ABSTRACT
From the very beginning of his career, when as a psychoanalyst Bion first treated psychotic patients, he realized —that their thinking constituted a pattern unto itself that was qualitatively, not just quantitatively, different from that of neurotics. The mind of the analyst must be capable of suspending memory and desire (L, H) in order to experience a transformation (T) in O, in order, in turn, to be able to establish the selected fact—an emotional capacity that binds what seem to be unrelated elements in a series of free associations. Bion believes, in other words, that not only does the analyst require the employment of a as a function to translate the patient’s associations, but the patient himself must employ a in order to generate free associations. The ultimate value of this contact-barrier—and of the dreaming that supplies it and reinforces its functioning—is to prevent one domain from interfering with the functioning of the other.
