Bion's “Passion”; the Analyst's Pain

The Patient, an engineer in his early forties, customarily greeted my appearance in the waiting room with, “Are you ready for me?” Until recently, how analysts understood and responded to such a question regarding the reality of the analyst's subjective state would not be controversial. The well-trained, well-analyzed analyst would be quite ready. Not so the patient, who, in expressing insecurity about the analyst's emotional accessibility, most likely would be communicating his own anxiety.

Traditionally, our options were clear and stress-free. The analyst might merely acknowledge the communication as a commonplace greeting, like saying “hello,” respond to the question with a question, “What makes you ask?” or, as I did, remain silent, note the remark inwardly, and wait to see what develops.

The development of a session and of a treatment, however, involves not only the analyst's “waiting” for the patient, but tolerating anxiety and allowing one's own emotions to cohere and contribute to the meaning of the psychoanalytic situation. This viewpoint takes us a distance from Freud's (1912) recommendation to put aside emotions and achieve “psycho-analytic purification” (p. 116). Contemporary analysts (e.g., Aron, 1996; Gerson, 1996; Jacobs, 1991) have argued convincingly that the “myth of ‘analyst without anxiety or anger’” (Racker, 1968) is not possible, or even desirable (Renik, 1996). Loewald (1986) declared the analyst's technique involves a “special trained ability to use his own love-hate in the service of analyzing” (p. 286).

Rather than eschew personal emotionality, in fact, the analyst must embrace it. This is a painful task, not easily achieved or sustained. Bion (1974) characterized analysis involving “two rather frightened people; the patient and the psychoanalyst. If there are not, one wonders why they are bothering to find out what everyone knows” (p. 13). The suggestion is not that the analyst primarily was afraid of the patient, but of realizing unrealized