A patient has just left my study. It is the end of one day and perhaps the beginning of another... As I now sit at my desk and begin writing, I realize the surroundings have changed as well as my motivation. What does the act of writing mean in itself? Having heard the patient's tale, I must now expand upon it, give it a written form. At this time, is careful discursive work on the text an Ariadne's clew that will safely guide me through the maze? To wit, autobiographical discourse summons images that attempt to reveal and present truth. Yet, can the analysis - pursued in writing - accomodate itself of such a conventional summary of discursiveness? No. The act of writing is not the simple repetition of what I, the analyst, have already heard. The textual process present in discursive work cannot ignore translation theory. The analyst cannot subscribe to the somewhat naive fantasy that bestows immediate restorative powers to the " act " he commits by " writing. " What is written at the end of the day or in between sessions, harks back to the imaginary patient he appears to have introjected. This imaginary patient, however, is defeated and toyed with--at the risk of writing fiction.

In this respect - and also from within the literary realm - it is quite secondary that the narrative of the self not fully translate the " spoken quality " that determines the non transmissibility of the " analytical event ". The analytical " experience " in other words is the result of the interpreter’s patient construction of the historic nature that defines him fundamentally as a subject. Yet psychoanalysis as institution often appears reticent in face of any scriptural transcript that purports to " tell " or to " report " this experience.

In light of the sole clinical cure, psychoanalysis broaches literary transformation with circumspection. The explanation usually given is that there is a risk of rationalizing a posteriori the " contents " of the session, of creating a self-defensive autobiographical narrative. Within the realm of the literary, it is not important that this fictional construct translate or corrupt the " spoken " quality of the analytical experience. The critic should thus pay attention to the formalization if not the literary freedom of this analytical experience. I value this as an opportune conceptual tension between the meta-psychological requirements of the spoken analytical cure and its literary translation.

This tension highlights in fact the " unthinkable " aspect of the psychoanalytical narrative and its symptomatic nature. Case histories respond to an essentially reproductive mimetic logic. The patient exists through the symptoms he presents and the analyst is there to transcribe this speech which otherwise would sink into oblivion. I need not remind us here Freud’s heroic fantasy crowning him as conqueror, making him an explorer along the summary line between the unknown unconscious and outside reality. Such is the fancy of psychoanalysis and I dare say that it is rational, stamped though it is by metapsychological conquest. Writing becomes a mnesic clearing and only represents representation whence the concept of a self-authorized writing of the unconscious. To wit, the analyst proceeds from an internal strangeness that also destitutes him as subject. Furthermore, the writer/subject stands innocent in face of what suddenly propels him as a subject to sit at his writing table. I will expand later on on what is strikingly singular in Bion’s stance as writer/analyst in his Memoir of the Future. What Freud termed as disquieting strangeness and Bion associated with " emotional turbulence ", evokes indeed the failure of causal discourse and the dismissal of a narrativity bound to criteria of chronological and spatial verisimilitude.

I posit this disquieting strangeness as the founding instance of the narrative. It reveals the violent outbreak of the drive in search of a " representation " that can dispose freely of the unconscious. Of course, the narrative should not be seen as the advent of the unconscious. Nor can it be considered as its manifestation or a presentation thereof. In fact, it is the interpolative nature of the narrative which gives rise to strangeness. Representation can only be deferred, whether in session when the narrative of the self is " presented ", or afterwards when the analyst’s retrospective written account of this narrative stands as autofiction. The disquieting aspect of analytical writing is that it does not transcribe the psychic process but does repress within itself the scriptural construct giving it rise. Is it then any wonder that the narrative of the self is paradoxical? All the more reason why scholars often stress the mimetic nature of retrospective writing, its need to allay suspicion, its pretension to reenact the singular setting of the session.

Let me further expand on this. In order to define the singularity of analytical writing, custom dictates that I indicate how narrative fluidity is woven into it. In this respect autobiography is a colossal existential illusion. To believe that one can authenticate a narrative of the self - the very concept of the self or even the self at the heart of the narrative - posits identity as the object of the writing protocol. There is in this project an imaginary fault that touches upon the very perception of the self as projected identity. To be sure, the narrative is a secondary retelling of an identity that played itself out in session; writing then contributes to reorientate what was not told/analyzed during the cure.

This problematic has been raised by Didier Anzieu in his essay on Beckett and psychoanalysis. His argument, which does not differ much from Bion’s autofiction, is that the only way to contain the polyphony of the unconscious is to summon plural narrative " voices ". Anzieu does not set the stage for an authorized enunciator, even if Beckett appears to stand at the core of the narrative casing which allows the self to come forth. The enunciator is unknown. While he cannot attest the canonical drift that psychoanalysis institutes from without the cure, he can ascertain the passage of the smuggler personified by Beckett. Anzieu’s essay breaks down to this fundamental aporia at the center of the analysis : the status of the imaginary patient within fiction. How is he to " invest " the narrative? Along which discursive modes? At what cost can the patient’s narrative be " cannibalized " by the analyst? In a more modern vein, along which modes may the analyst want to leave his own narrative stamp?

Such is the fate of the analyst whose ascetic strictness moulds him into a silent chatterer. Yet it also transforms the listening process into one of understanding and brings the analyst to place himself in the very body of psychoanalytical theory. Some scholars may be tempted to rouse the figure of counter-transference in order to translate an experience in contradiction with harsh analytical knowledge. Others may refer to projective identification in order to qualify the intersubjective weaving between patient and analyst. To better render a listening process neither defined as memory or desire, Bion often quoted the following maxim culled from Blanchot : " La réponse est le malheur de la question. " (The answer is the misfortune of the question.) This maxim is rich in incident meaning for the analytical experience in that it also reveals the farthest limits of literary thought.

Let us now study the state of this persistent narrative stamp, laden with meaning, which is at the heart of the analytical listening process. The psychoanalyst, this silent chatterer, misunderstands the function of his speech if he believes the interior " voice " can be communicated without the alibi of discourse. He must play out a listening process respectful of the character role attributed to him amongst the many imagos summoned by the patient imaginary in the course of the session. Should he brush off this narration under the pretence that it is tied and bound to the Law of understanding, he falls victim and condemns himself to narcissistic effusion. To ignore the Law of understanding is to reject the importance of how " reality " nevertheless sets within the structure of the session, how it defines its boundaries and how it justifies its existence. In short, narration obeys the precepts of reality in that it recognizes an organizational principle at work through the various fictional worlds it gives rise to. Born of otherness, narration is also a figure of understanding. Does psychoanalytical narration then correspond to a particular setting of the listening process? Bion questions himself at length on the subject through his fantasy of a " language of accomplishment " having crystallized a signifier unencumbered by the realm of the senses. Bion’s claim of " becoming O " entails relinquishing the being itself in favor of the anobjectal fluidity of the dreamer’s Ego. In this view, the analysis would be conducted without - indeed would eliminate the need for - a narrative justifying the interpretation of patient discourse. The analyst need not play dead (as in Lacanian practice) but place himself in the space where every subject questions his origin : the caesura as transformation from which transference is possible. In actual fact, transference can only be lived from one’s dismissal of one’s desire as a (re)birth and the death sentence of the Other. Dreams are thus a transferential " other scene " that we find in Bion’s autofiction. It takes apart the temporal segmentation that orders the narrative :

They were having dreams - mutilated dreams - lacking a dimension like solid body that casts no shadow light. The world of reality, facts, was no longer distinguishable from dreams, unconsciousness, night. Thoughts with and thoughts without a thinker replaced a universe where discrimination ruled. Dreams had none of the distinguishable characteristics of mind, feelings, mental representations, formulations. The thinker had no thoughts, the thoughts were without thinker.

Again :

BION (with a gesture of despair, abandons his office to the three intruders and goes to sleep).

Is it not peculiar that the representation of Bion as actor integrates a dream-like dimension buoyed by fiction only to vanish in the dream told in the narrative? Letting the character go to sleep in the middle of the dream - excusing himself in such a fashion -, is it not in fact bringing him to the " reality " of his unconscious life? Bion’s sleep is all the more simulated within a dream that lets him escape the Law of understanding. On this Mycroft adds :

Surely it must be obvious to you, as it is to me, that Bion is feigning to sleep as a cloak for stealing my time and my capacity as a substitute for his truly real and majestic stupidity?

Is Bion the author-container of his book-contained? Or are we to consider an autoanalytical, individuative process, a pure container-contents encased in other containers, where Bion strives to be thought of in terms of the (autonomous) contents of the psychic life he re-presents?

SHERLOCK : (to Watson) Has he gone? It’s humiliating to think that dreams are at the mercy of people who dream.

MYCROFT : It’s worse to realize that thoughts are dependent on finding a thinker.

MYCROFT : He is what these real characters call " waking up ". At present he has the sense to think he’s the White Queen; when he is awake he will call it a fictitious character.

The dream here does not adhere to strict formalization. Not that it is without form or incoherent for that matter. It is waiting to invest itself in a form that will give consistency, constancy and contain the thoughts of the dreamer. In this perspective, the dream is the atopical inscription of a completed narration. As we refer to the dream we summon the perennial fiction of images inherent to it and this bears witness to the evocative and mortuary nature of dreaming. It places us in a temporal space which gains meaning only through the iconic strength of figurativeness showing the internal layers of the Ego-skin that pretends to dream.

In a sense, we could argue that the dream possesses its own consistency, its own weight, and that it is perfectly suited to nighttime. Yet this consistency is like a mask which is meant to show an identity void of meaning but presenting nonetheless a figure of reality. It only makes space for emptiness : the absence or forclusion of representations that are, if we follow Bion, bêta elements contained within the dream and help to prevent the implosion of the psychic apparatus. We need then recall how the dream shields stimuli in order to define the thoughts that border it and may aspire to logical status. Narration in this instance must be seen as an operative mode of thinking linked to an institutional form.

I will add that such a problematic of narration cannot ignore memory in that it may constitute a secondary form of psychoanalytical understanding. The paradox would be to sustain the institutional character of a process that expands situations and protagonists within the narrative. Bion sees the dream as a proto-model of a mental apparatus that falls back on the sense organs and can thus ingest emotional experiences transformed later on into thoughts or myths. Bion also stresses that only the dream can constitute itself in spite having pushed the Author aside. Who then narrates the dream? It is the Ego assuming its newfound identity. When interpretive passion finds its way towards the unconscious, it tightens the hold of memory and that may well be a great source of resistance to the psychoanalyst.

The fantasy at work in Bion’s fiction is that one can access the level of the thing-in-itself by paving the way through thought from K (knowledge) to O (the thing-in-itself) and expressing without betrayal this transformation into O. Bion’s experiment with fiction writing also signals the inadequacy of language to fulfill the role only it can play :

MYSELF : Much in this book has been described in narrative terms. The constructions employed could be understood if the language were known to conform to the conventions of spelling orthography, print, grammar. Are those rules to be understood as applying only to the domain of articulate speech, or is it possible that they derive from and apply to some domain of which we are unaware? Are the rules according to which I conform also to be understood to be part of the representation to which some yet undisclosed realization approximates? The matter obstrudes if I am working with someone who does not pay attention to, or attach importance to, the verbal content of what I say, but interprets the " flatus ", the breath with which I say it. I may be under the impression that my articulate, verbal transformations are what is important; he may be concerned with the breath with which I say it.

The quest for a " genuine language ", one which would give voice to the truth contained therein rather than offer a mediatized representation of it, entails a work of creation, a fictional construct. If the reader may be able to tell the fictional aspect of his work, Bion as protagonist refuses to take him for himself (Myself) and assume full authorship of his novel " about psycho-analysis : a queer affair ".

This paradox is found throughout the pages of Bion’s The Dream. The distinction between fiction and reality is always brought to the fore in the labyrinthine construction of the story and the following excerpt shows this well :

ALICE : So we are back to square one?

MYSELF : I fear so - the concern ultimately is " people "... (to Bion) : You and I are now employed in talking " as if " it were serviceable. In fact, as if " as if " itself was serviceable.

BION : There is nothing else - known to you or me.

MYSELF : Or to painters, or musicians, or poets, or one of these together.

BION : So far.

In Bion’s Memoir, the writing strives to show phenomena which are in fact difficult to represent through channels other than the mystical experience or the shared adventure of the analytical cure. This may be why the status of representation is so important to Bion. The problems created by conversational usage of simple literate English constitute an important theme of The Past Presented. Let me quote the following :

In extenuation I have found that if I say what I mean it is not English; if I write English it does not say what I mean.

I try to talk English because it is the best I know. But I do not know it well enough to speak it for the purpose of what I want to convey. [...] This is my lack and your misfortune in so far as you want me to talk a language that you can " understand ," and I want you to meet me at least half-way by talking a language I can understand.

And lastly :

It is true that if we use conventional language for the purpose for which it has been invented, the " meaning " could be said to be clear enough. But we are not using it for that purpose. But we are not using it for that purpose, and ordinary language may sometimes seem to us to be inadequate.

Bion indicates in his Memoir of the Future that the act of writing entails relinquishing capacity. He rejects in fact the metaphor of " the body of work " and questions the narcissistic projection of an identity set by the narrative of the self. In this he takes a decisive stance by ignoring this obsession with identity. He also contests within psychoanalysis the founding certitude of a primary speech whose transposition truly reflects psychic discourse. He further contests psycho-analytical identity in his Memoir. In The Dream, Bion at times ironically describes an analytical self tortured by dissociation and moulded by the inscription of multiple life histories that overlap, break into pieces, come together and combine :

The whole of this book so far printed can be regarded as an artificial and elaborated construct. I myself, here introduced in the narrative, can be regarded as a construct, artificially composed with the aid of such artistic and scientific material as I can command and manipulated to form a representation of an author whose name appears on the book and now, for the second time, as a character in a work of fiction. Is it a convincing portrait? Does it appear to " resemble " reality? [...] This book could be hailed as being in itself, resemblance to its paternity - that it could not be mistaken for someone else’s " brain child ." But I may have a different aim; say, that of writing a description of psycho-analysis.

The analyst witnesses an extra-territoriality that he helped set up for the cure. He cannot be an imago as Bion would have had it. This is why Bion stressed the need to break psychoanalytical dialogue which too overtly summoned motives of desire and memory. He was not subscribing to an ascetic conception of the cure, far from it : becoming O is a potent element of his thought that posits relinquishment as the primary mode of a listen that is not attuned to the underlying narrative related by the patient and possibly reconfigured by the analyst. It is mostly a question here of summoning the figures of interpretive failing and showing that the analyst cannot constitute a preliminary knowledge that would rest on an obvious semiological telling of fiction.

Great caution and certain irony greeted Bion’s negative theology as tenet of psychoanalytical listen. Yet there is a temporal aspect we can explore in this notion of detachment imposed by psychoanalytical speech and the lapse of memory at the heart of it. It is reminiscent of Freud’s definition of psychoanalytical fiction as a knowledge which End informs the love of beginnings. To Bion, custom dictates that the psychoanalyst, a major figure in the Oedipian web, be sentenced to death and condemned to relive night and day the consequences of his major transgression, that is his aperception of the unsconscious. The analyst cannot ignore this death sentence, not even in light of the internal management of the analytical space which highlights the function of capacity as a prosthetic element of the cure.

If during the course of his work Bion was able to bring forth the containing function, it surely was not to bolster the narcotic support of an analyst entirely dependent on the revitalization of an archaic relation to the maternal body. Bion and also Klein clearly stressed the power of this first object relation to have an impact on the analytical structure. They placed themselves at a distance from a strict reading of the prosthetic support advocated and clearly defined by Freud when revealing to Hilda Doolittle his hatred at being the mother figure in transference. More to the point, the figure of the Leader haunts the Freudian corpus and we could add that Freud’s refusal of counter-transference of this confidence told to Hilda Doolittle and Sandor Ferenczi, also preeminently stands out. We all share (t)his legacy.

If there is a legacy to share with regard to Bion, crossing over the well-ordered language of metapsychology, it is that fiction acquires a vivifying dimension that forces the psychoanalyst to abandon himself. Fiction here is not a mere mirror of psychic reality and abandonment of self to it. Itcoincides in Bion with abandonment of analytical neutrality. This viewpoint is a severe sanction of a dogmatic counter-transferential understanding of the cure. To Bion listening and writing are similar activities that aim to comprehend the psychoanalytical legacy by referring to the break in the relation between container and contained, and construct themselves supplely in opposition to depressive and schizo-paranoid stances.

To Bion, writing is as a necessary tribute to emotional turbulence. It is also a perceptive blindness that escapes the hold of the all-powerful narrative and tells of its disappearance. There are echoes of Joyce in his writings that recall an epiphanic description of " reality ", and the act of literature must take into account the self-abandonment of fiction. If we adopt this stance, we do not subject ourselves anymore to Freudian imperatives that require us to maintain course and consider narration as a discursive preconstruct from which to define case histories. Literature, even more so case histories, is not an inheritance allowing us to better remember. The writing of Wolfman and Dora obeys this instrumental logic in which patient fiction acquires unconscious truth through narration. This is why every case narration moulds the fiction of an addressee who stands to receive the predictable " story ", negating its End in order to structure its chronological foundation. It is no small wonder then that Bion was enthralled by literature and by the reworking of fiction that imposed narrativity to the dream. It is also no small wonder that this rapture, this extreme figure of depossession whose mystical connotations are quite evident in Bion, was the object of a felicitous and " impure " literary translation.