"Truth shall spring out of the earth…": The analyst as gatherer of sense impressions.

In this paper, the author reflects on the analyst's attempt to approach the unknowable, ultimate reality of the psychoanalytic experience, and the unrepressed unconscious. Drawing on both Freud's conception of 'attention' and Bion's emphasis on the power of observation, the paper explores the clinical implications of the notion of intuition as a primary tool in this endeavour. Intuition is often associated with Bion's thinking about the apprehension of psychic reality.

Violent emotions and the violence of life.

The paper discusses the violence of emotions and the violent retaliation against the mind as a way of protecting oneself against overwhelming pain. Leaning on Bion's thinking, it is suggested that violence may be an outcome of a quantity of excitation that the individual is unable to elaborate mentally. This violence is often dormant, covered by a veneer of civilization.

The Psychotic Part of the Personality: Bion'S Expeditions into Unmapped Mental Life.

The psychotic part of the personality is seen as a multidimensional mental realm that is fully comprehensible only through intuition and tolerance of approximations, transience, and the notion of infinity. It is suggested that a major differentiating factor between the psychotic and nonpsychotic parts of the personality is the capacity to tolerate the infinite complexity of the human mind. With the use of mathematical concepts, Bion tries to describe the state of mind required of the analyst who endeavors to tread on psychotic territories of the personality.

Obsessionality: Modulating the Encounter with Emotional Truth and the Aesthetic Object.

Experiences with autistic and primitive mental states have significant implications for our understanding of obsessionality. Consequently, obsessionality is seen as an attempt at a massive simplification of experience, in order to deal with the pain inherent in the encounter with intense emotional experience and with the separateness of an enigmatic object that eludes one's omnipotent control. Moreover, early loss and a precocious awareness of separateness often play roles in the withdrawal to obsessional thinking and verbosity, and to an illusion of omnipotent control of the object.

ATTACKS ON LINKING OR A DRIVE TO COMMUNICATE? TOLERATING THE PARADOX.

The notion of attacks on linking, as described by Bion, may depict a patient's drive to communicate the internalization of a destructive relationship between a primary object and an infant. This may be enacted between patient and analyst in the here and now of the analysis, whereby fragmentation and numbing of thinking may point to a primitive catastrophe relived in the psychoanalytic setting. The patient's material may seem incoherent, but incoherence might be the communication the patient is unconsciously trying to convey.

Transcending the caesura: reverie, dreaming and counter-dreaming.

The author reflects about our capacity to get in touch with primitive, irrepresentable, seemingly unreachable parts of the Self and with the unrepressed unconscious. It is suggested that when the patient's dreaming comes to a halt, or encounters a caesura, the analyst dreams that which the patient cannot. Getting in touch with such primitive mental states and with the origin of the Self is aspired to, not so much for discovering historical truth or recovering unconscious content, as for generating motion between different parts of the psyche.

On boredom: a close encounter with encapsulated parts of the psyche.

The psychoanalytical literature has numerous scattered references to the analyst's experience of boredom, especially amongst writers working with primitive mental states. In the present paper, the author tries to gather some of these references in an attempt to integrate the various facets of this widespread phenomenon, and reflect on some clinical issues and dilemmas it raises. It is suggested that the experience of boredom in analysis may be a reaction to an encounter with a hidden, encapsulated part of the psyche, a bidimensional area of experience in which mental activity has been suspended, and experience remains meaningless.