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Freud, in his paper ‘The resistances to psychoanalysis’ (1925e) commented: ‘the source of this unpleasure is the demand made upon the mind by anything that is new, the psychical expenditure that it requires, the uncertainty, mounting up to anxious expectancy, which it brings along with it’ (p. 213). This resistance, of course, does not apply merely to psychoanalytic explanations of individual behaviour but also to group and organizational contexts. Bion, in his first set of Brazilian Lectures (1974), in discussing the fallacy of the Euclidian geometry, both convincing and misleading, contrasts this with the artist who enables the viewer to ignore the piece of canvas and the smell of paint to see better an avenue of trees and a pond. He suggests that objects are either visual, comprehensible, and wrong, or accurate and incomprehensible (pp. 20-21). This defence of the unseeable is contrasted with some later advice to the analyst that he should be talking about real life: ‘No interpretation is any good unless it is reminiscent of real life’ (p. 24). While he seemingly supports those who will use psychoanalysis in their own way, he also says, ‘I would like to know what the people who are going to get control of psychoanalysis mean to use it for, and how they are going to use this extraordinary invention of human speech’ (p. 49). In his lectures in New York and Sao Paulo (1980), Bion suggests, in answer to a question, that instead of writing a book called The Interpretation of Dreams someone should write a book called ‘The Interpretation of Facts’, translating them into dream language not just as a perverse exercise, but in order to open up two-way traffic. He seems to be saying that the mental domain cannot be contained within the framework of psychoanalytic theory since it is not a ‘container’ but a ‘probe’ (Bion, 1970, pp. 72 and 73). I mention these sources to underline the difficulty and challenge to those who would translate fact into dreams or conscious into unco