ABSTRACT
Wilfred Ruprecht Bion, the intrepid tank commander, took a different direction and attacked science’s flank. According to Bion, as analysts, we must dream our emotions and those of our patients as our analytic task. Psychopathology thus ultimately devolves to being the result of incomplete or unsuccessful dreaming. Chaim Tadmor related that the Assyrian gods were thought by ancient Assyrians to communicate with each other through human dreams. Dreams were held to be sacred: they were signifiers of divine intercourse, and it was considered blasphemy for any mortal to attend to them. Bion, the polymath and autodidact, summoned a significant portion of the wisdom of the Western—and perhaps even Eastern—World, infused it into psychoanalytic thinking, and rendered psychoanalysis a pragmatic practicing philosophy about the achievement and experience of intimacy and self-transcendence. Bion is transforming the positivistic-mechanistic drive unconscious into a numinous, mystical unconscious.
