ABSTRACT
Analysts, like mothers and fathers, must be able to descend into reverie so as to be optimally receptive to “becoming” the patient’s anguish—as if by exorcism—and to be able to detect the “name” of the anguish by becoming an “analyst of achievement” who is conversant with the “Language of Achievement”, the ancient and primal pre-lexical/sub-lexical language of body emotions prior to their being felt by the mind as feelings. Unlike most analytic thinkers, Bion was able to extricate himself from the closed loop of analytic thinking by using analogic thinking—that is, models. Interpenetrating Bion’s ideas about the first and second forms of thinking is his notion of the contact-barrier and its flexible function of dividing and reuniting different elements. Bion was a psychoanalytic cosmologist in so far as he valued the vast-ness and infinite resourcefulness of the unconscious, which he was ultimately to rename “infinity”.
