A Discussion of Elizabeth T. de Bianchedi's “The Passionate Psychoanalyst or Learning from the Emotional Experience”

The most beautiful, the most profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and science.

I am very pleased to discuss another of Dr. Bianchedi's papers for this scientific meeting. I was intrigued when I first read the title of her paper, “The Passionate Psychoanalyst.” Given the atmosphere of disciplined restraint that we practice in, it is refreshing to find the word “passion” figuring so prominently in a psychoanalytic paper, and being used in such a creative and evocative manner. Let me move right to the heart of Dr. Bianchedi's paper, passion.

Passion, as Bion describes it, has a specific meaning, a meaning which Dr. Bianchedi uses to touch on theory, technique, communication, primitive states, emotion, and mysticism. Passion involves a fundamental exchange of emotion between people, or within oneself in communication with an internal presence. As Bion states, the shared emotion in this link is “experienced with intensity and warmth though without any suggestion of violence.”1 Dr. Bianchedi elaborates on the profound importance of this passionate emotional link, in that from prenatal development onwards it allows for registering emotional experience, leading to the capacity for “feeling one's feelings, to suffer and have pleasure emotionally,” and, eventually, to self-awareness. In other words, it makes possible the very essence of being human, the capacity to have access to and live through a private emotional