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The technique, however, is a very simple one…. It consists simply in not directing one’s notice to anything in particular and in maintaining the same ‘evenly suspended attention’.
This chapter is based on a paper written jointly with John Steiner (Britton and Steiner 1994). We wanted to describe the use by the analyst of the intuitively selected fact in the evolution of his or her interpretations and to draw attention to its hazardous similarity to the crystallisation of delusional certainty from an overvalued idea. Overvalued ideas are likely to arise from overdetermined unconscious beliefs. In that paper we discussed the problem of distinguishing between the two clinically, and stressed the importance of monitoring the subsequent development in sessions following interpretations in order to try to do so. We agreed to look together at clinical material from our own work for suitable examples where we thought the selected fact crystallised the current analytic situation and where we thought an overvalued idea impeded analytic understanding. The case material we chose I have used in this chapter. By not disclosing whose work it was in either of the cases we wanted to emphasise that at times in any analyst’s work a selected fact is quite likely to be an overvalued idea. It also added some protection to confidentiality for the patients. For both these reasons I have written in this chapter as if I was the analyst in both cases.
Bion suggested that the organisation in the analyst’s mind of thoughts about the patient resembles a process described by Poincaré in his ‘Science and method’ (Poincaré quoted in Bion 1967:127). This process begins with some particular fact among an accumulation of facts arresting the attention of the scientist in such a way that all the others fall into a pattern or configuration by their relationship to this selected fact. Bion adopted the
term ‘selected fact’ because he believed a similar process took place in the analyst’s mi