Chapter 20. Brasilia 1975. Clinical Seminars

Presenter: The patient is an eighteen-year-old who has been in analysis with me for two years. He had to wait for two months after the initial interview before I had a vacancy; he wouldn't consider going to another analyst. His father, a doctor, died a year ago.

He always arrives in a great hurry, looking scared and anxious, his hair uncombed, his clothes untidy. He complains of pains and says he has to fight with himself to come to the sessions.

He arrived late for the session I am reporting, saying that his car had run out of petrol. He was even more anxious than usual. He lay on the couch but couldn't speak. After a while he said, “I'm very frightened because I can see something but don't know how to describe it – I can't find the words. There are scenes, like a movie, passing so fast on the wall at the end of the couch that I can't connect with any word in time.”

Bion: If you lay on that couch, what would you see on the wall?

P: Just a bare white wall.

B: He can see something. I think he can see your words going right over his head and hitting the wall.

P: He said he would like a special machine to collect his thoughts. Then I could translate the thoughts and understand what he was seeing.

B: He is reasonably sure that you, like most other people, cannot see anything on that wall.

P: He said he was able to control pain. I asked him what sort of pain. He said, “It is too complicated a process to explain to you. If my father were alive he would understand and explain because he was a very good man.”

B: This statement that his father was a good man is intended

to be heard by the father. But this father is a dead father – and that is a different matter. The dead father is sure to be very angry, very hostile to the son who goes on living. And the situation would be made much worse if the son did anything which made his own life worth living. The dead father becomes a very bad, envious, hostile and lively ghost.