ABSTRACT
In this supervision, Wilfred Bion is confronted, not with a clinical stimulus, but a theoretical stimulus: the "case" of psychoanalysis itself, and the fact that as a fundamental premise (or model) the patient, who is the subject of analysis, "possesses a mind". As an additional datum, there arises within the group the observation that this model, which posits a mind, is built by the mind itself, in a sort of specular procedure. In his first set of associations/constructions, Bion considers that the assignment of names to phenomena and things, the rules of grammar, or the laws of physics are all "human fabrications". Next, Bion refers to the essential epistemological difference between sensorial and psychic realities, stressing the difficulty for us to establish the existence of "the mind" as an entity. In an imaginative demonstration of his α-function, Bion evokes a "pilgrimage of human curiosity" in search of a possible location of the mind in some organ of the human body.
