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with ... at-one-ment ... ultimate reality and truth ... formless infinite ... ineffable experience ... an act of faith” (Bion 1970, pp. 242-254). Bion’s text becomes most ambiguous when he tries to describe the relationships that hallucinosis and transformations in hallucinosis have with the total clinical situation. One should remember that Bion was not writing about technique, but about models of observation. The difference is crucial: if read as technique, one may take Bion to be suggesting what to do in the clinical situation, and how to do it, whereas when read as a model of observation, Bion attempts to describe what cannot be described, that is, the state of mind and being of the analyst when making their best efforts to be maximally open to observation without imposition of T(K), that is, without memory and desire. Below are three grammatically ambiguous passages demonstrating the problem of interpreting Bion’s text: I. “Receptiveness achieved by denudation of memory and desire ... is essential to the operation of psycho-analysis and other scientific proceedings. It is essential for experiencing hallucination or the state of hallucinosis. This state I do not regard as an exaggeration of a pathological or even natural condition: I consider it rather to be a state always present, but overlaid by other phenomena, which screen it” (Bion 1970, VI, p. 250; emphasis added). II, “to appreciate hallucination the analyst must participate in the state of hallucinosis” (ibid, p. 250; emphasis added). III. “By eschewing memories, desires, and the operations of memory [the analyst] can approach the domain of hallucinosis and of the ‘acts of faith’ by which alone he can become at one with his patients’ hallucinations and so effect transformations O ➔ K”. (ibid, p. 250; emphasis added). The first and second emphasized passages read ambiguously with respect to the grammatical object of the verbs “experiencing” and “participate”. Does the analyst experience and participate in hallucinosis per se ? This seemingly more straightforward reading contextualizes the verbs as aspects of technique, of what the analyst does in session. It is as if Bion recommends that the analyst hallucinate and / or participate actively in hallucinosis. Another reading takes the total analytic situation itself as the object of the verb, that is, the analyst may experience and participate in the analysis by fulfilling their part, or role, or analytic function while working with their patient’s state of hallucinosis. This contextualizes the text more towards description of the observational framework. With respect to the third emphasized passage, a reading of clinical technique may suggest that to become “at one” with the patient’s hallucinations involves a form of merger with the psychotic patient. A reading shaped by observation may indicate that the scientific “act of faith” of pure observation brings the analyst in the closest possible contact, “at one”, with the object of observation, “his patients’ hallucinations”, in order to “effect transformations in O ➔ K”. Finally, Bion proposed that all clinical observation should include and begin with the
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