Letters to the Editors: On: Whose Bion? Who is Bion?

Dear Sirs,

I am very much in agreement with de Bianchedi in the belief that ‘the injunction to eschew memory, desire, and understanding gives us a model of an “evenly suspended attention”’, one which ‘is not Bion's perspective of Freud's proposition of an evenly suspended attention, but something much more complex and difficult to achieve’ (2005, p. 1532). Indeed, freedom from memory, desire and understanding must be established ‘as a permanent, durable and continuous discipline’(Bion, 1992, p. 315). But why should one feel compelled to engage in such arduous discipline? My response is: because there cannot be a really free-floating attention without freedom from memory, desire and understanding. On one side, free association and free-floating attention are not free at all, being just determined by unconscious drives and motives rather than by conscious intentions. On the other side, the recommendation to the analyst to work with an open mind, free from any preconception (Freud, 1912), means that the analyst should discipline his or her attention for it to remain evenly or freely suspended, that is not conditioned by the associative flux, nor by the analyst's theory. Only to the extent that such discipline (only implicit in Freud but made explicit by Bion) has been established is one free from the opacities that obstruct intuition. The more the analyst can approximate this freedom, ‘the more confidently can he discount the origin of his observations as due to the “personal equation”’ (Bion, 1992, p. 315).

As far as I know, Bion never used the term phenomenology to refer to his own approach, nor does de Bianchedi make any reference to the strict similarity between Bion's and the phenomenological approach. Yet they are so similar that one can hardly tell one from the other. The basic assumption is the same, i.e. the assertion of or the belief in the possibility of a direct, non-mediated knowledge of things through the faculty of intuition. In both perspectives, intuitio