109. Letter from Donald Winnicott to Wilfred R. Bion, 5th October 1967

5th October 1967.

Dear Bion,

First to thank you for a very interesting evening.1

I am not quite settled in my mind about the idea of memory and desire or intention. When I got home Clare reminded me again that the phrase memory and desire, which you have used before, is a quotation from T. S. Eliot, and she was able to give me the whole poem, and for some reason or other I accept memory and desire as naturally interrelated in the poem. At the same time in the application of the same idea to psycho-analytic work I cannot help finding myself using the word intention and not feeling desire to be correct. As you said, we each have to find the word that fits for oneself. For me, memory and desire is all right in a poem because it refers to an experience that is 100% subjective. In the application to psycho-analytic work I find I cannot allow that this is 100% subjective. The memory includes memories of phenomena from external reality and certainly what is likely to turn up tomorrow in my analytic work cannot be covered by what I have in my own mind to want, precisely because I have to be able to allow the patient to be a separate person, as the patient has to come to be able to allow me to be outside his or her omnipotent control.

So you see why it is that I find myself unhappy with your word desire in this context.