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17th November 1960.
Dear Bion:
As I said to you on the way out, I enjoyed the challenge of your paper last night.1 The question I want to ask you is whether the psychotics on whom you are basing the ideas are people that you would think of as having had the capacity to dream and having lost it? Alternatively are they people who have never achieved this elbow room between the concrete and the abstract, or between psychic reality and external reality? If the former is the case, I suppose these patients have memories of dreaming and this must make a difference.
I expect that the right answer to all this will be that you are not talking directly about clinical work, but nevertheless it seems to me that you invite us to wonder whether the state of affairs which we recognise quite easily has an etiology. Another way of getting at this point would be to ask you what it is in the analysis that may possibly enable a patient who cannot dream and who cannot either sleep or wake to achieve at last the dream?
I hope you will understand that I am not expecting you to write a letter answering these questions. It is simply that I wanted to write you and put into question form the place where I was able to come into contact with your paper last night. I know that I have not been able to assimilate yet the more important aspects. Perhaps the most important thing that you are doing is to begin to deal with the challenge of the psychiatrists who could turn us all into scientific research workers and we don't know how to say why it is that we hope this won't happen. You have suggested that our attitude must eventually [address] the whole question of scientific proof.
Thank you for a very good evening.
Yours sincerely,