Rehearsed Language of Psychoanalysis

Taking up Bion's idea of a continuum between the psychotic and non‐psychotic parts of the mind, this paper looks at clinical moments where the primitive part – psychotic and ‘autistic‐contiguous’ – mimes language and takes over the analytic field. The patients discussed seem to intuit the analyst's blind spots and a pseudo‐language takes over as primitive parts of the patient collude with those of the analyst. The three patients discussed here use registers of speech which vary from over‐abundant to quicksilver and dried. However, it is not as much a communicative use as it is evacuative and adhesive. Verbal language offers familiar moulds in terms of unfree associations, pre‐existing narrative structures, syntax, figures of speech (symbols, metaphors, paradoxes) and common psychoanalytic tropes (dreams, primal scenes). Primitive parts of the mind nestle in these moulds rather than disturb them. It is only through examining the countertransference and abjuring collusions that the analyst may be able to contact the terrifying or enclosed parts in the field. ‘Death’, for instance, represents the limits of language and as it is unpacked, it comes to acquire a range of meanings which allow the recovery of thinking. I have tried to demonstrate the experience of verbal language as a seductive screen that analyst and analysand collaboratively create to make bearable the incomprehensibility of the encounter. In doing this what emerges is a ‘thick description’ that helped and reflects on different kinds of collusion. The paper tries to capture the experience of collusion as well as a return from it.