ABSTRACT
The treatment of patients with serious difficulties in symbolization is a riddle. These patients do not present the severe symptoms of the most serious cases, and their cognitive functions are in some areas usually well preserved. Nonetheless, the challenge they pose is that they suffer from a deficiency in their capacity for thinking, which originates in traumas that are filed in the so-called “inaccessible unconscious”. W. R. Bion maintained that alongside conscious and unconscious states of mind there is a third psychic category, which he calls the “inaccessible”. From the perspective of a post-Bionian theory of the analytic field, this chapter shows a clinical vignette how the analyst’s reverie can gradually lead to figurability in the patient. Bion’s remark is especially significant insofar as it aims to account for the notion of an image “translating” something that is somatic in itself.
