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Dear Editors,
P.C. Sandler's comments on Giuseppe Civitarese's paper ‘Transformations in hallucinosis and the receptivity of the analyst’ raise some questions concerning the scope of discussions among psychoanalysts and the conditions in which they can be fruitful. What is the aim of our debates? Do we intend to grasp the specific understanding and sensitivity of a particular colleague on a certain issue? This would imply that we are willing to listen not only to our patients but also to our colleagues and be ready to learn something from them. Are we to defend a certain orthodoxy, which is irremediably our orthodoxy as opposed to the other's orthodoxy? In this last case the risk is, as Bion (1965, p. 37) pointed out, to pervert the communication of knowledge into propaganda. Do we think that there are definitely established truths in psychoanalysis or can we really accept the troubling idea that different legitimate points of view exist which can be put to discussion? This would demand the humility to consider the possibility that our beloved and idealized truths are not universally shared and maybe even that they are not as true as we would like.
This thorny problem is still more acute with Bion. As it has been often said, there is not one Bion but several. Amongst the Bions I appreciate there is the one that commented on the way we should read papers in order to avoid a defensive reading: “Freud's papers should be read and forgotten: only in this way is it possible to produce the conditions in which, when it is next read, it can stimulate the evolution of further development” (1967, p. 156). This same Bion suggested to his supervisees a certain state of mind “Don't try to understand me! Pay attention to your emotional response to me!” (Grottstein, 2008, pp. 7-8). To forget what we have read in order to allow its underground growth, to pay attention to what arises in our mind through the contact with our predecessors' thinking: following this train of thought, we mi