Bion, W.R., Brazilian Lectures. London: Karnac Books (1990), pp. 20-1
Milton’s Paradise Lost and the termination of the Fifth Book of the Aeneid are both serious attempts to formulate, and thus communicate, something about religion, about a god representing the ultimate reality. We are trying to talk about an obscure subject, the most fundamental and primitive parts of the human mind. We could try to bring a brilliant illumination to bear on this obscure thing in order to show up the dark space so clearly that even something dark and difficult to see would become visible. Freud gave a clue to another approach [in a private letter to Lou Andreas Salome] when he said, ‘I often try artificially to blind myself in order to examine these obscure places’. I may not have translated that correctly, but I would like to borrow from Freud and divert his statements to suit my problem.
Instead of trying to bring a brilliant, intelligent, knowledgeable light to bear on obscure problems, I suggest we bring to bear a diminution of the ‘light’ – a penetrating beam of darkness: a reciprocal of the searchlight. The peculiarity of this penetrating ray is that it could be directed towards the object of our curiosity, and this object would absorb whatever light already existed, leaving the area of examination exhausted of any light that it possessed. The darkness would be so absolute that it would achieve a luminous, absolute vacuum. So that, if any object existed, however faint, it would show up very clearly. Thus, a very faint light would become visible in maximum conditions of darkness.