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Bion: “Well” … “I mean to say” … “You know” … I can go on like that for hours. It is the wreckage, the remnants of thought. Patients often want to tell you something, but all they have with which to do it are the remnants of articulate speech. So the first thing you are confronted with is the remains of a culture or civilization. We try to be as conscious, as wide awake, as logical as we know; to have all our wits, all our experience about us to do the work of psychoanalysis. But is that state of mind one which can make contact with a different state of mind?
Freud gave meaning to words like ‘conscious’ and ‘unconscious’, drawing attention to the fact that there is a state of mind which is different from what we usually call ‘conscious’. I am not sure that he made a clear cut distinction between what he was talking about adjectivally – unconscious modes of procedure, unconscious modes of thought – and the unconscious as if there were such a thing. These concepts, these theories match up with what most people vaguely recognize, partly because we all think we know the language, but we know a debased language – a vague language.
I don't think this idea of the unconscious, or even the idea of unconscious thoughts or ideas, extends far enough. It is surprising how far Freud got with those theories and the extent to which he made his own work redundant. He opened up still further areas of experience which cannot be treated in the way in which we attempt to treat neuroses and those phenomena in which this idea of the unconscious and unconscious thoughts – the substantive and adjectival words – are indicated.
I draw attention to the existence of what seem to be primordial ideas and feelings which have never been conscious. They are different
from ideas which have been conscious at some time and have been repressed, or have been transformed into something which is unconscious. That realm which we often think of as being somewhat irrational is in fact rational – if seen from