Reading as a Way of Dreaming, Dreaming as a Way of Reading

Erin Trapp

A review of Sousa Monteiro, João. Bion’s Theory of Dreams: A Visionary Model of the Mind. Routledge, 2023.

My experience of reading João Sousa Monteiro’s book, Bion’s Theory of Dreams: A Visionary Model of the Mind, was quite ambivalent. This played out in a few ways. One pertained to the very literal process of reading: in one sitting the text might feel frustrating and difficult to move through on the level of language and editing, and in the next, the language might appear less inhibitory and the ideas more immediately transmitted and captivating. The book is at once vivid and blurry, concrete and profound. In this sense, my experience felt something like an idea of Wilfred Bion’s on which Michael Eigen elaborates in Contact with the Depths, describing the “on-off” nature of psychical reality. Eigen writes that “Bion uses the term constant conjunction for images or actions that appear together with some reliability. Like ringing the doorbell-looking away; speaking-fading out; a sense of tension, pain rising, then dissipating and blanking out” (78). This “constant conjunction” represents a “conjoining of tendencies” that perhaps lose the cast of ambivalence as they seem to become a single functioning unit, or as Eigen states, “something like second nature, a chronic state of affairs, a ‘habit’ sequence that runs off by itself” (78). This constant conjunction is above all an experience of contact—contact with the creation of the mind. Others—including Annie Reiner, who notes in her recent book W.R. Bion’s Theories of Mind that Bion’s curiosity began and ended with the “unknowable mystery of the mind”—recognize the centrality of the mind in his theories. The value of Monteiro’s book comes from its immersion of the reader in this ambivalent experience of reading as a way of dreaming, of creating the mind.

Monteiro says his book reflects on “Bion’s most illuminating and far-reaching intuition: that the most fundamental quality of the human mind is that it pulsates with unreadably complex and yet overwhelming awestruck life beyond the edge of the unknown, the unknowable and the unthinkable” (13). Where others focus on the clinical setting and parameters implied in Bion’s extensive work, Monteiro’s attention is always turned toward this inner dimension, oriented around the experience of “continuously dreaming the human mind into its awestruck structure” (14). The idea that the human mind is continuously “created” rather than merely “existing” is the underlying premise of this argument, which Monteiro expresses in the idea that it is not “consciousness and unconsciousness” that is created, but “the conscious mind and the unconscious mind” (27). This process—which is, however it might be construed or emphasized, the legacy of Bion—is both the work of therapy and the way the mind works.

Monteiro is not alone in recognizing the “visionary” nature of British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion (1897-1979). In her appendix to Four Discussions with W.R. Bion, titled “An Introduction to Bion’s Model of the Mind,” Meg Harris Williams lists some of the ways Bion imagines “vision,” including the use he makes of the metaphor of Alpheus, “the sacred river that runs underground (unseen) and then re-emerges in expected places: it is suddenly ‘seen’, but it always existed” (78). This metaphor describes “how an idea tracks or travels, whether or not it is visible,” and it corresponds as well to those parts of Bion’s theory that we might call “post-Kleinian,” an idea that “the mind’s origins extend (beyond Klein) into prenatal life and even further into the evolution of the species” (Harris Williams 67). Following in the tradition of Donald Meltzer, who emphasizes areas of Bion’s work that can be characterized as aesthetic, Monteiro recognizes this origin as “creative.” Monteiro, a psychoanalyst in private practice in Lisbon, worked under the supervision of Donald Meltzer for thirteen years before Meltzer’s death in 2004, and while the first part of the book can be read as Monteiro’s development of Bion’s ideas, of the mind’s being drawn, through language, into being, the second part elaborates Meltzer’s ideas of the “passion” and “intimacy” of analysis, of the mind in the analytic session.

Monteiro’s figure is of “ripening”: an analysis, he writes, “[S]hould gradually ripen into an awestruck and very mysterious dialogue between internal characters” (194). In the final chapter, he writes, “We all owe Bion the discovery of uncertainty in psychoanalysis, and to Meltzer to have ripened this discovery into a key guiding light through both research and all along virtually every single clinic hour” (243). Others who extend and unfold the complexity of Bion’s thinking and the vastness of the conceptual world that he created—most predominantly James Grotstein, Antonino Ferro, and Michael Eigen, whose rich theoretical writings on Bion feel like troves of therapeutic action—do so, to my mind, via a process somewhat more like construction than “ripening.” While Bion did discover “uncertainty,” he also solidified the language of psychoanalytic processes that encounter and seek to transform uncertainty—the “alpha-function” comes to mind as central here, a name that he gives to the processes of “dreaming” and “thinking,” which transform pre-processed sensory material into bits that can be represented—and these conceptual aspects of his thinking are so evocative and complex that even he, it seems, often gets tied up there. In light of this, Monteiro’s somewhat singular focus on this “awestruck” quality of the mind, its dreaming, and its being heard, is remarkable, as it carries out the process he seeks to describe in the book of the mind “continuously creat[ing] itself into existence” (5). The quality of this “continuous” creation, this ripening, is one of the offerings that Monteiro’s book makes and what makes it worth reading. In the text, we encounter this aesthetic dimension in its language and in the experience of reading itself, and this feels like a somewhat humble reminder that writing, like dreaming and thinking, carries with it an alpha function; it is also a process through which the mind continuously creates itself. Against the background of this profound dimension to Monteiro’s work, its shortcomings are also evident, as readers may experience it—like many perhaps do Bion’s work—as obscure, hermetic, abstract. It may also speak more to clinicians familiar with Bionian terms and concepts than to those interested in thinking about some of the cultural, social, or political dimensions of dreaming or of Bion’s theories more broadly. However, I propose that the book’s structure—its repetitious progression from the unknowable mind adjacent to Freud’s dream-thoughts, through Bion, into a series of (again, repeated, or iterative) questions about what a dream is, and back out into reflections on the human mind—invites us into and performs the erring, wandering, and confusing process of dreaming. The book is not for readers who want to grasp Bion’s theory of dreams and put it to use; it is a philosophical text, one that develops its own theory about the psyche and about psychical reality. In the context of the present realities of AI and the impoverished landscape of managed care and mental health, an argument about the existence and uniqueness of psychical reality takes on new significance and meaning. For readers willing to overcome an initial resistance related to the potential unfamiliarity of Monteiro’s language and terms, as well as Bion’s, the book may transmit this experience of psychical reality, not as something to understand but as something to experience.

At the start of the book, Monteiro proclaims the somewhat controversial undertaking—one that James Grotstein also claims in his tribute to Bion, A Beam of Intense Darkness (2007)—of repeating quotations and phrases when they come to the writer’s mind in writing the text. One effect of this is the uneven, perhaps spoken rather than written quality of the text. The repetition calls to mind “kenning,” a compound word in which two figurative words are used in place of a more concrete noun. This is a feature of medieval literature identified as a “circumlocution” or a form of “roundabout speech,” and, like kennings, these quotations or phrases, purportedly offered for clarity and perhaps for concreteness, also work on the text in other ways. While Monteiro comments on Bion’s use of small particles of language—for example, there is a discussion of the “little protruding ‘so,’ caressingly dropped into the line” (89)—his own language particles make for an ambiguous experience of reading as well. This language signals both the literal, material, concrete aspect—perhaps its bordering on meaninglessness—and its profound, multilayered meaningfulness. We are, then, in the world of Monteiro’s text, dreaming as a way of reading.

Circumlocution is present in phrases to which Monteiro returns in order to define certain aspects of Bion’s theory and in the effort to develop concepts. “Dreaming” is identified as a “cluster of dreaming functions operating the contact-barrier” (30). This phrase—“a cluster of dreaming functions operating the contact-barrier”—repeats throughout the text. However, Monteiro does not define the terms he uses. The closest we get are the equation and substitution of terms. There are moments in the text where the tone becomes monologic, as in the phrase, “the unknown, the unknowable, and the unthinkable,” whose frequent repetition can feel like roteness or tautology, as if it were used concretely. I take these moments to be expressions of the substrate of the mind—the human mind pulsating “beyond the edge” (13)—that is the particular focus of the book. While there is something somewhat awkward or redundant about these phrases, this “failing” of language is a sign that we are “in it” in some way, in this experience of the mind as if from inside.

The reading experience is marked by the impression that conceptual language and argumentation are failing. The idea of the “contact-barrier,” that permeable border between consciousness and unconsciousness, is introduced as an equivalent to Bion’s “odd term ‘dream’” (15). What Monteiro presents as “Bion’s theory of dreams” is, then, also a theory of the contact-barrier, insofar as he reads the term “dream,” repeated “ten times in pages 15-17 [of Learning from Experience],” as being “converted into what Bion called contact-barrier” (15). In the first chapter on dreaming and the contact-barrier, Monteiro seems to move around the term in this way, through substitution and equation, without defining or conceptually “grasping” it. Reading this is a frustrating experience. In the following chapter, Monteiro begins by quoting Bion, as he describes a shift from “dream” to “contact-barrier.” He quotes from Bion’s Learning from Experience:

My statement that a man has to ‘dream’ a current emotional experience whether it occurs in sleep or in waking life is reformulated thus: the man’s alpha-function whether in sleeping or waking transforms sense impressions related to an emotional experience into alpha-elements, which cohere as they proliferate to form a contact-barrier. This contact-barrier, thus in continuous process of formation, marks the point of contact between the conscious and the unconscious elements and originates the distinction between them. (qtd. in Monteiro 28)

Monteiro focuses on Bion’s “misleading and unclear,” “unfortunate” use of words, but one of the things to which he does not attend is the fact that Bion’s term “contact-barrier” is taken from Freud, who uses the term Kontaktschranke in his 1895 Project for a Scientific Psychology. The German term “Schranke” translates the figure of “crossing” or “folding” and is used by Freud in the sense of describing not only “barriers” but also gates that are perhaps specifically concerned with passage or permeability, as in “toll gates,” “lattice gates,” or grating. (We are not far here from Bion’s grid.) Monteiro is less concerned with whatthe contact-barrier isand more concerned with its effects or workings, both textually and in the world. While there is something lost in not explicating the terms of the contact-barrier—something that makes me think that the repetition of phrases is not driven by a desire for clarity but by some other force—we can also say that the text, as it is written, works on a different level. It brings the reader into the process of dreaming, which at times threatens logic and readability and moves via repetition.

The value of reading Monteiro’s book lies in its emphasis on the generative and creative aspects of this process, and it is hard not to be buoyed by the passion of this approach to thinking about clinical work, especially given the impoverished, pathologizing frameworks of contemporary mental health. Monteiro’s book invites thinking about the difference between the work of psychoanalytic therapy and the way the mind works. And yet Monteiro does not say enough about what is afforded by this difference, itself a product of the constant conjunction of dream and dreaming. I would like to take up two of the main themes of Monteiro’s book in order to extend his thinking about this difference between the work of therapy and the way the mind works. The first pertains to a distinction that Monteiro makes between the work of the mother and that of the therapist, a distinction that seems to underlie more explicit statements about the congruence of these roles or their analogous nature. The second pertains to experiences of failure in therapy: failed dreaming, failed containing, interrupted processes, failures of passion on the side of the therapist—failures that point to the analytic process as a site of falling short, of not hearing, not dreaming, not tending to dreaming.

Mother’s Reverie, Therapist’s Reverie

Bion’s concept of reverie, which begins as an expression of the mother’s love for the infant, has certainly contributed to the predominant association of the work of the mother and the work of the therapist in psychoanalysis. The mother’s love, Bion writes, “is expressed by reverie” (Learning from Experience 36). “Even the foetus’ and the infant’s earliest experiences of joy and excitement have to be lovingly dreamed by the mother back into them,” writes Monteiro in a chapter titled, “Mother’s Reverie” (52). While Monteiro does not reject—and in many ways extends—this model, he also opens up spaces for thinking about how this analogy functions and for considering its limits.

To dream “the human mind into existence”—who if not the mother, to take on such a task? And reverie seems to imply as much. Yet, for Monteiro, reverie consists both of “dreaming her babies [sic] projections back into them” (56) and of the fetus’s and infant’s capacity to “introject mother’s own dreams into new qualities of their own personalities as well as new qualities of their thinking” (57). While one may assume that this work of dreaming falls within the purview of the mother, Monteiro places the larger share of this process of introjection and on the “creative strength of the unreadably complex dynamic of psychic reality” (136). This emphasis on introjection begins with Monteiro’s ideas about projection:

So nothing seems to support the widely spread assumption that projection is a straightforward psychical move naturally travelling from foetus and the infant to the mother—from the couch to the chair. Without projection, mother’s reverie would hardly become as busy as it normally would be, and I believe the human mind might have been deprived of one of the most mysterious and most extraordinary process [sic] that it has been possible to identify and tentatively examine so far. (56)

In setting projection out as an “unnatural” process—or one, we might say, that is threatened by the very real demands of reality—Monteiro suggests that reverie and introjection might become increasingly complex, nuanced, or indeed, “busy,” in response to the activity of projection. If projection does not “move naturally,” it can be seen as a process that is influenced by—as well as influences—the reality of the world. We can imagine the turns this process might take in a world that is “too much with us,” especially as we move in the ever harsher realities of climate change, environmental destruction, racism, genocide, rising right-wing nationalism, and fascism. In this sense, the “busy” world—a public sphere full of violent rhetoric, stories of destruction, and atrocity—overloads the mother’s capacity for reverie, for sensitivity, while the projecting baby also responds to, say, increasingly more hostile environmental conditions, with either increasingly complex or increasingly empty projections. These harsh realities imply physical violence, destruction, and deprivation, which threaten to overload the projective processes in a direct way because the projective processes are also tasked with managing an individual’s destructive urges and experiences of deprivation.

The term that Monteiro associates with projection is “sensitivity”: “the sensitivity of projecting.” He writes, “[P]rojection is believed in this book to both be a vital and yet highly demanding task that may dramatically fail in several different ways and is indeed to actually very often miss its crucial psychical function” (53). In his discussion of projection and projective identification in A Beam of Intense Darkness, Grotstein explicates the necessarily “internal” aspect of the process. He writes, “Bion, while formulating the realistic communicative aspects, never considered projective identification as actually taking place in the object—only that the object was affected” (178). I read the “sensitivity” proposed by Monteiro in a similar vein. There is not solid ground for receiving these projections of unconscious phantasy. In part, a need or desire for this ground, and the certainty of knowing that “something” is there, seems to inform the appeal of trauma models. For the “affected object,” which Grotstein implies is the mother, pertains to the child as an object of projections as well. In Monteiro’s phrasing, we might wonder on whose shoulders projection falls as a “demanding task”—the mother who receives it or the child who produces it? As he sets it up, it seems constructed as a two-part process, in which the projections of the child are received and dreamt by the mother, and then the child dreams those qualities “into themselves.” If introjection is in turn identified with sensitivity, it reflects the tenuousness of a process that can feel like dreaming: the construction and dissolution of worlds in the dream equates to the experience of receiving and transmitting projectively.

This emphasis on the power, autonomy, and the significance of the introjective moment contributes to a dis-aggregation of the roles of mother and therapist. Monteiro writes:

The classical analyst is certainly not inclined to offer the analysand the concrete experience of a thinking mind in the room, nor the inspiring experience of uncertainty, nor the truth of his own feeling the need to convert his experiences into new dreams, nor his being uncertain about the meaning of being human strongly advising him to hold up conclusions, but the unhearing mother always being sure about the sea of enigmas and unknowns defeating her foetus’ and infant’s minds. (135)

It is the “hearing” and “thinking” of the analyst that allows a therapeutic experience for the analysand. This dimension carries within it a recognition of a failed dreaming experience by “the unhearing mother.” There is a key difference between the mother’s and the therapist’s work: the therapist has to listen for this failed dreaming at the same time that they have to dream. They must have a concept (a thinking, a caring, an attending) that informs their dreaming, a concept that is sensitive to the projections and the capacity for introjection of the patient.

In a chapter titled “What is Hearing?” Monteiro describes this particular capacity, citing Bion’s Cogitations: “Drugs are substitutes employed by those who cannot wait. The substitute is that which cannot satisfy without destroying the capacity for discrimination [of] the real from the false. Whatever is falsely employed as a substitute for real[,] is transformed thereby in[to] a poison for the mind” (qtd. in Monteiro 153; brackets are in the original text quoted from Bion, Cogitations 299). What is healing may therefore be considered as that which satisfies without destroying the capacity for discriminating real and false. It is not the distinction that the therapist tends to but a “capacity” for discrimination. Monteiro traces out this distinction in Meltzer’s work. Meltzer, who is the main interlocutor of the text and to whom the text pays tribute, theorized this “hearing” in terms of “internal characters,” which seem like an extension of the importance and sensitivity around projection. Monteiro writes:

This shift from listeningto hearing in virtually every session, this shift from the person of the analyst to his own internal characters, and from the person of the analysand also to his internal characters so that the analyst would perhaps be at last prepared to meet the analysand’s meaning, may perhaps take quite a long time or even never happen. This crucial shift may also be formulated as the shift from psychotherapy to psychoanalysis. The former runs between persons—the patient and the analyst. The latter between internal characters. (157)

We might understand this dimension as a further disarticulation of the analogous actions of mother and therapist. For mothers, I would guess, are at their very best only capable of “listening.” They are structurally prohibited—and I would imagine for good reason—from being able to “hear.” In this sense, the work of the therapist tends to something that “feels like” or is affectively experienced as the mother’s failure. Monteiro makes a much-needed contribution, with this emphasis, to a vision of the roles of mother and therapist as constantly differentiated rather than as analogous or as one and the same.

Failures in Dreaming

The second part of the book considers the work of the analytic session, situating the “mind” in the session. In this discussion, there is a vacillation between a more “positive” model of the work of analysis and an awareness of its potential failures, specifically the danger that the therapist might lose their “passion” by becoming caught up in the idea of “understanding.” Monteiro writes, “The measure of our illusion of understanding is given by the measure of our lack of passion” (203). The analyst must be able to “hear” the “music” of the failure of the mother, both “mother’s reverie, as well as of foetus’ and the infant’s failures in introjecting her qualities” (65). What the therapist does with this “hearing” and this “failure” leads Monteiro to discuss the limits of “understanding” and the concept of “knowledge.” For to understand the mind, “we must warp the awe-inspiring mystery of the human mind down into a mere object of knowledge, understanding and reason” (202). What compels the therapist toward understanding? One implication that can be drawn from Monteiro’s writing is that we do not knowthe difference between understandingand knowing, and that we gravitate toward understanding because we do not know we can wait for knowing. Understanding, in this sense, can be seen as a drug. It administers a dose of what Bion calls -K (anti-knowledge)—also known as a beta-blocker—which Bion claims, “could be more fruitfully, though more vaguely, described as column 2 categories, that is to say, psycho-analytical objects feared as liable to trigger off developments of a catastrophic nature, to initiate ‘catastrophic change’” (Bion, Two Papers 16). We might imagine that understanding functions to destroy a capacity “to discriminate between real and false,” which, for Monteiro, might amount to a failure of passion.

This difference stands out to me in thinking about an idea of failure articulated succinctly and yet profoundly by Susan Sands in her review of Philip Bromberg’s Awakening the Dreamer, “Dissociation, the Analyst’s Vulnerability, and the Body.” She describes how in cases of a patient’s severe trauma, the therapist may subjectively experience an “actual, temporary, traumatization” that is also “intensely personal”; this may result in the “failure of the containing function of the analytic pair” (743). This failure of containing is to be differentiated from a failure to understand or a failure to empathize. The failure of containing comes from the presence or emergence of “knowledge” (K) into the analytic pair, knowledge that arrives in the therapist’s own mind. Monteiro discusses Bion’s statement about seeing Monet’s painting of a field of poppies: “If you walk into the Jeux de Paumes (sic) in Paris and see the painting itself, you think ‘I never saw a field of poppies until now; now I know what it looks like’—it is an emotional experience, not a report on one” (qtd. in Monteiro 209-10). Picking up the phrase, “now I know,” Monteiro writes,

What exactly is it that he claims to know although he has no means to know what exactly he believes he knows? Can we ever put it into words? Hardly, I would believe. For we now seem to hurt ourselves against a few barriers which we can neither ignore nor dodge. The transformations that seem to have occurred in Bion’s psychical world while watching Monet’s painting prompting him to claim now I know is believed to essentially run beyond the edge of the unknown, the unknowable and the unthinkable. (211)

As Monteiro notes, “we seem to hurt ourselves on these barriers.” Sands would add to this: we hurt ourselves on this“contact-barrier.” The therapist will feel it as her own, and she must have retained the capacity herself to discriminate real from false: her suffering from her failure. This moment of failure contains an experience of the therapist’s knowing, as if Sands were uttering here, “now I know.”

It is this knowing that, like dreaming, is an unending process, interrupted by understanding as well as “nightmaring.” Monteiro stresses that “this is an unending process, except if this most extraordinary and mysterious creative process is severely hindered by pathology, that is, by any nightmaring processes” (213). “Psychoanalysis,” he elaborates, “is about passion and its failure, not about symptoms. The epitome of pathology is seen in this book to be what in us severely damages our sweeping drive to keep making life and the world glittering with ever new insight and meaning and destroy the capacity for endowing things with the shining experience of awe and mystery” (218). Pathology is not seen in the presence of symptoms but emerges in the termination of this K process, which is what Monteiro calls “nightmaring.” What comes into the scene to constrain, limit, and degrade this relation is a relation to knowledge (K) that puts an end to this unending process. Monteiro takes up O’Shaughnessy’s line, “each patient has a point beyond which he does not extend his K” to query whether and to what extent analysis works on “ending the analysand’s K-link” (qtd. in Monteiro 216; 218). We could consider this “ending” the failure that is threatened by the therapist’s own experience of traumatization, as Sands indicates. Monteiro in turn wonders: “When, in his own analysis, even in his own life has the analyst himself ended his own K-link?” (219).

One of the contributions of Monteiro’s argument is this consistent turn to the work that the analyst needs to do in order to continue to dream, given that at every moment, its ending is present. We might consider these moments in which dreaming is interrupted as structural failures, or limits, or perhaps fault-lines, as failures of the contact-barrier. One of the places where this formulation turns up is in Monteiro’s discussion of dreaming. In the chapter “What Is a Dream?” he suggests that “what we are all used to call a dream is, to begin with, not a dream . . . a dream, in Freud’s sense, is, in Bion’s, an undreamed emotional experience, that is, an interrupted dream . . . in the eyes of Bion’s contact-barrier, dreams, in Freud’s sense, are of a failed dream” (72). In the later chapter, “What, Then, Is a Dream,” he again queries dreaming:

In the light of Bion’s theory of dreams, therefore, a dream, in Freud’s sense, is, in Bion’s, a failure of the workings of some dreaming functions. In other, hopefully clearer terms, a dream, in Freud’s sense, is an interruption of the workings of the dreaming functions in converting some elements, whatever their nature, into new, hopefully more creative psychical elements. What exactly is the nature of this failure? Is this failure coming from the couch, the chair, or from both? If the failure comes primarily from the chair, it may stir, and even deepen, the one primarily coming from the couch. (134-35)

In this passage, dreams are regarded as premature or substitutive processes. Perhaps like the process of substitution described above as the use of drugs, these “dreams” represent something that is still false (-K), something that is not “waited for,” something that is like a “poison for the mind.” Monteiro uses the term “nightmaring” to describe this “use” of dreams for something other than dreaming: the interruption of dreaming. He writes, “[T]he analysand’s dreams may be usefully seen as evidence that the analysand has nightmared some of his own dreaming processes” (137). This idea of nightmaring as a negative version of dreaming compels us to think about the nightmare in its etymological sense as well, as “oppressed sleep” (literally, “an evil female spirit afflicting men (or horses) in their sleep with a feeling of suffocation”), indicating this aspect of violence or destructiveness attributed to the external world, seeming to exist “outside” of a person’s head, or requiring this figure of “visitation” or “affliction” (“Nightmare”). Here we are at the contact-barrier, encountering it as a substantial or material entity rather than as a passage or continuous space of transition, and it is contact with this in a substantial way that makes this experience not just awe-inspiring but painful as well. In this way, the introjective processes that Monteiro describes are also seen to be interrupted. From a point of view that holds regard for the patient above all, this pain must be tended to as the edge of the unknowable, unknown, unthinkable—there it may yield the “shining experience of awe and mystery.” But contact with pain must also be made, and remade.

While he suggests this dimension of pain or failure, Monteiro remains situated in an abstract and perhaps ideal conceptual world, in these final chapters more critical of the analyst’s “dull, discolored mind” (218) and absence of passion than curious about this dullness and how it might be understood. This seems to be a potential impasse in Monteiro’s otherwise capacious argument. We could compare his terms with those of Marion Milner, who draws attention to the ongoing nature of the creation of the mind in her detailed account of nearly two decades of working with a schizophrenic woman. In The Hands of the Living God, she writes,

We could see how all the nailing-up, in those early pictures, could have partly expressed her dread of the fantasy of tearing out my eyes with her finger-nails, which would be like robbing me of my power to see, to understand her, robbing me of insight; a secret fantasy act which was liable to occur, as I saw it, in response to a special failure on my part; in fact, whenever I failed to manage our relationship well enough to enable her to feel that whatever understanding we achieved really came from her; or rather, from a kind of unity between us that made it not matter whether she said it or I said it. (455)

Milner’s description of this “special failure” feels like one of the highest expressions of therapeutic work, expressing something that must actively work against the pathologizing process that amounts to nightmaring or suffering. Monteiro might see Milner’s “special failure” as one of “neglect and indifference.” Whether or not this type of nightmaring or failure is workable seems increasingly important in our present world, in which destructive social forces are poised to impinge upon the capacity to dream and the capacity for reverie.

And while this kind of neglect or indifference might exist as a characterization of an analyst, as Monteiro seems to think, its more insidious forms are subtle and within us all, a part of nightmaring that arises in an instance where the creativity of one’s mind is missed. While Monteiro is not ignorant of this psychical dimension, he does not address some of the more difficult and debilitating aspects of this encounter between the patient’s nightmare and the analyst’s ability to dream. Reflecting on Bion’s phrasing of the “the felt need to convert the conscious rational experience into dream” (qtd. in Monteiro 143), Monteiro imagines the experience of an “unfelt need” (144):

Perhaps the worst form that the unfelt need to dream conscious or rational experiences into psychical life may take is the frightening form of neglect and indifference. Who would ever be prepared to guess the damages inflicted upon one’s own internal life as well as upon so many others’ by responding with neglect and indifference to the wonder of creative thought, to the discovery of the inspiring experience of uncertainty, to the merits of living beyond the edge of the unknown, the unknowable and the unthinkable? How often such response to the world has emerged in the course of an analysis evading the analyst’s eye who may himself never have been touched by the experience of passion? How often has this unfelt need to dream conscious and rational material slipped away unnoticed throughout the many years of an analysis? How often have such clinically critical phenomenon [sic] travelled, unseen, throughout the many years of an analysis? (144) While this scenario may very well play itself out continuously in the therapeutic session, the kind of “attending” that I am imagining should have the therapist stopping at their own dreams, at their own interrupted moments, in which the contact-barrier, which seems otherwise perhaps barely perceptible, can be felt. That this can happen in ways that are personal, bodily, and might otherwise be dismissed by the therapist indicates for Monteiro a point of inflection where the therapist encounters their own pathology. Here the therapist has a challenging task, one that Monteiro regards critically in other therapists, denouncing their dullness and absence of passion. “One would expect analysts to attempt to closely read the evidence of the nightmaring processes at work in themselves,” he writes, since doing so would “lead them into the drama of neglect and indifference about the unending enigmas and marvels the human mind is teaming with” (220). How one is led into this “drama of neglect and indifference” matters, for the language of such nightmaring is at once off-putting, illogical, missing significant parts and repeating others, barely intelligible and also indelible, vivid, concrete. Monteiro notes that “Bion keeps warping language down into many pages that constantly defeat readability. He again and again walks us all along an odd, uncertain edge between intuition, evocation, perplexity and incomprehension. Words are often seen running out of his own grip, this seeming at times the realm he may feel closer to, even deeper into” (238). The same could be said of Monteiro’s writing. While I don’t experience Bion’s writing as a nightmare, my experience with Monteiro’s writing made it possible to grasp language as a nightmaring process. I write this not as a judgment of value but rather as a statement of fact. Perhaps every process of dreaming that is worth the name must also include not just the possibility of interruption—“look, a dream!”—but the more oppressive impossibility, or failure, of a nightmare. Do we stop dreaming when we encounter another person’s nightmare? Monteiro does not theorize this but allows the reader to experience it firsthand, and that is the feat of this book.

While this scenario may very well play itself out continuously in the therapeutic session, the kind of “attending” that I am imagining should have the therapist stopping at their own dreams, at their own interrupted moments, in which the contact-barrier, which seems otherwise perhaps barely perceptible, can be felt. That this can happen in ways that are personal, bodily, and might otherwise be dismissed by the therapist indicates for Monteiro a point of inflection where the therapist encounters their own pathology. Here the therapist has a challenging task, one that Monteiro regards critically in other therapists, denouncing their dullness and absence of passion. “One would expect analysts to attempt to closely read the evidence of the nightmaring processes at work in themselves,” he writes, since doing so would “lead them into the drama of neglect and indifference about the unending enigmas and marvels the human mind is teaming with” (220). How one is led into this “drama of neglect and indifference” matters, for the language of such nightmaring is at once off-putting, illogical, missing significant parts and repeating others, barely intelligible and also indelible, vivid, concrete. Monteiro notes that “Bion keeps warping language down into many pages that constantly defeat readability. He again and again walks us all along an odd, uncertain edge between intuition, evocation, perplexity and incomprehension. Words are often seen running out of his own grip, this seeming at times the realm he may feel closer to, even deeper into” (238). The same could be said of Monteiro’s writing. While I don’t experience Bion’s writing as a nightmare, my experience with Monteiro’s writing made it possible to grasp language as a nightmaring process. I write this not as a judgment of value but rather as a statement of fact. Perhaps every process of dreaming that is worth the name must also include not just the possibility of interruption—“look, a dream!”—but the more oppressive impossibility, or failure, of a nightmare. Do we stop dreaming when we encounter another person’s nightmare? Monteiro does not theorize this but allows the reader to experience it firsthand, and that is the feat of this book.

Works Cited

Bion, Wilfred R. Cogitations. New Extended ed., edited by Francesca Bion, Karnac Books, 1994.

–––. Learning from Experience. Maresfield Library, Karnac Books, 1984.

–––. Two Papers: The Grid and Caesura. 1977. Routledge, 2018.

Eigen, Michael. Contact with the Depths. 2011. Routledge, 2018.

Grotstein, James. A Beam of Intense Darkness: Wilfred Bion’s Legacy to Psychoanalysis. 2007. Routledge, 2024.

Harris Williams, Meg. “An Introduction to Bion’s Model of the Mind.” Four Discussions with W.R. Bion, Harris Meltzer Trust, 2018.

Milner, Marion. The Hands of the Living God: An Account of a Psycho-analytic Treatment. Routledge, 2010.

“Nightmare, N.” Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com/word/nightmare.

Reiner, Annie. W.R. Bion’s Theories of Mind. Routledge, 2023.

Sands, Susan H. “Dissociation, the Analyst’s Vulnerability, and the Body: Review of Awakening the Dreamer: Clinical Journeys by Philip M. Bromberg.” Psychoanalytic Dialogues, vol. 17, no. 5, pp. 741-51. Taylor & Francis Online, https://doi.org/10.1080/10481880701632640.

Winnicott, D.W. Playing and Reality. Routledge, 2005.