ABSTRACT
The experience of confronting the darkness and inner chaos, is exactly what W. R. Bion means by the idea of contemplation of the paranoid-schizoid position, without memory, desire or immediate comprehension. This formulation is based on the concept of the maternal reverie, which makes the mother capable of tolerating and elaborating the infant’s projective identifications, even thought his maternal function is entirely unconscious, while the analyst’s reverie is more conscious and certainly more intentional. The analyst’s ability to use his own common sense and work in this way depends in a sense on his availability to entrust himself to his unconscious elaboration of the material that comes from the senses. In Cogitations, to illustrate this concept, Bion speaks of the sensation of fur, which must be picked up by a person’s other senses, other than sight, to be capable of asserting that there is a living animal present.
