I was surprised at the fluency of T’s telling of this dream as if a bridle has been lifted off her speech. The dream was the first of a series of other dreams that brought to the foreground a demand to keep on talking ‘trying to go about as if everything is ok’. It touched on the unspoken sense of dying, the pending ‘falling off’ of arms and legs, that symbolises perhaps a loss, or – to take it a step further – a ‘killing’ of the actual body that comes with words. As Žižek explains:
Word is murder of a thing, not only in the elementary sense of implying its absence – by naming a thing, we treat it as absent, as dead, although it is still present – but above all in the sense of its radical dissection: the word ‘quarters’ the thing, it tears it out of the embedment in its concrete context, it treats its component parts as entities with an autonomous existence.
(Žižek, 2007: 51)
I began to have a sense of the extent of betrayal that language carries for T. Words between us – in any therapeutic encounter – are a promise that would always break, an attempt to get closer to the thing-in-itself, only to discover that we have actually killed it while producing the words to capture it. Bion writes about such betrayal as a fundamental aspect of any process of translation that can be accessed through the myth of the Tower of Babel. There is always a God, he explains, that ‘belongs to a moral system and appears to be hostile to [wo/]mankind in [her/]his search for knowledge’ (Bion, 1963: p. 65, my additions). Translation, even the translation of ourselves in psychoanalysis, will always encounter a sublime resistance to the process of