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Bion: The difficulty in practice is this matter of scrutinizing what I have called conversationally – I would hate it to become a technical term – the debris. Perhaps what I mean by that may become clearer as I go on talking about it.
When the analysand comes into the room, is it possible to see the total situation, as it were, having denuded oneself as far as possible of one's preconceptions so that there is a chance of being aware of any facts that need to be observed? Although I am concerned fundamentally with talking to the patient, I am also concerned with the fact that he has a body and a mind. That division – body and mind – is convenient for conversational purposes, but it is a distortion of the facts because he is not “a body and a mind”: I find it useful to think of a person as “your Self”. But I would also like to make it clearer what I mean by “your Self” when I am wanting to stress either the somatic or the mental qualities.
Take this instance of the patient who appears to be perfectly fit and healthy, comes in, gets onto the couch and lies down. After a time you begin to notice that he hardly seems to disturb the covers on the couch; when he gets up and goes out, you don't have to smooth the covers – there has been hardly any movement. As you go on observing, a pattern begins to emerge (as Freud put it, quoting Charcot) and you notice that the patient lies precisely in exactly the same place. There is nothing remarkable about that, but when he lies in exactly the same place day after day, week after week, year after year, then I think you begin to be suspicious that he might just as well be lying on the edge of a precipice; from the amount of movement that he makes, he is lying in exactly the way that he might appear physically if he was in a cataleptic state.
It takes quite a long time before you see a point like that; it builds up over a period, and then you gradually see that there is something peculiar about it. The next thing you notice is that he