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Presenter: The patient is a twenty-seven-year-old married woman. I have been seeing her for six months. She has a great deal of difficulty in speaking during the sessions; she is silent for long periods. When she lies down on the couch she becomes very anxious.
Bion: Whose idea was it that she should lie on the couch?
P: She chose to do so. When she arrives she has a radiant expression and looks at me in a penetrating way with brilliant eyes; then she lies down. Every session since the beginning of the analysis has consisted of long periods of silence and signs of fear and anxiety; she described the fear as ‘undefined’ and cannot explain it. I would like to recount one of the most recent sessions in which I got the impression that she was more communicative. There was the usual long silence at the beginning of the session. Then, while she was still twisting her head, wringing her hands and pushing at the sleeves of her blouse, I asked her what was going on in her mind.
B: There are two people in the room, but the patient knows something that we can't know – that there is also a silence in the room. That silence isn't just nothing; therefore if she is afraid of the silence, she is not afraid of ‘nothing’. The silence must be, as it were, the place where some person or thing is. I could put it like this: there are three people, three things present – the analyst, the patient and the silence. And it seems that the silence is the frightening one – at the moment.
P: The question I asked myself was, why is it so difficult for her to speak? Why does she think it is safer to keep quiet about what is going on in her mind rather than tell me?
B: If this object is silent, she would feel frightened of doing anything different from that.
P: After this long silence something very strange happened. I got the impression that there was an Egyptian mummy lying there and that there was a resistance in the relationship between us. I was surprised when the patient began to speak and said,