The mystic’s and the psychanalyst’s experience under Bion’s vertex
Abstract
The author’s proposal in this work is to explore the assertion that some mental conditions that permit the access to a mystic experience may be part of psychoanalytical practice. This approximation offers the psychoanalyst the possibility of using elements of some mystics’ discipline to think about the experience of the session, without leveling both situations, or to label psychoanalysis a religious or mystic attitude. Bion was aware of this approximation and affirmed that psychoanalytical facts may be adequately expressed taking the model of the mystics’ experience. In doing so, he uses it as a provisional construction to signify facts observed in his experience with the patient. From this methodological approximation and, taking as a model the notion of Negativity, Faith and the Experience of the Unspeakable that may be applied to Psychic Reality (The Unconscious) approach, the author recovers Bion’s contributions to situate Psychoanalysis as an experience that is open to what is unknown in each session. Psychoanalysis’ aim is not to decipher the mind, but to place the analysand in contact with its mystery. This contact does not belong to the speech level, but constitutes an emotional experience of transformation experienced in the analytical relationship.
