When the Analyst Becomes Stupid: An Attempt to Understand Enactment Using Bion's Theory of Thinking

First I talk to a patient and then I go to sleep. If I dream, I take the patient on. If I don't dream I send him to a scientific medical doctor.

There are clinical situations in which, in the face of the threat of a catastrophic breach in the analytic field (acute enactment), the analyst reproaches himself—imagining that, without realizing it, he has invaded the analytic field with aspects of his own. Later he may realize that he has let himself be recruited by aspects of the patient, and he then accuses himself for having been stupid and arrogant. But in going back over the clinical material, the analyst may discover that he and his patient were involved in an unconscious, chronic collusion (chronic enactment), which preceded the acute enactment. During this collusion, any realization of triangular reality was blocked.

It becomes clear that stupidity and arrogance did in fact occur during the chronic enactment, and that the stupidity kept it from being noted. Attacks on the perception of reality during the chronic enactment