ABSTRACT
Wilfred Bion maintains that any truth that can be thought is no longer truth but its evolution into material reality, that which can be known through the familiar senses. Thus, any truth that penetrates into the realm of verbal language is a falsity. This thinking is essentially similar to that of philosophers like David Hume, Kant, and others who postulated a gap between the phenomenon as it is realized in the world and the thing-in-itself. Bion emphasizes that the purpose of the analyst's partial severance with external reality differs from the purpose of the psychotic manoeuvre. The psychotic wishes to destroy contact with psychic reality, whereas the analyst wishes to establish it. And this psychic reality is ineffable, not because it is experienced beyond or outside reality, but precisely because this is what real experience feels like when infinite dimensions are perceived simultaneously, paradoxically, with no boundaries of time and space; this is why linear, narrative language cannot grasp it.
