The Ineffable Effable

Being bitten by a snake is not a memory one forgets easily. My father did not. He recounts that he was nine or ten years old when, in the middle of the night, he got bitten by a snake. As pain and dizziness began to take hold of him, the village elders responded with panic and wisdom in equal measures. Snake sighting or bites were after all not so uncommon. He does not remember very much except that those attending to him kept pouring cold water from the well nearby to keep him “awake.” When I think about this memory, I imagine him as a child in the grips of a terrifying and incommunicable state, that of the fear of dying. One can imagine that in the memory is the memory of being neither dead nor alive. The cold splashes of water that prevented him from fading into a venomous sleep create a caesura, or a raging river between two banks of the psychic experience of life and death (Bergstein, 2013). Like snakebites, the bite on the analyst’s linking function that make her a human soup, in Bion’s words, is not so uncommon. I think of the times when the analysis appears to be dead in the water. The image came back to me while working with Samar, as I began confronting chaotic and fragmented material that she offered as an elegy for the unbearable states of mind. Like my father’s memory, I appeared to be going in and out the session only to be brought back by flashes of her voice imploring me to not give up. I would repeatedly find myself confused and helpless. In a way, it was easy to lose sight of the terror that she was experiencing. Such emotional turbulence, thought Bion (1982), requires that we move “without gripping onto any of the banks in a way that halts movement” (p. 625). Samar’s inchoate states started to form a language of pain in migraines. Over several sessions a storm of associations or day material came pouring from her – all pointing toward a cold, intrusive and exhausting world to live in. During this time, she began caring for feral kittens who, like