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«Thought (Diànoia) is able to enunciate all it receives from representation and express it through words».
Analytic tradition demands that research be centred on the clinical aspect, with the result that «scientific» psychoanalytical works consist mainly of clinical accounts (anamnesis, descriptions of sessions, associations by the patient, interpretations by the analyst). This tradition unconsciously tends to withdraw from the method of Freud, who favoured conjectural thought in constructing psycho-analysis. We can consider Bion's objection to this tradition as the first step in his research, and at the same time, as something so basic that it has taken on the value of a proposal for methodological change, rich in consequences.
I have always suspected, writes Bion (in Second Thoughts, Introduction), «that narrating a case or referring the interpretations given it, are two different ways of saying the same thing, or two different things said about the same fact. What was a doubt became a conviction. I tried to formulate the reasons behind these convictions in three works (Learning from Experience, Elements of Psycho-analysis and Transformations).
I do not think that narrating a case is the same as referring observation data, or that these concern what “was said” by the patient