D.W. Winnicott and the Position of the Analyst and the Analysand in the Psychoanalytic Situation

1 In his paper “Differentiation of the Psychotic from the Nonpsychotic Personalities”, read to the British Psycho-Analytical Society on October 5, 1955, Wilfred Bion reports some clinical material with the comment — typical of his knack for turning the usual perspectives upside down — “it is a clinical experience based on these theories rather than the description of an experience on which the theories are based” (1957, 52). Bion then proceeds to recount the initial part of the session, involving a patient who had arrived a quarter of an hour late, and spent some time turning from one side to another on the couch, trying to find a comfortable position: “At length he said, ‘I don't suppose I shall do anything today. I ought to have rung up my mother’. He paused and then said: ‘No; I thought it would be like this’. A more prolonged pause followed; then: ‘Nothing but filthy things and smells’, he said. ‘I think I've lost my sight’. Some twenty-five minutes of our time had now passed, and at this point I made an interpretation, but before I repeat it I must discuss some previous material which will, I hope,