Discussion of Cláudio Eizirik's: “The Analytic Field: Bastions, Surprises, and Movement”1

It is a very great pleasure to discuss Dr. Eizirik's rich and evocative paper. I was especially compelled by the felicitous experience of encountering both what was familiar and initially unfamiliar to me in reading his work. And, as I take this up, I thought I would do so less in the spirit of finding “common ground.” Instead, I hope to emphasize this experience of the unfamiliar as a means of exploring some of the developments concerning the specificity of psychoanalytic theory and practice today. In this way, I hope to make a few links among and between modern psychoanalytic thinkers who — in their own fashion — seem to independently converge as well as diverge in their thinking on some of the key ideas that potentially extend and develop our understanding of psychoanalytic work today.

One of whom I particularly like is Wilfred Bion. In a number of his works, he quotes Emmanuel Kant's observation — that intuition without a concept is blind and a concept without intuition is empty. He actually used this quote in 1975 on a visit to Brasilia, the new capital of Brazil. There, along with teaching and lecturing, he participated in a panel discussion titled: “Brasilia, a new experience” (1975/1994). (Bion was referring to the “shock” of the new city and capital of Brazil, completed in 1960 and built on a high, flat plain in the central part of the country. A planned city with Modernist design and a utopian vision, Brasilia was at the time the object of considerable controversy.)