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Presenter: The patient is a fourteen-year-old boy. He came in and lay down on his front – not in the usual position. He began by saying, “If you were ill next time, we shouldn't be able to have our session and I would save money.” Then he looked at me and said, “You are moving your fingers.” He kept glancing at me all the time. Then he asked, referring to a boy who he knew had been one of my patients, “Did he leave you?” Then, “How long does an analysis take? Is it possible that I shall be here for ten years?”
Bion: I might say something like this: “You are not really sure whether you are the boy who came here and never came back again, or whether you are the boy who came here and has come here again today. But since you are the boy who has come here today, you are beginning to be afraid that you might also be coming here for ten years. And you would like me to be able to tell you how many years you have been coming so far, and how many more years you are going to come.”
I suggest that this boy feels he has already been coming for fourteen years – in fact ever since he was born – and that it's quite long enough. At the same time he is not quite a boy – he's a young man; and he's not quite a young man – he's a boy who needs a father or mother or psychoanalyst to come to. In short, we are looking, at rather close quarters, at what is known as an adolescent. It's no good telling him that because it wouldn't mean anything to him. But he could possibly understand if one said, “You are feeling like a grown man and you are tired of being a boy. But you are frightened of being a grown man and would like to be a boy for a bit longer – perhaps for ten years more. You want me to tell you when you will be a man and when you can stop being a boy.”
These are just rational guesses, rational conjectures. But during analysis you don't have time to discuss this kind of thing. Here we can imagine that the patient is waiting for the interpretation, but in real life he wants an answer s