Seminar 1. 28 June 1976. The Tavistock Seminars

Bion: It took me a very long time to realize that the actual experience of being psychoanalysed was a traumatic one, and it takes a long while before one recovers from it. In physical medicine you usually have to go through a period of convalescence; you then hope that if you are fortunate you will reap some benefit from the violence that has been done to you physically. I was introduced to the kind of idea that violence is not done to you by psychoanalysis – that in the course of time you gradually got more and more cured. That doesn't seem to me to fit in at all; it was quite a long time before I began to feel that I knew where it was “at” and what sort of niche I occupied in this peculiar universe or domain that we call “psychoanalysis” – for want of a better word. But I can't say I have got very far with that particular line of thought. Part of the difficulty is that one has to borrow the terminology from all sorts of sciences, religions, aesthetic activities, in order to attempt to formulate a language of our own. There isn't a suitable language for this extraordinary domain, but I am convinced that there is such a domain, that there really is something which it is fair to call a mind, or character, or personality. The problem is having to use a debased currency, a language that has lost a great deal of its value and has therefore lost its cutting edge – in so far as one has to use it for a particular purpose.

Freud described the situation in which people suffer from an amnesia – a gap, a space where there ought to be some sort of memory – and then fill this gap with paramnesias. That's fine, and a very

profitable sort of idea it has been. But after a time when we get more and more accustomed to hearing about psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, the more we wonder whether there