Why does psychoanalytic writing from the beginning of the pandemic seems somewhat embarrassing to read now? Maybe it is the hurried need to weigh in on all that was said to be “unprecedented” about this time, as if all this tragic novelty offered an opportunity for an equally unprecedented psychoanalytic reading. As each of the first weeks of lockdown ticked by, I kept an imaginary reckoning of the character of each week’s struggles based on the sorts of themes that came through the Zoom screen. Week 4, for example, was surely characterized by tensions with loved ones and partners, while Week 3 was a time for some people to half-apologetically confess that the lockdown actually suited them in many ways. As the weeks turned into months, these attempts to wrestle meaning from the monotonous march of death and repetition fell by the wayside. In a similar way, I read much of the writing from this period as a premature accounting, an attempt to signify something that ultimately resisted any formulation beyond considerations of practical and technical matters like the practice of teletherapy.

It was only with the advent of the protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder that the period of the pandemic seemed to be about something, and that “something” was systemic racism. Understandably, psychoanalytic writers turned to the archive or psychoanalytic writings on race. Yet my own experience during this time provided a perspective on psychoanalysis and race that can only be obscured by relying on what analysts have written about racism. In contrast, I found that reading during the time of the George Floyd protests allowed one to uncover blind spots about racism by finding references to race in analytic writing that were not at all focused on or concerned with race or racism on a conscious level. Like many others, I tried to pass the early days of extreme isolation by forming a reading group, in this case one interested in studying the work of Bion. We chose a book on supervision seminars Bion did in 1967 in Los Angeles. At this stage of his career, Bion was focused on one of his still controversial teachings: that the psychoanalyst should work without memory or desire. He was there to tell the group of Los Angeles analysts that they should proceed in each session as if they knew nothing about the patient: Think not of the patient you saw yesterday; think instead of the patient you shall see tomorrow. As for desire, analysts should put aside their desire for any cure as well as the countless smaller desires that encumber a session, especially the desire that the session should end, the wish for a good meal after the session does end, and many more cravings, large and small.

At the time of the session excerpt we will examine, Bion had already given several lectures to the Los Angeles analysts. On this occasion, April 13, 1967, he was attending a case presentation to give a public supervision and discuss his notion of working without memory or desire. The text of this case is found in the edited volume Wilfred Bion: Los Angeles Seminars and Supervision (Bion, 2013). The chapter that includes this supervision is titled “The utility of abandoning memory and desire in a case marked by masses of information from the patient and the case presenter.” An analyst presents to Bion and the group the case of a rather generic-sounding man. Here is the description:

The patient, Mr. X, was a married man and business manager in his late thirties who had been in analysis with the presenter for one and one half years. He complained of depression and difficulty functioning effectively at work. He described feeling almost continuously depressed, and he would often relieve his depression with barbiturates and some occasional marijuana. He felt that “things just go badly” at work, and he always expected “the worst” there. Mr X recognised that he acted seductively with female employees and business clients, and he felt thrilled when he evoked intense emotional responses in them. One woman began writing him letters. He felt very guilty about this activity. (p. 108)

The presenter of the case shares the beginning of a dream of Mr. X:

He was parked on a street or alley, over a period of some time, over a couple of weeks. And he had struck up an acquaintance with someone who lived near where he had parked his car. There was some sort of criminal activity on the street. It was covert, and a suspicious sort of activity, he doesn’t know what it was. But it was mildly threatening to him. He felt that simply by leaving the area he would eliminate the danger. In any case, he struck up this acquaintance with this person or the person’s wife, living in a house nearby. (p. 109)

The editors’ notes tell us that we are reading a transcription of a case presentation recording. As such, the editors have us understand, there are things that have not been included in the transcript, including ringing telephones, the scrape of chairs on the floor, a housekeeper whistling as she housekeeps, cars, emergency vehicle sirens, and more. As a reader, I found myself wondering about the need to explain such things. We might also wonder if this earnest accounting of full disclosure, seemingly in the interests of bringing us closer to the full truth, serves as a kind of displacement, displacing something which is more affectively charged than the movement of chairs. We can only imagine that the surplus of sincerity on the part of the editors covers another more fraught example of omission, one that is so absolutely left out as to not even be counted in the most sincere reckoning of what has been left out.

But let us continue with the dream. The dreamer continues to wander down alleyways, returning to his car to observe the so-called “suspicious activity.” He has met an acquaintance who lives in a house nearby. Mr. X’s wife suddenly appears, and they go to the house of the acquaintance and his wife. It turns out that this man is a politician and is running for high office. Mr. X looks out the window and sees a man performing some “suspicious activity.” He tells the politician’s wife, who says, “Oh yes, he was always messing around there,” and when they got around to it, they would put a stop to it (p. 109).

The presenter further explains that Mr. X’s association is that “the suspicious character looked like a trashy Southerner” (p. 110), adding that “This reminds me now of various people of that sort, such as the character Popeye in Sanctuary, Faulkner’s book Sanctuary” (p. 110). In his dream, Mr. X is “mildly threatened” (p. 109) by suspicious activity, but the mildness is acute enough to cause him to leave the area where it occurred. In any case, we hear that, in the dream, the “mildly threatened” Mr. X decides the solution is to move to another place, away from the suspicious person. He goes to the business of the acquaintance, but the description emphasizes some further lingering in back alleys and watching of the suspicious activity of the characters he sees there. It is not clear if the man is following the acquaintance he met during his stay in the parking lot or his acquaintance’s wife. He also brings his own wife. The ambiguity brings to mind the initial description of the man as someone who takes pleasure in seducing women and flirting with them. There is something libidinal about all of this.

At the point where the politician’s wife speaks of the trashy Southern man, Mr. X says that it reminds him of the character Popeye. In the footnotes, we read,

William Faulkner’s novel, Sanctuary, tells a hideous story of murder, rape, deceit, and injustice. Popeye, who is impotent, kills a man and rapes a woman with a corncob. He takes the woman to another town and keeps her there for his perverse sexual desires. At the novel’s end, Popeye is tried and hanged for a crime he did not commit. (p. 131, note 1)

All of this contributes to the sense of the sexual stakes of this dream, adding a note of sexual violence and perversion. The presenter continues telling the dream:

His wife and he left the house, walking down the alley. He felt this was ill advised. Some Negro boys were in a building and on a roof walkway connecting two buildings. And they look out a kind of window—they weren’t on a roof; [they were] in a kind of a walkway that had a window, some kind of connection, between two buildings—and they looked out a window and they say some expression for a woman, he’s not sure, some expression like a “chick” or “babe” and then, “let’s get her.” They’re referring to the patient’s wife. He told his wife that they have to run, and they did. They ran down an alley to a passageway to a main street. And they had to jump down four or five steps. They went into a busy all-night liquor or grocery store, or both, which was also run by Negroes, but Negro girls. There were many customers there, and the patient said to the Negro girls “we were just chased,” and they want to call the police. And the girls said, “Oh, they’ve already been called. They’re always being called around here. As a matter of fact, the alarm had just stopped ringing for them, they’re always being called, problems are always going on there.” The patient didn’t understand about the alarm.

[…]

Then he wondered if he should wait for the police, and then go to his car, and then pick up his wife back at the grocery, or maybe they should both go to their car, or they should wait for the police first, and then go to the car or vice versa, he was confused as to what to do. He was not confused questioning what to do; he didn’t use the word “confused.” That was the end of the dream. (p. 110)

At this point, the Southern man who reminds him of Popeye vanishes. The man and his wife leave the house and walk through the alleyways. “Some Negro boys” who are both said to be on the roof, but not on the roof, on a walkway, yet also looking out windows, call his wife “babe” or “chick” and then indicate their intention to “get her.” The man and his wife run to a grocery store, run by “Negro girls.” The black girls indicate that there is no need to call the police. They say, in essence, that the police here are always already called. The girls indicate that there is some kind of alarm that just went off. It is as if the police are always in the process of being called and that an alarm is always in the process of sounding or has just ceased ringing. “They’re always being called around here,” one of the girls says. She never says that they ever actually come. It is hard to believe that they ever do come. The dreamer, however, seems to never doubt that they are coming. He gets confused in an obsessive attempt to figure out where he should go to meet them: Should he wait in the grocery or go to his store then back to the grocery to meet his wife etc.? The man considers all these options, but his confusion is immediately negated by an odd explanation by the presenter: “He was not confused questioning what to do; he didn’t use the word ‘confused’ questioning what to do; he didn’t use the word ‘confused.’”

To be sure, something is up when an explanation about confusion is this confusing. Being confused becomes conflated with the question of whether he used the word “confused,” as if the very word is all that lies between confusion and the possibility of something like clarity. Speaking of confusion, although the Southern man, who reminds the patient of Popeye, would seem to be white, there is some ambiguity about this. When I look up Popeye’s race in Faulkner’s novel online (The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project, n.d.), I find this: “Although Temple (the woman in the book who is raped by Popeye) once calls him ‘that black man,’ and Horace refers to ‘Popeye’s black presence,’ Popeye is white.” This being the case, we must also understand that, although it is never noted by Bion or the group of Los Angeles analysts, we are dealing with a dream of white man who dreams of a white man who is said to have a “black presence.” This is a dream and a case presentation haunted by a black presence.

The presenter goes on:

The patient adds the following: “I remember there were some police there in the dream. They were sort of supervising the demolition of a structure. Or they were putting up a sign, I don’t know. It seems odd, the police were doing construction work rather than police work. This was an addition to the dream now. You know, it was an odd place. I almost enjoyed the unusual character of it, of this area, this slum area. (p. 111)

There is something strange about the police. They do what they should not be doing. The patient tries to explain what is off: they should be doing police work, but instead they are doing construction. What is unspoken is the fact that their construction work is actually a work of destruction through demolition. What is being constructed by destruction? What do the police do that they should not be doing? We are left confused, although the word “confused” has barely been said. If the word “confused” were said, would the police do what they are supposed to do? Would they cease also working in construction, which is to say demolition? If this were to happen, would the alarm that calls the police stop always sounding?

There is something about the patient’s almost-enjoyment of the slums that allows him to enjoy this play of alleyways and alarms. The ever-sounding alarm does not alarm him, and he has still not said the word “confused.” He thinks the police are coming and that this is a good thing. Why would they not when the alarm has sounded, when they are called? Surely the police must be coming. If the alarm sounds, it must be that they are always responding to alarms, always responding to any hint of suspicious activity, so that we can always feel safe, safe from the Southern man and Negro boys alike.

Still, surface associations aside, it seems that the patient knows that things are not what they seem. There is some confusion about the police, specifically confusion about why the alarm always rings, why the police are always called, but the patient does not wonder about this. After all, wandering in alleys, he did see the black boys on the roof or out the window or on the walkway; in any case, he did see the black boys above him from down below, did hear them call his wife “babe” or “chick.” The boys did call out “get her,” causing the patient to flee, to run to the store. In his dream, the Southern man who reminds the dreamer/presenter of Popeye disappears to be replaced by the black boys that catcall his wife. In his dream, black boys disappear to be replaced by black girls who work through the ever-sounding alarm. The patient is mildly threatened. He is mildly threatened, and I, as reader, am mildly disturbed.

I am reading this in preparation for a quarantine-inspired group conducted by Zoom on the work of Bion. It is June 2020, not April 1967. The quarantine as a story has, amazingly, receded into the background, following the worldwide Black Lives Matter protest movement and the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. In the weeks that follow, psychoanalysts will abruptly abandon their remote theorizing about remote therapy in a time of pandemic and, like everyone else, turn their attention to race in America. Psychoanalysts, like banks, drug stores, online grocery delivery apps, and yoga studios, will not fail to make their own statements in support of the movement. Study groups for white therapists to consider privilege and racism will arise, armed with reading lists including psychoanalytic thinkers who have worked on the topic of racism. For the most part, all of this happens without reference to the lack of diversity in American psychoanalysis, a fact that is usually met in the field with embarrassed silence or statements of various attempts to find more trainees of color, efforts that seem to never go very far for reasons that are not very well understood (Woods, 2020). Woods cites Moskowitz in the video Black Analysts Speak, stating that “[p]sychoanalysts of color make up .007 of the profession, far less than in the field of nuclear science” (Winograd, 2014).

The archive of race in psychoanalysis is not only found in the official writings on the topic. Today, a casual reading of an old case conference or countless journal articles featuring white people dreaming of black men reveals that which remains obscured in the now official anti-racist reading lists. To read these with an awareness of systemic racism is to become aware of what psychoanalysis says about race when it doesn’t think it is talking about race at all. Today, under the influence of the international support of the Black Lives Matter movement and the manner in which it has forced a reconfiguring of our symbolic landscape, we hear the presence of a “black presence” haunting a dream and haunting a case conference that hardly admits the register of race other than as a symbolic placeholder for all that is abject for a white patient dreaming of Negroes. This is not to imply that these matters have not been considered and considered frequently, yet it is one thing to read writings on race specifically and another to read reports of dreams in articles that have no particular interest in race. Thus we find more dreams of black presence throughout the psychoanalytic archives.

A 1945 article, “The Hero’s Rebirth,” finds that the dreaming hero’s journey involves surviving an encounter with the black presence on Amsterdam Avenue.

Then I am walking along the street on Amsterdam Avenue, conscious that the journey with Helen was only a dream, and thinking that I must write it down before I forget it. I took an envelope from my pocket and tore off a rough-shaped piece and scribbled the dream on it while continuing to walk. Along the curb an automobile stopped, full of Negroes. They looked like kidnapers. I quickly walked away, turned the corner towards my house and woke up. (Fodor, 1945, p. 490)

A 1962 article, “The Curative Factors in Psycho-Analysis,” finds the black presence in the analytic space: “I was in your consulting room telling you a dream, but I was rather embarrassed because there were a lot of other people there including some Negroes whom I felt you should not have allowed in” (King, 1962, p. 226). A 1972 article, “A Quantitative Study of a Psychoanalysis,” finds the black presence in a dream as follows:

Something happened on the bus that bothered me. Was sitting down, the buses were still crowded. There was a Negro boy who was standing in front of me. He sat down beside me. I had two papers, a morning and The New Statesman. Was reading one and the other was on my lap. He took the paper off my lap. I said, that is my paper. He said, I just want to look at it. I told him, you didn't ask me, I’d rather you didn’t. I took it back. It was strange. When he got off, he stepped on my foot. Don’t know if it was deliberate or not. Thought he might hit me before he got out. When I took the paper he didn't try to insist on it. He had no reaction. (Dahl, 1972, p. 241)

If you asked me what these reports reveal that was not already otherwise known, I couldn’t answer very clearly other than to say that they probably include a certain something extra that stays unsayable behind the embarrassed silence when psychoanalysis is asked to account for the paucity of its own black presence. As for Bion, it remains unclear what forgoing memory or desire has to do with all of this. In the case presentation in question, Bion sees the patient is seen as someone who is hiding from himself, one so knowledgeable about psychoanalytic writings that he evades how sick he is. So, too, our earnest lists of psychoanalytic writings on racism seem to obscure what so far remains far beyond the reach of psychoanalysis. Perhaps a reading without memory and desire is exactly what is needed in order to read these dreams other than as they were read in their time. The timelessness of the unconscious might paradoxically then allow us to resituate this dream both in its own time and in our present time. In both times, we find ourselves in a time where black boys threaten and black girls work in grocery stores, a state of affairs that recently became a lethal threat, particularly to non-white people, in grocery stores in the time of the pandemic. In both cases, we find a story about what happens when the police are called and a split interpretation of what it means to call the police or to believe that, as the black girl in the dream says, there is no point in even calling them. Somehow the white dreamer includes a black girl who already knows something about the police that he will not allow himself to know. Should he go back to the car, parked for two weeks in the place near the slums, or should he wait for the police in the grocery? What if he goes to the car and misses the police who finally come to the grocery? The dreamer is always going back to where he started, immobile, in his parked car, always in his same parking space in between walks in the back alleys, the black alleys. His confusion and wandering seem to keep him from knowing what he already knows.

It was April 1967 when the dreamer dreamed this dream. Although you would not know it from anything said by way of context in the editors’ introduction to the Bion seminar in Los Angeles, a quick Google search allows us to situate the session as a dream on the eve of what was to become known as the “Long, Hot Summer of 1967,” a summer marked by race riots. Bion is speaking two years after the Watts Riots in Los Angeles of 1965. An online chronology of racial unrest during 1967 allows us to place this case conference of April 13 precisely at a time when a series of riots, involving looting and police violence, was starting. Without memory and desire, we learn from a 2017 US News and World Report on an article of August 14, 1967 that the riots started on April 7. The session in which the patient told his dream of Negroes happened on April 10, 1967.

The US News article from 1967 further provides this chronology:

Omaha, Nebr., April 1—About 200 Negro youths smashed windows, looted stores, damaged police cars; 21 arrested.


Nashville, Tenn., April 8-10—Negro college students rioted three successive nights after a speech by “black power” leader Stokely Carmichael. Several were injured and nearly 100 arrested.


Louisville, Ky., April 11 to mid-June—Negro demonstrations for open housing drew harassment from whites who threw rocks and bottles. Nearly 700 whites and Negroes were arrested in weeks of repeated disorders. National Guardsmen protected the Kentucky Derby. (US News Staff, 2017)

Further, the article tells us

More than 100 cities of the U.S. have been hit by Negro violence this year. At least 177 persons have been killed, thousands injured. Property damage has approached 1 billion dollars. National Guardsmen have been called out more than 20 times to help police, and once—in Detroit—U.S. Army troops were used in addition to the National Guard. (US News Staff, 2017)

Two days after the patient told his dream of Negroes, April 12, 1967, Bion (2013) gave his first talk to the Los Angeles analysts. He speaks of the difficulty in transmitting the “ineffable” truth of any psychoanalytic session when analysts speak to analysts (p. 4). He says that patients and analysts can more or less understand each other since they share a common experience doing analysis together, but analysts have a hard time speaking with other analysts. That Bion would say this is not surprising, but the figure of speech he uses to describe this state of affairs surely is. He tells the analysts, “I think that in fact, that is a situation in which the fault, the “n***** in the woodpile,” [deletion by author] isn’t really detected, because it lies in this difficulty of communication (p. 4). The N-word in question is written in full in the text, although nothing about this decision or its implications appears in the text; instead, it is presented as if its usage is unproblematic. This omission—which, unlike the omission of the notation of the sounds of whistling housekeepers, is not noted—becomes more striking when reading the case conference material on the dream and more striking still if one is reading it, as I was, in the midst of a global uprising against racism. Wikipedia explains that the phrase means a figure of speech originating in the United States, meaning “some fact of considerable importance that is not disclosed—something suspicious or wrong” (Wikipedia, n.d.). The entry notes that one possible etymological root of the phrase is that slaves attempting to escape captivity were said to sometimes hide on trains underneath piles of wood being transported.

Some fact of considerable importance has not been disclosed—something suspicious or wrong. Without memory and desire, we find ourselves back where we started, parked in the same place, pacing the same back alleys, haunted by fears of a Black planet. There is no need to call the police because the police are always called, and the alarm is always sounding. Bion’s 1967 talks in Los Angeles addressed analysts and asked them to listen to the patient without memory or desire. He asked analysts to think not of the patient they know but the patient who will come to see them tomorrow. But what happens when the unknown is always already without memory, when it is separated and segregated in alleyways, on rooftops, and in groceries in the dreams of white patients? The analysts of 1967 could only read this psychogeography in the anal terms of then current theory that held that dreams of Black people usually signify an anal fixation. Despite calls to listen without memory and desire, the dream remained unreadable, with its boundaries of white and black, above and below.

Bion’s Interpretation

It is not a matter of pointing out the racism revealed in the discussion between Bion and the analysts. Their interpretations cannot help being what they are and are even correct, as far as they go. To listen without memory or desire is to listen without a desire that this system be anything other than what it is. How, then, does Bion demonstrate his method? How is it possible to demonstrate the absence of memory and desire? What does a method of listening without memory and desire reveal about the theme of blackness that emerges in this dream?

Bion (2013) listens without objection as the analysts describe Mr. X’s dream as representing a split self, split between an aspiration for respectability and “slummy” (p. 111) delinquency. Mr. X is slumming it, hiding out in the bad parts of town where his sickness will be merged with the general state of rampant criminality. It is not for Bion to say it should be otherwise, that the patient should not equate Blackness with delinquency and sickness. Bion knows that this is simply true, for him, for Mr. X, and for the analysts. Thus we have the following exchange:

Analyst: He’s not sure or not whether he can get adequate protection against the mobilisation of all the bad, dirty, black, Negro, and rat objects that are going to attack him if he does try to go legitimate. Because here is where he’s not sure he has the protection of going straight.


Bion: Yes, but it applies the other way round, too; I would have thought here that the difficulty is that whatever state he’s in, it is a bogus cure. He is cured, but his cure is menaced.

In order to “go legitimate,” Mr. X requires the protection of the police. His analyst assures him that an analyst is not a policeman since he listens without judgement, but in his very assurance he reveals his awareness of the opposite. Just as the police don’t have to judge or make arrests in order to stabilize the very structure of what it means to “go legitimate,” so too the analysts here reveal their seamless alignment with a system of legitimacy that depends on a realm of delinquency in order to separate itself out as its opposite. The point is not that there is racism in the interpretations, which there obviously is, but rather that listening without memory or desire can’t help but silently assent to the need for an abjected, less than human other, the Negro, in order to define the possibility of its opposite, cure, or legitimacy and nothing less than the possibility of being seen as fully human.

What happens when what is most unknowable wants to remain unknown and unreadable even when it is inscribed in the psychoanalytic archive? In such cases, we might say, it is not enough to be without memory and desire. In such cases, we must negate the negation of the “without” in order to approach it from another orientation, both within and outside of the psychoanalytic archive that holds this testimony. Contemporary events call us to return to the archive to read again in a manner that might be described as without “without memory and desire.” But without without memory and desire is not a refutation of Bion’s memory and desire. It is, instead, an attempt to achieve its rigorous demand by reading that which, until now, has remained impossible to read, with or without memory, with or without desire.