ABSTRACT
The title of this chapter is "Thinking aloud about technique". Its contents try to be exactly what it says. When I learned that this conference was going to take place, I just sat down and wrote what came into my mind, as if indeed thinking aloud. I did not consult any bibliography; I did not try to cite quotations; I did not try to learn better what I already knew about Bion's work; and I did not use the words he uses when describing his concepts, but, rather, my "everyday" way of expressing them. I just wrote. And only later did I realize that my intention had been not only to pay tribute to his memory, but also to satisfy a private need of my own to communicate with him in personal homage. You can then, perhaps, understand my enormous surprise and fright when, months later, I was told that this private dialogue of mine had been chosen to be read in public. Then, perhaps in order to become a bit more relaxed, I tried to think that perhaps the working method I had used might somehow have been the one he would have wanted me to use, by just describing the emotional experience of this dialogue taking place between me and the Dr. Bion I have in my inner self, as a private inner object of my own personality. Had I 146then perhaps, even Ln a modest way, approached that enormous effort he expects us to make in our analytical technique, when he asks us to work "without memory and desire"?
