ABSTRACT
When I was very young and went on long journeys on the London Underground every day, I always read the advertisements; among them was (and still is) a series of humorous “poems” singing the virtues of pure virgin wool. I remember them only vaguely, apart from the last line, which was always “There is no substitute for wool”. The phrase came into my mind recently as something closely associated with psychoanalysis—perhaps only because those journeys took me to sessions? Could be, but there’s also a more serious reason: for tonight I wanted to write an essay elucidating some particularly difficult aspects of Bion’s work—or at least those which I find to be so—and thought about calling it something like “From the ‘Grid’ to the ‘O’”. But that would have required some quite ponderous, lengthy restructuring of Bion, which struck me as both presumptuous and fruitless—nothing can substitute for the personal reading of Bion, if you want to read and know him, of course, because he was perfectly capable of writing what he meant to say, and needs no exegesis. It might seem that this assertion sits badly with what I said a moment ago, namely that there are difficult aspects; but taking a closer look, it seems to me that these concern the practical application of Bion’s ideas within the analytic session, particular with regard to the concept of absence of memory and 10desire in the analyst, and I would like to clarify some of my ideas about this problem, which in my view has a great deal to do with the “vertex”, the point of view from which the analyst “sees” the session.
