You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The idea of truth has, for psychoanalysts, some specific features that should be examined and defined by psychoanalysts themselves. If, following Bion, we agree that truth is, for the mind, what food is for the digestive system, it becomes particularly important to define what we psychoanalysts mean by “truth” when we make use of the word in our everyday practice. In every analytical experience, the part of “truth” that comes to the fore does so in a more or less falsified way in order for it to be experienced. “Becoming O” implies an emotional experience during which knowledge takes shape in the mind to an ever-increasing degree of structuring and complexifying. Free association and evenly-suspended attention make up a continuum in which a shared space is gradually built up as a backdrop to how that experience is expressed. The ability to come closer to “truth as O”, without memory or desire, implies that we start from open-ended knowledge in order to attain a kind of knowledge that is unsaturated. The writer approaches the concept of “truth” in the analytical relationship, in the relation between transference and countertranference.