can anticipate or predict. The chapter highlights an attitude characterised by openness to a sense of oscillation that moves back and forth between awareness of emotion and sudden recognitions of evolution. Bion introduced a complex idea he called a psychoanalytic object to describe an experience potentially shared in a session. According to Bion, a psychoanalytic object has extension in the domains of sense, myth, and passion. The development of a model of psychoanalytic intuition remains an incomplete challenge, but there is no doubt that Bion believed that intuition was a vital aspect of the mature psychoanalyst’s experience.
