ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an example about a girl named as Coreen. Coreen found pleasure, even ecstasy, in reporting the moment-to-moment everything–nothing balance, her psychospiritual pulse. Even after she stopped working, holed up with the television, she managed to get to movies and art exhibitions. She was managing to keep herself alive—barely—with some kind of nourishment from somewhere. She coasted on innate life energy and what nourishment she extracted from poisons. The problem of nourishment is highlighted in W. R. Bion's discussion of lying. Bion writes that truth nourishes, lies poison. The vignette begins with a statement concerning nourishment. The vignette presents violence before nourishment, even if the latter occurred first. The patient mentions nourishment in an account of trauma, almost in passing, as if nourishment were an occasion for trauma. The coupling or mixture of nourishment/violence/shutting-off recurs in Bion's work, and nowhere more dramatically than in his use of the big bang image.
