Chapter 1 Setting the Scene

Once the stage is set, psychoanalysis ‘gets to work’, inevitably, immediately and as of its own accord. Transference, repetition, regressive modes of thinking are set in motion. The scene includes an analysand who is suffering and making a demand, a psychoanalyst who is offering help, is receptive and unhurried, sessions at an intensive frequency and at regular times in the same place, and with the analysand in the reclining position. Bion (1979b, p. 247) writes:

In analysis, the patient comes into contact with the analyst by coming to the consulting room and engaging in what he thinks is a conversation which he hopes to benefit by in some way. Likewise the analyst probably expects some benefit to occur – to both parties. The patient or the analyst says something. It is curious that this has an effect – it disturbs the relationship between the two people. This would be true if nothing was said, if they remained silent.

But the ‘scene’ is above all a reference to the scenarios which will, from the first moment, be created by the patient with the participation of the analyst, with whose own scenes they will interlock. There will be a constant process of locking and interlocking, which it is the task of the analyst to monitor and reflect upon. A feature of the scene is the implied ‘other’, be it another mental space, another realm, another time, another object, in short a fantasy scenario, even while the ‘here and now’ of the two people in the room is clambering. Whether we call it ‘psychic reality’, ‘unconscious’, ‘illusion’, ‘phantasy’, ‘transference’, this element is a defining feature of psychoanalysis. The stage is set in order to facilitate maximal

observation of this other scene, if the analyst is able to weather the ‘emotional storm’ (Bion, 1979b, p. 247). From this encounter develops a ‘language’, one which gives meaning to experience. The psychoanalytic interpretation is made within this context, “a context whose co-ordinates are fixed by the patient's deman