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Presenter: The patient is a woman of twenty-six, an only child. She is a psychologist, has just graduated, and was sent to me by the Institute of Psychoanalysis. She started analysis, four times a week, about a month ago. Right at the beginning she said that what had happened during the last nine years of her life seemed to have happened only yesterday, and that she didn't pay much attention to anything before that. What had happened was this: nine years ago her father got into trouble with the police over an involvement with a fifteen-year-old girl. The patient heard the news on the radio and read about it in the newspaper. From that moment on she followed all the activities of the police and the lawyers – her parents never talked about it, but she knew everything that was going on. The family moved from one town to another, running from the police. Now the father is on bail awaiting trial. The mother married against her family's wishes; she was very wealthy, but the father was just a janitor in a building downtown.
At the beginning of the session I am reporting, she did something different from usual – before she lay down she looked at me and smiled. Then she said, “Today I just can't think about anything. Why is that? Yesterday when I left here I felt quite free.”
Bion: It is as if she felt that nine years ago something emotionally important happened with the result that she has never been the same again. But with you just then, she was afraid that the same thing had happened again, namely, she smiled at you – and there is no knowing what troubles may happen now. In other words, it is felt to be typical of one of these incidents which are apparently of no importance, and yet it starts such a train of events that you can never forget it. On the other hand, if she isn't going to dare to smile at the analyst or other
people, that is also a desperately serious situation. One of the very early experiences that the infant has is of smiling. That often triggers off most