ABSTRACT
Before yesterday's seminar, I was curious to know what Dr Bion thought about music. I'd been reflecting on an analytic experience of mine when I felt that a woman patient preferred music to analysis and was trying—and had begun—to find music in analysis too, for certain reasons: music banished visual experiences, especially terrifying ones associated with the phobic space. She was able to dissolve the terrifying experiences of sounds by putting them together in a melody and using only certain sounds or certain limited pitches. If the music was broken down, the sounds took on a terrifying quality reminiscent of the terror of the visual, almost bodily, three-dimensional images of a claustrophobic space. But I had attributed this possibility of seeing terrifying images to her phantasy of a Cyclopean eye—the third mental eye that psychologists talk about—which she seems to see graphically before her.
