Caesura: A Close Reading Seminar of Bion’s Text

What is it about?

This chapter is an edited transcript of the close reading seminar discussing Bion’s paper “Caesura”. Leaning on Freud’s statement that “there is much more continuity between intra-uterine life and earliest infancy than the impressive caesura of the act of birth allows us to believe”, Bion further elaborates the notion of caesura as a pivotal concept in his thinking. The caesura of birth serves as a metaphor for all that is concealed from our view. Moreover, this concept tries to address the barriers that might be erected in the psychoanalytic encounter, which are often so impressive that we are unable to see beyond them. Perhaps first and foremost is our tendency to be engrossed in the sensuously visible, in verbal communication itself, which is so impressive that we get caught up in it, hence blinding ourselves to non-sensuous, unrepresented and unrepresentable psychic reality. The insights developed in Bion’s “Caesura” seem to be at the very core of his clinical work. This paper underscores the significance of working in the immediacy of the here-and-now with the prospect of expanding one’s capacity to tolerate contact with reality in transit, in the unfolding present. Furthermore, this paper highlights the realization that approaching the patient’s logic requires the analyst to penetrate, or transcend, the caesura of their logic, or the logic of the conscious, finite, awake mind, and give their imagination an airing – so as to encounter a different logic, seemingly irrational, or perhaps ‘anti-rational’.

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