ABSTRACT
W. R. Bion assumes an unusually peremptory tone to stress that analysts should deprive themselves of memory and desire to be able to observe correctly what happens in the consulting room. Bion profoundly condemns both memory, whose unconscious components falsify observation, and desire, which permits neither understanding nor cure. Bion’s psychoanalysis is recognisable as psychoanalysis as understood by Sigmund Freud, with the fundamental reference to the dominion of the unconscious and the conviction of the active existence of the transference. Freud is quite categorical with regard to analysis, in fact for him psychoanalysis was much more than a therapy: the International Psychoanalytic Association also defines the term “psychoanalysis” in the same way. Although at a macroscopic level the authors are referring to a thinking person, in a psychoanalytic context it is useful to conceptualise thought processes as if they were the result of internal relations between a multitude of objects and internal parts.
