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This short, highly condensed paper with its aphoristic style seems provocatively nihilistic of all that we have learned as psychoanalysts. Yet, as I see it, Dr. Bion's recommendations to resist desires and the impulses to remember—the points to which I will address myself—are logical extensions of Freud's theories and recommendations on technique.
This paper easily can be misunderstood because of its style and brevity. Actually, Dr. Bion's recommendations are such that the analyst must work harder, and must have justified trust in his memory and his mental health.
He suggests that each session be treated as if it were an initial consultation, i.e., with the analyst's being without preconceptions and having every sensitive antenna alerted for clues. As I understand Dr. Bion, he urges the analyst to resist the impulse to remember so that the patient's associations can act more easily upon the analyst's unconscious to show the new ways of linking the material of that session with the patient's history and preceding sessions.
These new links of present-transference-past will come to the analyst as his free-floating associations to the patient's material. That these new links may lead to new areas of insight about which the analyst may have unconscious resistance is, I believe, as much a cause of the increased anxiety in the analyst who tries this method as the fact that he is using a new technique.
This is but a logical extension of Freud's advice that the psychoanalyst should observe what the patient is unconsciously trying to show, in the same manner that one in a moving railroad car and looking out the window will observe scenes which seem to have no connection.
I first heard of Dr. Bion's ideas about a year ago. Some weeks later, they came to mind while I was feeling irritated at my lack of understanding for the past month of a woman patient who was then in her seventh year of analysis (two with a previous analyst). Feeling that I had little to lose since the analysis ha