speaking, to the attempts to construct emotions and experiences into their narrow verbal meaning. Bion gives an example of a patient who stutters every time he tries to speak about his experience. He writes:
The words that should have represented the meaning the man wanted to express were fragmented by the emotional forces to which he wished to give only verbal expression; the verbal formulation could not ‘contain’ his emotions, which broke through and dispersed it as enemy forces might break through the forces that strove to contain them.
(Bion, 1970: 94)
T’s dream was telling me something about the inherent alienation in language, and the unbearable death that comes with words. It presented me with a conflicted element of translation in its relation to psychoanalysis: a care home that continues to put its emphasis on articulation in language might be ignoring at times the ongoing catastrophe of a falling tower that is always a part of speaking. As her dream shows, the traumatic locus does not reside only in the catastrophe of collapsing-building-falling-of-limbs itself but in the gap between the ongoing destruction and the attempts to speak. Although speaking always sits on the horizon as a marker for healing, for T, language was only possible as a violent cover that concealed the unbearable echoes of destruction; preventing a dialectical process in which – as told by the myth of the Tower of Babel – deconstruction and creation are intertwined.