Seminar 2. 4 July 1977. The Tavistock Seminars

Bion: I find it extremely dull having questions answered that I haven't asked. So I think it would be preferable if I give you a rough idea of what I propose to say, and then if you will ask any questions you care to. I don't say that I shall answer them, but I can usually find a few more questions to ask you – a natural development, because most questions cause a whole lot more to occur. We never seem to get to the point of an answer unless we look back on it and think we have apparently gathered some kind of experience in the meantime.

I feel disposed to consider this kind of work from the point of view of the analyst: I mean by that the person who is theoretically responsible for the conversation. I am thinking of Freud's constant reference to Charcot's insistence on observation – that seems to me to be the absolute essence of it: observation. But what are we observing? Even the language we use is not adequate for the sort of difficult job that we do. We have to use the word, “observation”, as a kind of metaphor, an approximation. In Paradise Lost, Milton talks of the situation in which he cannot fall back on his eyes because he is blind; he says he hopes he will be able to “see and tell of things invisible to mortal sight”. We cannot hope for that, but somehow we do observe things that are very often not observed in the ordinary course of social intercourse. It would be useful if we could formulate in our own minds what it is that we are observing; it is a question which crops up all the time if we are doing this kind of work. Therefore, it needs to be kept in constant repair. How would you formulate it if you were trying to convey it to somebody else? What form of words would you use? It is curious that we do, in fact, resort to words; it is probably partly because the ability to talk articulate language is our most recent acquisition. But, of course, we are having to borrow words that have been used and

formulated for quite other purposes, when the kind of th