‘The opposite of a good dream’, Ogden explains, ‘is not a nightmare but a dream that cannot be dreamt’ (Ogden, 2003: 23). T and I were beginning to find a way for the initial budding of voicing something unspeakable precisely through an experience of its crippling impossibility. After a while of sitting together with-in long silences, I could sometimes feel the pressure to solve the conflict disappearing as my thoughts were starting to drift. By allowing this gap – space for the silences, uncomfortable void in our sessions – images began to grow in the empty space between us.
For Bion, the ‘no-thing’ is a vital function of psychic life. It can present, as Eigen explains, as pain, hunger or a gap that is required for meaning to evolve, an empty space in which images can begin to grow. Meaning itself is not a thing but a no-thing and eradication of its evolution can happen when no-thingness is denied – when ‘no-things’ are treated as objects or as nothingness, in a way that makes it impossible to modulate, learn and grow from experiences (Eigen, 1995). Articulation in language for T was for many years an attempt to disavow the gap between ‘no-thing’ and nothingness; to substitute the budding of thoughts with language; erasing, by using words, the abyss of the unthinkable. The space of silences that begun to grow in sessions between us made me realise that it is precisely allowing the absence of the thing that turns the violent nothingness into a Bionian ‘no-thing’ and opens the door for reverie.