Panel on What is Psychoanalysis?

Stefanie Teitelbaum

I’d like to discuss Bion’s quote ” Psychoanalysis itself is just a stripe on the coat of the. Tiger – Ultimately it may meet the Tiger – The Thing Itself -” O”. This idea weaves thought W.R. Bion, ‘A MEMOIR OF THE FUTURE’. Bion’s post Kleinian thinking. Stripes and a Tiger. Bion’s Psychoanalysis

Looking at the thing itself, alive in Freud’s system ucs, and available to analyst and patient as stripes in the preconscious and system perception-consciousness, psychoanalysis may be looked at as elements which may bring us in contact with the affective reality of the unknown.

I propose to discuss seminal ideas from Bion’s 4 psychoanalytic tracts; Learning from Experience, Elements of Psychoanalysis, Transformations and Attention & Interpretation as such stripes.

In the Interpretation of Dreams, Freud wrote that in every dream there is at least one spot that is unplumbable – a navel as such – a contact with the unknown. I’ll draw from psychoanalytic literature and my own reverie to draw a link from Freud’s circular of a belly-button to Bion’s circular “O”.