ABSTRACT
Ibegan teaching W. R. Bion in the 1970s and D. W. Winnicott in the 1960s. Bion wrote of most dreams being semi-aborted, since only so much build-up of emotion is tolerable. In Cogitations, he suggests that psychic intensity can damage psychic functioning. The psyche cannot take itself, or can only take so much of itself. There are moments when use of psychic capacity to digest damaging processes can suffer damage. Bion calls Faith the psychoanalytic attitude, a state of being without memory, expectation, understanding, or desire, radically open. Faith in the face of catastrophic O. An extraordinary nucleus in the depths of our feeling life. An emotional nucleus that is part of a basic rhythm: breaking, shattering, going under, dying, and coming through. An emotional nucleus and clinical attitude that Bion and Winnicott share.
