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Presenter: The patient, a fifty-year-old man, has been in analysis with me for a year. His background is a simple and modest one, but he is a very interesting and intelligent man. The session I have chosen shows the chief aspects I have noticed in my contact with this patient.
He came in, shook hands with me and said, “Good morning, how are you?” Then in a complaining voice, “I've been up since four o'clock. I've been thinking too much. My entire life has been like that – always thinking, thinking. I can't stand it any longer. I've also had problems with impotence – I'm worried about it.” He continued, “When I arrived at the central bus station” (he comes from another town for his analysis) “I ate a meat roll, some pears and two tangerines. I didn't eat the cellular part of the tangerines because I don't think it is digestible. Nevertheless I now have indigestion – they are heavy in my stomach.”
Bion: He is always thinking, thinking. Where? In his head? Or in his stomach? In the alimentary canal? Or with voluntary muscle?
P: That reminds me: in the next session he said, “I ate fried manioc and steak for lunch, and they are still inside my head.”
B: Mental indigestion.
P: I have the feeling that he digests thoughts with the alimentary canal, and food with the head.
B: I would remind you of something else which may be similar. Somewhere inside the head is the ‘rhinencephalon’ – the nose–brain. Why is that? Do our noses think? Have our noses got brains? Why did the early anatomists call it the ‘rhinencephalon’? Where did they get that idea from?
Fishes use the sense of smell as a long-distance receptor; sharks and mackerel, for instance, can smell decaying matter a long way
away. As embryos we go through a state when we are like fishes living in a watery fluid before we are born. After birth we carry this same watery medium inside our nostrils so that we are still able to smell when in a gaseous medium – air. If this happens when we change from being a foetus into a new-bo