“As if” We Were There: Bion and the Recorded Session

The archive comes to us and calls to us. Preceded by a disclaimer, “please treat this as if it were private patient material,” this document is indeed “as if” private. If it is patient material, what matter of material is it? Maybe its materiality is precisely what is at stake, captured on a document that can be printed on paper or read on a laptop or iPad; all possibilities that the patient, known as Mrs. C, could not possibly know about any more than those who conceived this experiment in recording and archivization did. What did those who conceived this project want from this experiment? What do we do with their apparent wishes to hold and contain something through microphone, tape, and transcription that would otherwise have escaped?

You might imagine the transcript to contain the raw report, the blow-by-blow of a he said/she said, refreshingly free of professional commentary from those who know better after the fact, and to some extent, that is true. But the transcript also includes the gravitas of parenthetical numbers at regular intervals as well as the numbered turns of the analyst and analysand in each session, marking the text as a document to be pondered, cited, and recited with reference to these numbers. These markings transmit to the reader a subtle demand to undertake a serious study through reading and re-reading. To start with, this is something I want to resist, although I know that eventually I will heed the desire that I imagine I am inheriting, that the text be read and studied.

If I am honest, I have to admit that I do want to return to the text, to re-read it, to honor these oddly preserved exchanges from so long ago. But before I do, I want to allow for my impressions from my one and, so far, only reading of the sessions of Mrs. C to be inscribed. In doing so, I may be trying to recreate the materiality of the session “as if” it were patient material, spoken and imperfectly recalled, but not recorded or subject to precise capture such that each