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Presenter: The patient sat on the couch and said in a strong voice, “I've asked myself why I'm here today. There's a soccer game this afternoon – Brazil are playing. I enjoy soccer so much I'm sorry to miss it. I was sure that I was going to get awfully bored here. I've been thinking how bored I would be ever since I put the key in the car to come here. And I'm still asking myself why I came.” I said, “I feel it is very difficult for you to admit that you do something because you enjoy it. You arrived here feeling certain that you would be bored. It seems to me that behaving like this makes you feel happy. Perhaps you are being masochistic.”
Bion: The patient says he ‘asked himself’, but he doesn't say what he himself answered. Perhaps ‘he’ and ‘himself’ are playing another game which is also very pleasurable – a game in which he is cruel to himself and is also cruelly treated. But neither of the two people in the room can go to the football match, so both of them are cruelly treated.
P: He said, “I don't understand when you talk about things like masochism. I'm getting bored again. I've been bored ever since I woke up this morning, and I'm so bored now I feel like crying.” His tone of voice was one of a mixture of anger and sadness. He went on, “There's a story about a woman that I can't get out of my mind. Fortunately she is so unbearable that I can't fall in love with her.”
B: What do you think the patient understands when he is with you? Brazilian? Portuguese? Football?
P: Although he says he doesn't understand me, I have the impression that he does. I agree with your reference to a cruel game – I think that is what he was feeling.
B: Verbal language is very difficult to use for this purpose. I need some way in which I could say, ‘understanding + absolute’. I mean by that, understanding, both positive and negative. What is the patient absolutely understanding? He is understanding psychoanalysis, but he is not understanding football – he hasn't gone to it. Having c