Intuiting the Truth of What’s Happening: on Bion’s “Notes on Memory and Desire”

Abstract

Bion’s “Notes on Memory and Desire” (1967a) is an impossible paper that this article’s author has struggled with for decades. He views the paper, only two and a half pages in length, as a landmark contribution. Despite its title—and its infamous dictates to resist the impulse to remember past sessions and desire for “results”—the paper is not, most importantly, about memory and desire. It proposes a new analytic methodology that supplants awareness from its central role in the analytic process and, in its place, instates the analyst’s (largely unconscious) work of intuiting the (unconscious) psychic reality of the present moment by becoming at one with it. This article’s clinical examples, provided from the author’s own work, illustrate something of his ways of talking with his patients.

• Memory
• desire
• intuition
• awareness
• truth
• psychic reality