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Bion: Well, here we are.
But where is ‘here’? I remember a time when I was at an address – some seventy years ago – which I called “Newbury House, Hadham Road, Bishops Stortford, Hertfordshire, England, Europe. Another small boy said to me, “You have left out ‘The World’”. So I put that in too. Since then I have been told by the astronomers that we are part and parcel of a nebular universe, a spiral nebula to which our solar system belongs. Astronomers can get away with a remark like this; nobody complains that they are always ‘inventing’ new discoveries. But, as Freud pointed out, this is not the case with doctors or psychoanalysts. People say, “These doctors are always inventing new diseases; then they treat them. It becomes a vested interest”. But nobody says “You astronomers invent a new universe and want another telescope”. I suppose it is because we feel it doesn't matter very much what the Universe is.
I want now to narrow down the view, cutting out the various elements we regard as irrelevant. As analysts we look at what we call the character or personality. This peculiar view – I won't say Freud started it, but he gave it a considerable push – turns out to be a vast universe of its own kind. We forget that the dimension which Freud introduced into this scrutiny has caused a lot of trouble. We fail to notice it because we are in the storm centre, unaware of the ‘centre’ of which we are a part. But it is that disturbance with which we are concerned.
What does it look like to us? When we go to our offices tomorrow what do we expect to see? What are we going to look at? What is our interpretation, our diagnosis? What is our interpretation of the facts which our senses make available?
We assume that there is a mind, a personality. What does it look like? What does it smell like? Does it present itself to our touch, our feelings? Do we get any tactile impression? We know that so far we do not; so far we cannot say, “I walk into this room blindfold and I can feel a