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Bion: I have been explaining to the translator that I find it quite bad enough trying to translate what I want to say into English; I am therefore very thankful that I don't have to try to translate it into any other language. I would ask you to be indulgent to both of us. I don't think it is our fault – it is inherent in the difficulty of the matter I want to introduce.
For that reason I think that this subject will probably take at least four or five evenings to introduce. What I say will either seem to be incomprehensible, or so obvious that it is hardly worth saying. Whether it appears to be obscure or whether it appears to be obvious, in either case it will give you a misleading impression.
I will start by reminding you of what Melanie Klein says about projective identification and the depressive and paranoid-schizoid positions. The infant or very young child thinks it can split off nasty feelings and ideas, that is, anything which is unpleasant. According to her, the child has an omnipotent phantasy that it can split off these unpleasant thoughts or ideas and then evacuate them in the way that it can evacuate urine and faeces. She was referring to something she believed to be applicable after birth.
What I am going to say cannot aspire to the status of what is ordinarily called ‘scientific thought’; the most that I can claim is that it is imaginative conjecture. The central point of this guess is that even before birth the foetus – I don't know how close to being a full-term foetus, or whether it could apply to the embryo from an early stage – becomes sensitive to what could be called ‘happenings’, events like the sense of the pulsation of its blood, physical pressure of a kind that can be communicated through a watery fluid such as amniotic fluid or even extra-cellular fluid. (When I refer to extracellular fluid I am
talking about a fluid which is as near as possible to something which is not polluted at all. The amniotic fluid is already polluted by meconium