Memory and Desire: Response to Discussion

To the Editors: I regret that I feel utterly without the expertise necessary for providing the kind of discussion of Dr. Bion's paper on Memory and Desire that you request from me. The following remarks, however, are a few off-the-cuff comments addressed privately to you and to whomever on your staff you may wish to show them.1

Dr. Bion's approach, which you characterize in your letter as “highly unorthodox and revolutionary,” is, it seems to me, not without precedent, both in the reported literature and the unreported annals of psychoanalysis. Not long ago there was a paper in one of the psychoanalytic journals on the therapeutic effect of long silences—hour after hour, as I recall it—on both the analyst's and the patient's part, this to offer a kind of soothing acceptance of the patient's need for just this sort of thing.

Going this innovator one further, analysts sometime doze during hours, and one seriously defended to me the marvelous therapeutic potential of sleeping clear through the hour. How reassuring for the child to know that it can pacify its feared mother this way!

And one analyst I know encourages his ex-patients to write him long letters which, he confided, he never reads. But he bills heavily for his reading time, lest the patients feel that they are unappreciated.

Now Dr. Bion comes along and suggests—nay, insists—that we forget the patient, everything he has told us, and treat the patient every day as if we had never seen him before. This may be just the thing for analysts with senile loss of memory, but it does not go far enough. The really revolutionary approach would be to stay away from the hour entirely—to not even leave a tape recorder in one's place. Unfortunately, few patients might be able to afford such treatment.

I recall a bit from one of the Marx Brothers movies where a spokesman for the brothers, who are supposed to be itinerant musicians, is dickering with Mrs. Richbitch about what they are to be paid for playing at one