ABSTRACT
My day-to-day work has been greatly enriched by the ideas of Bion and not only from the point of view of basic implicit theory, but, above all, in terms of the theory of technique and in terms of the way I act and am in my consulting room, in the everyday world of working with patients. I shall now try to clarify some of these points:
The way of thinking of interpretation as something unsaturated that should not occupy the whole of meaning, but rather continually open the way to new scenarios, to that which has not been thought. There is no sole holder of knowledge, but rather two people who try to get as close as possible to an emotional truth that is bearable (for both!) on that particular day. In carrying out this work, the patient is not only ‘the best colleague’, but also the one who knows more about him/herself
The way of thinking about theory not as something that guides and supports me, but as something I discover and construct in a provisional manner as I go along, without feeling fear that it might be considered provisional or shame that it might already have been codified. The provisional nature of theories and ideas in the consulting room means that we constantly need to get away from the light pollution and white noise of everything we already know. In his Italian Seminars , Bion (1983) says that what matters in the analysis is what is accessible to our senses in the session. Only here – I might add – can we really perform metabolic-digestive-transformative operations and only in this way can we enable the patient to introject the tools for doing so on a lasting basis.
The waning of interest in the ‘content’ of the patient's narratives (which I agree with and will later explain why) in favour of interest in tools for thought. I am interested in modalities that make for the development of the alpha function, the container, the predisposition to contain, to dream and to transform proto-emotional states and proto-sensoriality: at this point the contents can be as varied as possible and are not particularly to the fore.
