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Observation: I have been thinking about the opportunity I had with a patient who came back after seventeen years. I got a call; she asked me whether I remembered her – I really didn't, but I remembered the name. The thing I have been pondering is that this lady told me that for all these seventeen years she had been holding on to something I had said; it was a kind of magic. What interested me was that I don't think I ever said it; it doesn't sound like me at all. It was, “There is no law that you have to stand in line with his bullet”. I may have talked about her relationship to her sadistic husband, that she had the right not to take the kind of sadism she was expected to, but it was the wording that interested me – I don't think it was mine. There was such gratitude and magic in this. She returned because she hoped I could again come forth with a phrase for this poor suffering soul. She had had an awful life. A child of hers had been killed by a fall in an elevator shaft – partly due to her husband's carelessness in leaving doors open in his own factory; and her older son died of a horrible cancer. The first time I saw her, her first words were, “I have a few little problems”, and out came this horrendous account. It was Dr Bion's speaking about language as a communication which interested me; you don't often have a patient coming back and telling you what they think happened. Did I say it unconsciously? Did she hear something, or did she make this up? How does one know? Or doesn't it matter?
Bion: We all have to get used to an extraordinary thing; this queer conversation, which we call psychoanalysis, works – it is unbelievable, but it does. The result is that you give various interpretations which you may or may not remember. It is difficult to believe that you may nevertheless have sown an idea which has germinated and
given birth to still other ideas until the patient comes back and tells you ideas which she thinks – and probably quite rightly – she got fro