Commentary 22

The first point that I would like to address in Rudi Vermote's text concerns the author's own commentary on his working method. He emphasises that his presentational technique relates to that of Bion and his grid, and to the concern with maintaining contact with the patient's psychic reality during the session and thus with avoiding mention of his patient's biographical details. My own concept of psychoanalytic listening differs

from our colleague's in that, for me, the psychoanalytic listening unfolds ‘within the transference’; that is, it assumes that what occurs in the session is, first, a repetition of part of the patient's earlier subjective history (first form of transference: transference as repetition) and, second, also a new creation, a re-creation of this history in the space of the session. (The transference is also a new way of bringing back into play what has occurred previously.)

My own listening is therefore concerned just as much with what it is that is being repeated as with the transformation that this repetition produces in the session, or what it brings to representation. My listening therefore seeks out just as much the history itself as the particular form in which it is actualised. The patient's ‘psychic reality’ appears to me to catch at the chiasmus or meeting point of these two dimensions of the transference, and affect or affective contact seems to arise at the point when a part of the past ‘re-presents’ itself in a different way.

Furthermore, the ‘reminiscent past’ in the session seems to relate to different levels, or to different temporal modes, which structure the history and organisation of the ‘sexual’. I distinguish four temporal modes or four organising moments in the life of the drives:

1. The first of these relates to the primitive communication that unfolds in the earliest stages of life, primordial time, and it concerns the organisation of the ego/non-ego distinction. Briefly,