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Q: You referred yesterday to three points of illumination in an analysis of five years. I would like to ask what the analyst was doing in the meantime; I take it that he had to say something. The problem seems to be how to foster and not prevent the moment of illumination arriving.
Bion: The simplest answer is, the analyst is analysing. But, of course, that is simply a general statement. When it comes to the details of it, it is a much more difficult question to answer. I remember being asked a long time ago, “Does the analyst ever do anything except talk?” I said, “Yes, he remains silent.” I think there would be a lot to be said for scoring it in the same way that music is scored, where you have “rests” marked. You can even mark the rate at which it is to be played. In fact, each communication requires the appropriate amount of time, otherwise illumination cannot take place anyway.
Take a book that I found extremely illuminating – Matte Blanco's The Unconscious as Infinite Sets (1975). It is a tough book to read; in fact, when you first take a look at it you think, “I haven't got time to read this kind of thing”, because it is perfectly obvious that either it is an outflowing of more and more theory, or it really has a meaning, in which case one has to spend a great deal of time reading it. To give people an idea of the time required for reading a particular book, it would be helpful to indicate, for example, “120 pages an hour”, or, “9 pages an hour”.
The illumination, as I have called it, is a very rare event, but it is built up in the time spent beforehand that extends far beyond the areas of any analytic experience. Some people know a good deal about life already, and then they are in a position to understand.
When I went into the army in the First World War, I struggled to learn drill and all that stuff, and I really thought I was a soldier by the time I had been gazetted as an officer. I discovered I didn't know the first thing about it, and the more I saw of