ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the analyst’s use of her or his training and her or his intuitive counter-transference as a means of making meaning out of the here and now experiences of the clinical hour. Because early aspects of the personality are nonverbal and non-conceptual, the analyst must rely not only on the verbal material in a session but on the emotional and sensual experiences within the transference and the counter-transference. Bion would call this the O of the session for both analyst and patient. It is not nameable and not knowable. Such reliance requires the analyst to use intuition as a means of inferring the active influence of these primal aspects of personality on the patient’s current functioning. Again, Bion would look at these changes as transformations that differ from the analyst’s ability to understand these transformations; the analyst must also trust her or his own process as it relates to the patient. This process involves intuition and dream work.
