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It's wrong what they say about the past […] about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out…
To what extent, Bion (1967a) asks, can we rely on the luxury of sticking to a part of the total experience which is verbally communicable? Bion makes use of the spectrum of the electromagnetic waves as an analogy for emphasizing the limits of our sensory apparatus which receives only a small part of the spectrum. The wavelengths visible to us fall in a narrow strip of visual perception in between the infrared on the one end and the ultraviolet on the other. We cannot see the ones that fall off these ends, but they are nevertheless there. Using that as an analogy, Bion suggests that thanks to verbal capacity, there is a certain realm of mental life, which we can speak of in terms like personality and so forth. This is the small part of the spectrum, in which one could talk about it as being verbally communicable. However, the psychoanalytic encounter compels us to observe and meet those areas of the mind that lie beyond that narrow sphere. We see a patient who seems an ordinary neurotic patient, Bion says, but as the analysis goes on, he seems to have what one might call a