ABSTRACT
This chapter presents two clinical examples; the first case focuses on the tendency toward fittedness in the initial meeting with a patient and the second follows a case in which fittedness emerges unpredictably in different forms over time. It broadens and individualizes Bion's vision to posit a general unconscious collaboration through which patient and analyst work to co-create forms of understanding and relational engagement specifically and progressively fitted to each patient's total, uniquely complex, evolving therapeutic struggles, aims, and needs. In the therapeutic context, the principle of necessity connects with the idea of needed relationship but by way of a complex path. Bion and Winnicott were some of the first analytic thinkers to theorize analytic dyads as relational systems each, in different ways, finding that unconscious cooperation between patient and analyst was essential to a productive analytic process they thought of the crucial analytic functions they discovered as residing primarily in the analyst.
