Emotion, non-emotion and analyst language

Abstract

In this paper the author examines, under the vertex of Bion´s theories, the notion of emotion. She studies patients’ situations of strong emotional manifestations and situations of lack of emotion specific to primordial states of mind – autistic states and unintegrated states. The author develops ideas about the type of language used by the analyst facing this kind of communication. To this end, she makes use of Bion’s theory of transformation (Bion, 1965), particularly transformations in “O”. She proposes that the analyst’s language for accessing such states of mind should be a “language of emotion”, the analyst “becoming the emotion” which in her view is specific to transformations in “O”. Clinical material will be used to illustrate these issues and stimulate discussion.