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Presenter: I have a patient who behaves as if he despises me deeply. This situation is very painful for me. I feel I ought to have been able to show him my limitations.
Bion: Why do you want to show your limitations? The patient should state what he thinks your limitations or capacities are. You are analysing the patient; therefore you want to know what the patient thinks. I don't understand the point about the analyst making his limitations known.
P: The patient acts as if I had no limitations at all.
B: When a patient comes to an analyst, he should learn something about himself. The fact that an interpretation is often given in terms of the relationship with the analyst is not because the analyst is of any importance; it is simply because the analyst is trying to draw attention to the character of that particular person who is showing certain beliefs about the analyst. For example, if the patient displays, or demonstrates in some way, feelings of contempt or hostility for the analyst, the important thing is that it tells you something about the patient. If a patient says that he is very grateful, that doesn't really tell you anything about the analysis or the analyst. But it does tell you a lot about the patient. It tells you that the patient is capable of feeling grateful. Another patient, by contrast, may be incapable of expressing any gratitude because he is so jealous or envious that he never expresses gratitude at all. One gives interpretations like, “You are feeling that I am”…, not because the analyst is a person of any importance, but because it gives the analysand a chance of recognizing what sort of person he himself is. If he is capable of love and affection and gratitude, it is important that he should know that – and so on through the list of his capacities and incapacities. In analysis it is
possible to see the kind of relationship that the patient is able to have with somebody who is not himself.
P: So if the analyst makes a mistake, it is important t