ABSTRACT
As the title suggests, in this chapter I am concerned primarily with a particular aspect of narrative, with the complex realities of life-stories, with those mysterious processes that underlie a ‘coming into mind’, the beginning of thinking, that which, in turn, enables a person to become him/herself. The story that I shall be telling unfolds in the course of a single analytic session. The point de de ˙part is a thought of the poet and critic Wallace Stevens (1941), ‘Both in nature and in metaphor, identity is the vanishing-point of resemblance’ (p. 72). The focus is on dreaming, on my own struggles to understand what Bion meant by the sleeping and the waking dream. I have been tussling with Stevens’s ‘thought’ about identity for many years. For is not one of the centrally challenging tasks for oneself, for oneself in relation to others, for the working psychoanalyst or therapist, and for one’s patients, that of really being the person one is, with the hopeful belief that it is, as George Eliot said, ‘never too late to become the person one might have been’?
