Robin Chester – Australasian Confederation of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapies Conference. Sydney 17th, August 2024

SYNOPSIS
In this paper the conference theme initiates a clinical consideration of a diversity in our clinical goals arising from the concluding clinical understandings of Lacan and Bion.
Lacan came to see that the goal of analysis was to assist the analysand to embrace the Real of their existence, free from the Other. For Bion, in contrast, it was to experience the unknowable truth of one’s existence as it arose in the interaction of two minds in the analytic situation. Both of these are seen to direct towards the existential challenges of theI – the subjective sense of self – how it becomes part of either, the us, from where it canbe retrieved, or the them, where it becomes lost.

These concepts are explored throughthe consideration of a number of theories.It is proposed that this clinical/theoretical difference between Lacan and Bion arises according to the I’s fate (us or them) leading to two different pathologies – neurotic and borderline – and two different clinical approaches. A brief clinical vignette exemplifyingworking with the former is outlined.

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