10 July 1978. A Paris Seminar

Bion: I must explain why I have to speak English. It is partly because I don't speak French, although I have learned or been taught French as it is spoken in the English Public Schools, but it is not the sort of French that you would understand. There are other reasons which will become clearer as we go on with our discussion.

I would like you to regard this as a working conference in which this problem is one which faces all of us. For example, a young man of twenty-five complains of having an unsatisfactory family life; I am not sure what family he is talking about, and in the course of a preliminary discussion I ask him his age and he says forty-two. Forty-two? But I said twenty-five just now. As I see him more closely I notice lines on his face, and every now and then I think he looks more like sixty-two than forty-two or twenty-five. Well, what is his age?

The first question I put to you is, will you take this patient or not? I am not suggesting that you should tell the patient or me or anybody else, but what do you tell yourself? If you want to write down your immediate impression now, it would perhaps be interesting to you to make a note saying “yes” or “no”. To answer that question I propose to use a procedure in which I assume a “vertex” from which I could form some impression as to whether I want to see this patient again. Suppose you walked into a bookshop, picked up a book, turned a few pages and read what I have just said. Would you put the book down and pass on to another? Or would you like to turn over some more pages before making up your mind whether to read that book or not? So there's my second question: are you interested in this story; do you want to read any more of it?

I'll try another one: suppose it was a piece of music you were hearing. Would this sort of music interest you? Would you decide to

go to a concert and hear the rest of the piece of music? Or would you decide that it was not your kind of music? That is another vertex. Of course,