ABSTRACT
Passion requires an awareness of and capacity for separateness, the awareness of another as well as a sense of one's own existence. Passion is a function of being. Wilfred Bion's ideas of passion and the analytic couple have similarities to ideas about intersubjectivity and the "analytic third". Dr James S. Grotstein credits Bion with having established these ideas about the analytic couple, in which intersecting subjective experiences are created in the relationship between both members of the couple, and create something new between them. According to Bion's model of the mind and of thinking, the development of the self depends upon a relationship to those primitive feelings, in the process of which they can be mitigated to a certain extent by a capacity to tolerate and digest the feelings. Play implies a relationship with the other that transcends both self and other and yet, paradoxically, is the source of a sense of self.
