1 “Bion’s patient, Frances Tustin, vividly described what I suspect is key in Bion’s clinical method, and that is his intention to bring about change in what the patient is able to see themselves, rather than telling the patient what he himself is seeing.”

2 “What I think one sees, however, both in the later 1960s and in his supervisions of the 1970s, is how he is learning to go in closer to the shared reality of the analytic present — he’s working at bearing a greater contact with something that has a life in its own right. Tustin describes it as his respect for the organic process of psychoanalysis.”

3 “In Chapter 6 I looked at the 52 Brazilian seminars. Here we can listen for patterns that emerge across the cases. To briefly summarize:  the first thing Bion says is most often a question. He does this by asking … an unexpected question, and frequently something the patient and the presenting analyst may be taking for granted. In the heart of the supervision Bion uses abstraction in formulating the patient’s core way of relating. It has quite a Kleinian feel. He focuses on the relationships between objects…”

4 “Bion abstracts from the various relations to determine what the core qualities of the patent’s relations are. The objects may vary, but something in the relationship between them stays constant. What this is then is interpreted to the patient. How does this fit with what I said earlier about him wanting the patient and supervisee to have their capacity to see for themselves open up, rather than being told what Bion is seeing. At first sight Bion’s implicit clinical methods in the supervisions would seem to be to do with knowing. At the same time, from the mid to late 60s onwards, Bion has clearly stated that psychoanalysis needs to work at the level of being rather than that of knowing. The differentiation of knowing about and being drawn clearly in his writings is very interesting to think about in relation to the Brazilian clinical seminars. Although he doesn’t talk about it explicitly, one can see reading the supervisions, I think, that his concern is to take the presenting analyst and members of the seminar in closer to the patient, in closer to the analytic present. This requires the questioning of assumptions being made by the  analyst and by the patient. It’s very important, the question of the assumptions, in the going in closer to the analytic present.”

5 “His core formulation in each of the seminars is what he would intend to use in an interpretation. But what for Bion is the function of an interpretation? It isn’t to give the patient something to know. A crucial factor in this is how Bion would come to the interpretation in the first place. He does make reference to the disturbing processes the analyst needs to pass through in coming to an interpretation in the first place, involving both paranoid schizoid and depressive position experiences. He also says the patient won’t accept an interpretation unless he or she senses the analyst has experientially worked for it themselves. Bion doesn’t tell us very much about his own experience when giving specific illustrations form his own work. But one imagines that when he’s talking about the difference between knowing about and being, that it is something he has deeply grappled with himself.”

6 “… Bion talks about how he thinks we over-moderate our thinking because we want to be reasonable and because we’re afraid of being maniacal. He was engaged in stretching what we could do and taking on the fears it stirred up in him and trying to devise the equipment that would help him know when he had gone off course…. I think he was a different kind of thing. Not only more of the same kind of thing.”

7 “… it is an experience many people have had that you can read Bion and not really understand him and yet it gets your own thinking going. So, what gets your thinking going is not a comprehensible narrative. It’s something about the kind of thinking he is doing himself. He wanted to get people’s thinking going, that would have informed the way he wrote and whether he edited or not. But it’s the quality of his thinking that gets our thinking going. I think even if we’re not understanding it in a comprehensive kind of way.”

8 “On the topic of Bion being difficult to read: That reminded me of Bion saying Freud knew who he was, what he was…. Did Bion know what he was? And the sense you get from it is: did Freud let himself fill the space he was capable of filling. I do think Bion wanted to fill the space he was capable of filling. I think he did think he was on a journey and other people would be on their journeys and come across him and be helped or not. And perhaps even understand things he hadn’t. But best he could do was leave a record of the journey. As raw as was possible to do that.  Accurate and raw.”

9 “I am reminded, too, that Freud, in the early days, in one of the letters he writes, says he’s learned to do this different kind of thing, which is let his mind do its own thing. And trust that it will — subjects will come up if and when they’re ready. And he says, I dream my days away. And Freud, then one imagines, had to put that aside because he wanted to establish psychoanalysis — as a more mechanical model. But he wanted to establish it, didn’t he? So, he put aside something else that he describes as dreaming my day away, and Bion didn’t put it aside.”

10 “My last point about the book: Bion talks about darkening the room metaphorically. We did try to do that. We tried to put out the lights and just focus the beam on to his clinical examples. So … for me in the 60s, not to look at the paper memory and desire,  not to look at the commentary, but to look at where he described something of his actual clinical work with a patient, not where he was thinking about it more generally. And I think that’s very illuminating.”