When Dr. Bion left Los Angeles in September of 1979, I found myself in a quandary. I had had twelve years of analysis with him and, before that, eight years with Dr. Carel van der Heide. Although Dr. Bion to my knowledge never said he was a Kleinian, he was certainly as familiar with Klein’s work as any of those who claimed to be. As for Dr. van der Heide, he was what we call a classical Freudian. I had four years as a candidate with him and, after I was graduated, about four more years. By this time I’d begun to read Fairburn and Klein and it seemed to me that these two held the answers to all that was still unanswered in my mind and in my life. This was in the late fifties and early sixties. I will not go into detail about the various people of the English school who came to Los Angeles, for that has been detailed elsewhere. Suffice it to say that with all of them I had as much supervision as I could have had. The problem was that I never had a Kleinian analysis, so there was no foundation on which to put the supervision, other than an intellectual one. I’ve since discovered that intellectual understanding may sound good in the journals and lectures, but for me it just does not work in the consulting room. So, there I was with twenty years of analysis and years of supervision, but since all of this did not help me I could not see how any of it could really help anyone else who came to me for analysis.

Now I have a confession to make. On writing this down for the first time I realize that unknowingly I’d come to these conclusions years before Dr. Bion left Los Angeles; I had already embarked on a new method of working long before Bion left. This was some time in the early seventies. There were two things I was convinced of: one, that there was an unconscious and two, that the only way to access the unconscious was through dreams. Freud showed me the way to do this via Dr. van der Heide, whose great love of dreams I have inherited. I decided to forget everything I had learned in the institute, for it was of no use to me, and I decided that Bion’s interpretations to me did not lead me into the deeper levels of my mind. This was also true of the work with Dr. van der Heide. Though I attended my sessions, I did so out of intellectual curiosity and a deep feeling of affection and respect for the integrity of these two men. There was nowhere else to go and there was always a chance something might break through. To his credit Dr. Bion did acknowledge that fundamentally he had not helped me. We continued to work until he left. I was sad to see him go but it was best for me, for it left me entirely on my own to pursue my path. I’m very grateful to Dr. Bion, for what he did teach me was how to think and it was these two pathways--a way of thinking and a love of dreams--that helped me on my way. I certainly did not have any respect for them in what they were teaching. I knew the information they were passing on was useless; they were whistling in the dark. I began to notice as I did my work that as I paid more attention to the dream, it yielded more and more information, which I was able to convey to my patients. Why could I not use Freud’s method to listen in a way that was unbiased, simply, purely, and to see where my thoughts would lead me.

I began to ask the patient more questions in the consulting room. I was taught that the analyst has to be silent so as not to interfere with the patient’s flow of associations. I violated this dictum. Early on I became aware that doing this did not alter the deep and powerful flow of the unconscious. Actually questions dip into it the way we dip into a river. The flow is not really diverted but the questions would bring rewards, more information. Almost nothing diverts the powerful flow of the unconscious mind. In my analysis with Dr. Van der Heide he would be silent for nearly the entire hour and then make a remark or two at the very end. Many times he would not say a word. I learned to do this without complaint; it was, I guess, the way analysis was done. I was a good student. I later came to understand, however, that the analysand is in exactly the same position as the baby, and babies should never be left unattended. As I began to ask questions, I noticed that I would get a surprising amount of the information I needed to make an interpretation that would make sense, not only to me but to the person on the couch, who is, after all, the only one to whom it matters. The nature of the question is of paramount importance.

In the course of the work I decided I would only make interpretations, not on a guess, not on the intuition that is today called counter transference, which I find useless. I decided to make an interpretation only when I could prove the interpretation on the basis of what I had heard from the analysand. This I found to be the only sound and safe way to work. Always to be grounded on the material which had come to light from the work. I did not ask the patient to trust me or to have faith, I merely would say, “think of what I am showing you, see if it doesn’t make sense in the light of what you have told me.” I always said, “keep your skepticism, examine everything I say, I have no objections to that. If you find a mistake in what I say, tell me and then we both will look at it. The only way to get a true picture of your life is if we understand it from the beginning and build it brick by brick. It is important that I understand it, but it is much more important that you do.”

I want to convey to you that here it all sounds easy and straight forward. It was not easy. There were days and weeks of my agonizing over an interpretation; in what framework should I cast it? In a Freudian one or a Kleinian one or a Fairburnian one? It was not easy for I was coming to conclusions that I had not learned in any one of these structures and it was a fearful time for me as I went on saying things that had not been said before, as far as I knew. It took several years of constantly scrutinizing my material, running through a variety of interpretations that might fit, but always I found that the interpretation of a dream in a Freudian or Kleinian framework did not answer all the conditions of the dream.

I cannot tell you how many months and years I agonized over Klein’s “death instinct,” for instance, which I would see evidences of in the material. Then I would waver: yes I should say it, no I can’t, where can I go with that and then a new idea was forced upon me by the material, by the dream. I always let myself be guided by the dream, which was my North Star. I felt convinced that if I stayed with that knowing which was a product of the unconscious mind I would, if I persisted, get the right answer and I also discovered that all the parts of the dream, all have to fit. There can be no part about which one says, we do not need that, or this piece which I can’t understand is useless or unimportant. All the parts have to fit.

As I continued to work this way, I noticed that sexual material diminished. I noticed that there was no such thing as an Oedipal struggle and this was indeed hard for me for I had let go of all the foundations, all the familiar landmarks that years of study had awarded me. I was on the open seas with no land in sight, with faith that if I kept going there would eventually be a landfall. I noticed that as I worked it was an absolute necessity to make a pinpoint interpretation. I could see that if I did not make the correct interpretation then the succeeding dreams would show it and I would have to say that I was wrong. In addition I was doing a great deal of supervision during these years. These were the seventies and I could see the verification of my office work in the cases brought to me for supervision. During these years, although people attempted to say I was a Kleinian or whatever, it was clear I was not making the usual Kleinian interpretations. It also became clear to me as time went on that infants do not have an instinctual hatred for the breast, but it was to take time before I came to a clear understanding of that situation. I took pains not to theorize nor to run ahead of what I’d learned from the work so that everything I knew was based on experience, not on a theory. I felt if I continued all the answers would come.

I began to see after many years that the material of people I was working with became more and more discernable as infantile, though it was cast in adult terms. It was as if the child or baby had put on the clothes of an adult and was talking. This quality began to intrude upon my ears--it was found in an inflection, in an emotional tone. It might have been as well in a fragment of a dream or it might have been in a gesture on the couch or in the way the person came into the consulting room and laid down. Little by little this knowledge was borne in on me until I could see how infants began to identify with the adults in their lives--that is the parents, that is the mother, naturally. Again, I noticed in the supervisions I was doing that merely saying something would not necessarily bring us to a deeper level. I realized after a while that one had to say exactly the right thing for the door to slide open. It was not long before I realized that I was working with a baby who could talk, but who was still a baby in all emotional respects. From here many things became clear, that in the main people are struggling with the issues of their infancy, issues that could never be addressed since they were never brought to the surface. To talk about these issues intellectually would be of no use, for only when the infantile core, which is the emotional core, is available can something be done through interpretations.

After a while of working at this level it became clearer and clearer to me that babies’ minds have to split almost at birth, maybe even before, in order to accommodate a mother who is beset by emotional disturbances—and, of course, who amongst us is not beset by emotional disturbances. As a matter of survival, all infants have to insure that their mothers will live. Though the gesture is only an omnipotent one, the infant has to take care of his or her mother. Later in life many of these people become caretakers, the saviors of everyone’s life, usually instead of their own. It became clear to me that babies are not born with a destructive, envious instinct. In fact, if such an instinct is there, it is a projection of the mother into the baby, who suffers great pain at this projection and all the rest that follows. The baby is born whole, as a creature from God, as are all of God’s creatures. Yes, I do believe in God, there is in my mind no doubt about that.

To ensure the survival of the mother the infant now has to become the mother. Then the infant knows that he or she will live. All of this is unconscious in the baby’s mind and though the infant feels that a big problem has been solved, which it has not been, the infant will indeed live. The consequences that follow will trail the infant all the rest of its life, for s/he will have a life long identification of being the mother. The mind will be split, and the entity it was supposed to be will never come into existence. It is this problem that one comes to in an analysis that has gone deeper and deeper to the very core of one’s existence.

As an important aside it follows understandably that the baby becomes an expert tracker of the mother’s mind. The more conflicted her mind the better at tracking the baby becomes. Then it is clear that the person or the baby-in-the-person is a good tracker of the analyst’s mind and when the analyst is sorely beset, that anxiety in him or her may show in the dream of the analysand. It is best to acknowledge that, as the dream shows, the patient feels the analyst is in difficulty. This is not a time for true confession, however; there isn’t any such time, as a matter of fact, for the analyst. One simply points out to the patient that this is how the patient feels; it is important for the patient’s feelings to be acknowledged and this acknowledgement helps to give confidence to the patient that his or her intuition is correct. It’s important to build confidence in the person’s intuitive self, especially since it is the true self that is all part of making the mind of that individual.

You see, the baby has been imprinted with the mother, it has been imprinted in the way it is to live and to die. We are all imprinted in these early moments and hours of life. In this early time the infant goes deeper and deeper. Konrad Lorenz found this to be true of birds and other species, and I say it is true of mankind as well. In this we are all God’s creatures under the sun. The principle is the same. It is simply the law of economy at work. We hide our imprinting by our brains, by our intelligence, but a deep analysis uncovers surely and slowly beyond our technical knowledge and our cleverness the simple fact of our being imprinted. Now it is clear that every person’s problem in life is not the Oedipal struggle. The problem is in how to find the spark of self that he or she was supposed to be as they came into existence, and the central issue is how to become oneself. It is over this issue that the patient puts up the greatest struggle. Confronting this fundamental conflict is the most frightening task for the patient and for every human being. Here they have to give up everything they have known from birth. They have to lose all landmarks they have known, they have to renounce the imprints of the mother and father they have known. It is only through a renunciation of the false self that a true transformation ensues. Short of this, if the choice is made by the patient not to sail on this journey, a fundamental change, a true transformation, will not be made.

Understandably the analysand will begin to attack the analyst long before this because he or she intuits where the analysis is going. Here all the strength, the skill and the experience the analyst can muster are important to hew to the truth of the dreams, for the truth will all be there in the dream.