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“Should we be worried?” Reis asks, and goes on: “These are analytic schools that cannot agree on almost any facet of psychoanalysis, and yet we find robust agreement when it comes to the issue of silence” (p. 73). In fact, we really should be worried about the prospect of a day when we have a perfectly unified, coherent and shared psychoanalytic theory. At that point we would be obliged to acknowledge that we have managed to eliminate any element of ambiguity. But, as they say, we would have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. Ambiguity is often used as a synonym for confusion or contradiction, but they are two different things. There are infinite ways to interpret a line of poetry, but there are also infinite interpretations that we would reject as arbitrary or absurd. As in art, ambiguity makes us see the same object simultaneously from several perspectives. When this happens, we can say that things seem true and real to us—and ourselves with them. So the idea that psychoanalysis can approach the vision that science has of inanimate phenomena is for us the most dangerous one.
But this same impulse arises from a disease that concerns psychoanalysis itself. Bion diagnosed it lucidly, and throughout his work he strived to cure it—the triad of arrogance, curiosity and stupidity. For example, in his essay about the first of these, entitled “On Arrogance” (Bion, 1958), he writes that Oedipus' problem is not the sexual crime but the fact that he stubbornly interrogated the Sphinx; that he wanted to know the truth “at any cost;” where it is immediately clear that what is at issue is not wanting to know the truth—which he defines as indispensable “food for the mind”—but a certain “absolute” (metaphysical, positivist) or naive truth (the truth of common sense). The drive to seek an absolute truth or to assume a rigid “scientific” posture arises in psychoanalysis from an ill-concealed moralism, disguised as causal theories, which ends up dealing not with what is true and