João Sousa Monteiro has been a psychoanalyst in private practice in Lisbon. He has worked under the supervision of Donald Meltzer, meeting him in Oxford every month for 13 years, and twice monthly for the last few years. Meltzer supervised all his clinical cases during these years. He authored Long-term Psychoanalytic Supervision with Donald Meltzer: The Tragedy of Triumph (Routledge, 2019), which describes in great detail the supervision of a particularly demanding analysis over 12 years. João has made five radio programmes on psychoanalysis, four of which are in conversation with distinguished analysts, including a co-founder and former president of the Portuguese Psychoanalytic Society. Four books came from these programmes, one of which he authored, and the other three he edited.

Part 1: On the Unknown, the Unknowable and the Unthinkable 1. Freud's Dream-Thoughts: An Uninvited Step into the Unknown, the Unknowable and the Unthinkable 2. Bion's Theory of Contact-Barrier: A Winding Road Into the Mysteries of the Human Mind 3. New Remarks on the Structure: And the Workings of the Contact-Barrier 4. The Conscious Mind and the Unconscious Mind: New Remarks on the Structure and the Workings of the Contact-Barrier 5. A Brief Historical Survey 6. Alpha-Function as a Cluster of Dreaming Functions 7. Mother's Reverie and the Mystery of Introjection 8. What is a Dream? 9. Bion's Theory of Dream-Work-Alpha: Part I 10. Bion's Theory of Dream-Work-Alpha: Part III 11. The Enigmatic Fabric of Mental Life 12. The Dreaming Ego 13. How Conscious is Conscious, and Unconscious Unconscious? 14. Freud's Wrestling with "The Fact of Consciousness" 15. What, Then, Is a Dream? 16. The Soul and the Stone 17. Still Unregistered Disorders 18. I Don't Know 19. What is Hearing? Part 2: 20. The Fundamental Basic Assumption of Psychoanalysis 21. The Myth of Interpretation and the Role of the Ineffable 22. The Slippery Word Understanding 23. Knowledge as a Privileged Path to Intimacy 24. Passion and the Wonder of Unmeasure 25. The Misfortune of Explanation 26. "Thinking with Passion is the Unconscious Thing" 27. The Inspiring Light of Perplexity and the Emerging Experience of Mystery: A Note Conclusion