Bion's Ideas Research Articles

Threads of identity

ABSTRACT Identity is a paradoxical expression for psychoanalysis because importance is placed on 'becoming', the decentring of subjectivity and the avoidance of rigid identifications. There is no settled understanding of metapsychological terms and practices or the relationship between theory and practice. The development of psychoanalysis in Asia creates wonderment and anxiety for both Western and Eastern psychoanalysts. Western psychoanalysts are concerned about the threat to Western ideals and sensibilities to define psychoanalytic identity. Eastern psychoanalysts question whether there can be sufficient space for the conception of Eastern subjectivity within a Western psychoanalysis or it represents a repetition of colonial othering. I suggest that there is a thread of identity that rests on the psychoanalytic attitude and state of mind. A state of mind is associated with Bion's idea of passion and Kristeva's notion of reliance. Chetrit-Vatine has extended these ideas to emphasise the importance of the psychoanalyst's receptive and ethical state of mind.

When the Good Object is also a Thief: A Memoir of Adoption.

This contemporary Kleinian memoir explores the possible existence of an intrapsychic, adoption-specific preoedipal triad including child, birth mother, and adoptive mother that can shape the emerging mind. As an intrapsychic construct, the adoption triad comes to exist in the infantile mind, requiring that adoptees contend with four additional part-object maternal representations: a villain (bad birth mother), a victim (good birth mother), a rescuer (good adoptive other), and a thief (bad adoptive mother). The psychic complexities of this possible adoption triad are explored, with an eye to how it might illuminate the psychosocial challenges experienced by some adoptees, including dysregulated behavior, rage, dissociation, and shame. To this end, Bion's ideas regarding presymbolic, nondefensive communication and Winnicott's understanding of use of the object are invoked. Expanding the preoedipal paradigm of adoption to include the possibility of an intrapsychic, adoption-specific maternal triad can enhance our understanding of the psychology of adoption, as well as highlight the need to consider the ways in which internal objects can exist simultaneously in both dyadic and triadic paradigms.

Hanging on the telephone: reflections on conducting psychotherapy over the phone during the Covid pandemic

ABSTRACT This paper is a discussion of the experience of conducting psychotherapy sessions over the phone during the Covid pandemic. It explores the constraints and advantages of psychotherapy over the phone. It refers to Freud and the original setting of psychoanalysis and discusses the ideas of Bion about the need for the therapist to attune in a state of reverie to the client’s communications. It reflects on the phone as a symbolic lifeline during the Covid crisis.

The Courage to Dream: A Beginning Psychotherapist Encounters Bion

In this paper, a psychotherapy student is given an assignment to analyse one of her own dreams using Freudian dream theory. She struggles to engage with the task until she discovers the ideas of Wilfred Bion. The notions of alpha function and beta function offer a framework for the student to understand why she has had so much difficulty in staying connected to her dreams or delineating in a culturally appropriate way between what is reality and what is her dreamworld. The student questions whether her early life, taking place within the political and ideological conflict of apartheid‐era South Africa, may have influenced her ability to stay in reality, and wonders about her own ability to contain the affects of her children. She presents a vignette of a dream of her own in which she has to free a naked baby who is stuck in a wall in a bathroom. The writer and her therapist construct the dream as aligning with her own psychoanalytic work to integrate the very young part of herself. In coming to this understanding with the ideas of Bion, the student experiences her own reality in a more vivid and present way.

The Wish to Never End: Grappling with the Termination of an Infant observation And its Relevance to Clinical Work

This paper uses a psychoanalytic infant observation to highlight the significance of grappling with endings. It describes the termination of a two‐year relationship with a child and his mother, who were observed weekly by the author. The content of the ending process is extrapolated to apply to infant observations in general, with implications for termination of psychoanalytic psychotherapy treatments with patients of any age as well as personal relationships. Transference and countertransference reactions and enactments evoked during the prelude to termination are considered. Vignettes from the infant observations illuminate important crossroads during the termination process. The paper also illustrates the resilient capacity that a child (and by extension the child part of an adult) can have to experience, process and bear the ending of a relationship, as well as to continue to hold that relationship internally. This glimpse into one child's, one mother's and one observer's experience of separating from each other demonstrates the ways primitive aspects of the psyche may be activated during a termination. Finally, Donald Meltzer's concept of three‐dimensional interior space and Bion's idea of open‐ended reality are applied, indicating how relationships that have ended may be contained within one's psyche, enduring beyond their ending.

Povratak u budućnost - osnove savremene teorije analitičkog polja

The concept of an analytic field emerged as a result of the research of a relational vertex in psychoanalysis in the sixties of the twentieth century by French-Argentine analysts, Madeleine and Willy Baranger. The authors came to the conclusion that the analytical dyad creates a field, which consists of two people that are inevitably linked and complementary in the analytical situation and involved in individual dynamic processes. From this perspective, the object of study is not the patient itself, nor the relationship with the analyst, but the field of the analytical situation as a product of unique phenomena and pathologies. Field theory is, in its essence, "weak theory" because it contains a large space for change, with the awareness of the transience and fascination with the new and unknown. In short, field theory is a fluid theory that is struggling to change, and as such it was a good ground for fertilization with complex Bion's ideas, especially among Italian psychoanalysts. Plurality of language in field theory has allowed dialogue between heterogeneous analysts, offering itself different perspectives of contemporary psychoanalysis, putting emphasis on the elements of dreaming, narration, and deconstruction of psychoanalytic discourse. Characteristics that emerge after the interpretation signal their understanding and pave the way for the next in terms of its (un) saturation and facilitation -contributing to psychic change. Haydee Faimberg linked the function of analytic listening to Freud's concept of Nachträglichkeit, which she defined as the subsequent giving of meaning and derived the concept of "listening to listening". The attribute of "weak" theory can very easily be transformed in the field into a "hard" practice, because it inflicts narcissistic wounds to analysts, disrupting the sense of omnipotence and self-sufficiency. The fantasy created in the bi-personal field becomes autonomous, has its own laws of functioning and is independent of conscious and rational control. An analyst can't become a passive observer of what is happening and which frustrates him occasionally but must take a "second look".

Rehearsed Language of Psychoanalysis

AbstractTaking up Bion's idea of a continuum between the psychotic and non‐psychotic parts of the mind, this paper looks at clinical moments where the primitive part – psychotic and ‘autistic‐contiguous’ – mimes language and takes over the analytic field. The patients discussed seem to intuit the analyst's blind spots and a pseudo‐language takes over as primitive parts of the patient collude with those of the analyst. The three patients discussed here use registers of speech which vary from over‐abundant to quicksilver and dried. However, it is not as much a communicative use as it is evacuative and adhesive. Verbal language offers familiar moulds in terms of unfree associations, pre‐existing narrative structures, syntax, figures of speech (symbols, metaphors, paradoxes) and common psychoanalytic tropes (dreams, primal scenes). Primitive parts of the mind nestle in these moulds rather than disturb them. It is only through examining the countertransference and abjuring collusions that the analyst may be able to contact the terrifying or enclosed parts in the field. ‘Death’, for instance, represents the limits of language and as it is unpacked, it comes to acquire a range of meanings which allow the recovery of thinking. I have tried to demonstrate the experience of verbal language as a seductive screen that analyst and analysand collaboratively create to make bearable the incomprehensibility of the encounter. In doing this what emerges is a ‘thick description’ that helped and reflects on different kinds of collusion. The paper tries to capture the experience of collusion as well as a return from it.

“Like Kings in Their Kingdoms”: Conservatism in Brazilian Psychoanalysis During the Dictatorship

In this article, we examine some aspects of the fate of Brazilian psychoanalysis during the 1964–85 civil‐military dictatorship. Presenting data from interviews with Brazilian psychoanalysts and focusing on the activities of the Brazilian Psychoanalytic Society of São Paulo, we argue that the external political situation was paralleled by conservatism within the Society, with some dangerous consequences. We attend especially to tensions between right‐ and left‐wing psychoanalysts, denunciations and fear, and the impact of Bion's ideas. We conclude by suggesting that the “complicity” of the Society with the governing norms was coincident both with the self‐interests and attitudes of particular individuals and with normalizing institutional tendencies in psychoanalysis itself.

Stray thoughts – seeking home: Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt read in light of Wilfred Bion's ideas

Peer Gynt, the main character in Ibsen's dramatic poem from 1867, has fascinated scholars since its publication. After a lifetime of escapades, Peer finds himself lonely, detached and with feelings of deadness. Gradually, the underlying structure of his personality confronts him. With the help of Wilfred Bion's ideas, it is possible to trace a distinct pattern, where unprocessed thoughts seem to play a decisive role in hindering Peer's self‐realization. The main female character, Solveig, spends her life waiting for Peer. Eventually she develops into a container, ready to welcome Peer's stray thoughts. This paper demonstrates how she evolves Bionian capacities like reverie, and eschewing of memory and desire. The interpretation that follows thus challenges a tradition where Solveig is seen as a romantic figure who, like Goethe's Gretchen, is designed to save the male protagonist by unconditional love. This paper argues that Solveig plays a more active role towards Peer in offering significant tools for personal development. The paper concludes that Ibsen and Bion have uncovered elements of basic human conditions that in some significant ways seem to coincide.

Working Through the “Caesura”

More and more often analysts work with patients who must develop the capacity to participate in analysis. One such patient, H., conveyed the impression of being "bogged down." He did not work or study, and at home with his family was prone to violent outbursts; his social relationships were centered around drug use. Concepts from Bion and Winnicott helped H.'s analyst take the risks necessary to create a therapeutic relationship with him. The patient has come to realize the worth of analytic thinking, and its potential to transform his life. Deviance with respect to technique, and collusion between the narcissistic areas of therapist and patient, pose the risk of dangerous slips in the direction of analytic "omnipotence." Reclaiming the term collusion (from the Latin con-ludere, "to play together"), however, can allow analysts to remain faithful to Freud's ideas while maintaining a necessary flexibility vis-à-vis the patient. This ludic space can be expanded through Bion's ideas, which deconstruct a perspective through which we are able to observe "facts," with particular reference to what occurs in the psychoanalytic situation.

Bion, Alpha‐Function and the Unconscious Mind

This paper will identify why and how Bion's ideas about dream‐work and alpha‐function evolved, and the profound implications of this development for what he calls ‘practical psychoanalysis’. Andre Green interestingly comments that for Bion the ‘model of the dream’ was unusually more important than the ‘model of the baby’; and I will consider in particular the question of ‘models’, and their relation to the making of the accurate observations of unconscious functioning we need to underpin our analytic work. It is hoped the paper will contribute to the clinically relevant question of whether there is an important link between Bion's ‘alpha‐function’ and mentalization theory.

WHAT IS THE CONTAINER/CONTAINED WHEN THERE ARE GHOSTS IN THE NURSERY?: JOINING BION AND FRAIBERG IN DYADIC INTERVENTIONS WITH MOTHER AND INFANT

"Ghosts in the nursery." "Visitors from the unremembered past." Fraiberg, Adelson, and Shapiro's (1975) words convey the relational "intruders" that they perceived while working with mothers and infants. A mother's unresolved past is a driving force within the treatment of mother-infant dyads. Working with these families, the therapist strives to process and metabolize the distress of the dyad while enabling the mother to contain the infant more fully. This article proposes that Fraiberg etal.'s metaphor may be newly elaborated utilizing Bion's (1962) original theoretical conceptualization of the "container and contained." He posited that an infant projects distressing affective states upon the mother, who contains the experience, transforms the feelings, and then enables the infant to reintroject a more tolerable experience. This lays the foundation for the relational experience of being known by another and facilitates the infant's development of self-knowledge and emotional regulation. We utilize Fraiberg etal.'s original case material to identify ways in which ghosts in the nursery disrupt the processes of the container and contained. Bion's ideas may help enrich our understanding of how the therapeutic relationship enables cycles of containment, transitioning the material "ghosts" from being contained by the infant to being contained by the therapist, and to ultimately being transformed so that the mother can reattribute them to the past.

Waves of being: Merleau-Ponty with Bion and Meltzer toward an ontology of music.

Phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty, early on, neglected music's theoretical value in favor of painting's. Later, however, he found that it is the transience of music that speaks to the phenomenological experience of Being. This transition from painting to music presents the possibility of an ontological understanding of music for psychoanalysis. For Freud, music and morality were both from a “beyond” that was an effect of neurosis. Drawing on psychoanalyst Bion's idea of container–contained, and his disciple Meltzer's application of this to art, as well as Bion's later innovation of the unknowable O, I apply Merleau-Ponty's distinction between painting and music to the therapeutic nature of art in order to see what sort of psychoanalytically significant revelation is obtained through music.

Seventy Years On: Some Clinical Consequences of The Controversial Discussions

Seventy years ago with much of the world engaged in a battle for survival in the Second World War, the British Psychoanalytical Society organized a series of scientific meetings to discuss the new theories of Melanie Klein. The paper starts with a historical background to the Controversial Discussions and moves on to discuss some of the main points of the debate. It revisits the concept of unconscious phantasy along with the debates on primary narcissism and the death instinct, also exploring its use and relevance in current clinical practice. Following Bion's idea that psychic change is felt as catastrophic, I attempt to link some of the anxieties and processes that were present during the Controversial Discussions with similar processes present in the psychoanalytic world today.

Bion's Notes on memory and desire – its initial clinical reception in the united states: A note on archival material

While Bion's 1967 memory and desire paper reflected a crucial episode in his clinical thinking during his epistemological period, it was also central to his evolution as a Kleinian psychoanalyst who worked with seriously disturbed adult patients. The author explicates and contextualizes these claims with a new archival document, the Los Angeles Seminars delivered by Bion in April 1967, and the full‐length version of Notes on memory and desire. Bion here instigated a radical departure from years of theory‐laden work when he made his clinical work and ideas accessible to a new audience of American Freudian analysts. While this new group was keenly interested to hear about Bion's clinical technique with both borderline and psychotic patients, there were varied reactions to Bion's ideas on the technical implications of the analyst's abandonment of memory and desire. Both the Los Angeles Seminars and Notes elicited responses ranging from bewilderment, admiration to skepticism amongst his audience of listeners and readers.These materials also however allow for a more complete and systematic presentation of important ideas about analytic technique – and while his ideas in this domain have been long valued and known by many psychoanalysts, this contribution stresses the crucial aspect of the reception of his ideas about technique in a particular American context. American analysts gained a much more explicit idea of how Bion worked analytically, how he listened, formulated interpretations and factored in the analyst's listening receptivity in the here‐and‐now. The author concludes with a consideration of the importance of Bion's American reception in 1967.

The preschool playground: a young child's experience of entering the emotional field

This paper explores a young child's experience of entering the emotional field of the preschool playground. Esther Bick's ideas about primitive mental states are drawn on to consider how psychic holding can occur through the skin in a physical way until the child is able to find containment from the preschool group. The metaphor of a ‘second skin’ is extended to describe the preschool group's response to the new child. Bion's idea about ‘a group mentality’ is used to think about unconscious processes occurring in the group as efforts are made to contain infantile anxieties. It is suggested that the capacity to contain feelings and face frustration is the first step towards socialisation of the growing child.

The Challenge of Leadership in Front Line Clinical Teams Struggling to Meet Current Policy Demands

Teams, and their managers, working at the interface between government policy and service to clients are subject to high levels of anxiety arising out of the persecutory manner in which well-intended policy demands are delivered and cost efficiencies imposed. Informed by Bion's ideas about group behaviours, these responses can be understood as a form of defensive behaviour and identified as Basic Assumption Me-ness. Basic Assumption Me-ness in team managers takes the form of managerialism at the expense of leadership, developing a shell that acts as a protection for the lonely, overburdened, vulnerable and soft inside. This hardness, evident through increased unavailability and a rather sadistic use of boundaries, is communicated to staff, who in turn pass it onto clients. In this manner, it infects all relationships thus stifling emotional engagement, creative thinking and practice. This paper then explores ways in which team leaders, courageous enough to take up their authority in an emotionally engaged manner, can reverse these dynamics to the relief and benefit of all concerned. Leaders need to insist on attendance at meetings and supervision where cases can be properly considered; demonstrate an ability to think about risk as ever present in the work because, as all are well aware, no amount of form filling can eliminate this; and acknowledge that the work requires constant assessment and judgement as well as an ability to stay with the unknown. The aim is to be responsive to the daily struggles of team members working face-to-face with clients and to remain aware of ‘the reality on the ground’ when engaging in an equally lively way with senior management.

Transformations of emotional experience

In this paper the author approaches mental pain and the problems in a psychoanalytic treatment of patients with difficulties in the psychic transformation of their emotional experiences. The author is interested in the symbolic failure related to the obstruction of development of phantasies, dreams, dream‐thoughts, etc. She differentiates symbolization disturbances related to hypertrophic projective identification from a detention of these primitive communications and emotional isolation. She puts forward the conjecture that one factor in the arrest of this development is the detention of projective identifications and that, when this primitive means of communication is re‐established in a container–contained relationship of mutual benefit, this initiates the development of a symbolization process that can replace the pathological ‘protection’. Another hypothesis she develops is that of inaccessible caesuras that, associated with the detention of projective identification, obstruct any integrative or interactive movement. This caesura and the detention of projective identifications affect mental functions needed for dealing with mental pain. The personality is left with precarious mental equipment for transforming emotional experiences. How can a psychoanalytical process stimulate the development of creative symbolization, transforming the emotional experiences and leading towards mental growth? The author approaches the clinical problem with the metaphor of the psychic birth of emotional experience. The modulation of mental pain in a container–contained relationship is a central problem for the development of the human mind. For discovering and giving a meaning to emotional experience, the infant depends on reverie, a function necessary in order to develop an evolved consciousness capable of being aware, which is different from the rudimentary consciousness that perceives but does not understand. The development of mature mental equipment is associated with the personality's attitude towards mental pain. The differentiation between psychotic, neurotic or autistic functioning depends on what defences are erected to avoid mental pain. The primary link between infant and mother is where the building of mental equipment takes place, through communicational forms that, to begin with, are not verbal. The author suggests the need for the development of an ideo‐grammar (in gestures, paralinguistic forms, etc.) in primary relations, as the precursor forms that will become the matrix for the mental tools for dealing with emotional experiences in a mature way. The paper stresses the significance of the parental containing function for the development of symbolization of prenatal emotional experiences. This containment develops ideograms, transformations of sense impressions into proto‐symbols, instruments that attenuate the traumatic experiences of helplessness. The author takes Bion's ideas about extending the notion of dream‐work to an alpha function that goes on continually, day and night, transforming raw emotional experiences in a ‘dream’. In order to acquire a meaning, facts need to be ‘dreamed’ in this extended sense. Meaning and truth are the nurture of the mind. Mental growth, the development of adequate tools – including reverie – for dealing with mental pain, seen from a psychoanalytic perspective including reverie, implies that the object becomes a provider of meanings. Analysis begins to aim primarily at the generation or expansion of the mental container, instead of predominantly working on unconscious contents as such.

The facilitation of genius: Rickman's mentoring of Bion

Marco Conci's paper gives new information on the relationship between two giants of early object relations: Rickman and Bion. First as Bion's analyst, and later as his mentor, colleague, and friend, Rickman inspired and facilitated the development of one of our treasured analytic geniuses. Although we only have Bion's letters, and so not the full correspondence, the portrait of a genuinely facilitating relationship develops, one that began before Bion knew where he was going and therefore drew heavily on Rickman's ideas and experience. As Bion matures, so Rickman gives him more room to differentiate, credits the originality of Bion's ideas, and becomes a friend and colleague rather than mentor. The resulting portrait is an object lesson in growth and maturation. The author of this discussion found a good deal of resonance with his relationships with his own early interests and formative development.

THE BODY SPEAKS: BION'S PROTOMENTAL SYSTEM AT WORK1

abstractPsychoanalysis has primarily explored somatic experience in relation to love and intimacy. This paper focuses on the body in relation to work. It explores the experience that what patients increasingly present for analysis are the traumas and pleasures of being caught up with and belonging to a body larger than their own, whether in a couple, a group, a work organization or the body politic. It begins with an exploration of Bion's idea of a relationship between protomentality and group disease. It goes on to consider what can be conceived of as his ecological methodology, which enables movement between different ‘fields of study’ (Bion 1962). These are applied to the health risks encountered by psychotherapists and the profession as a whole. Finally, there is a proposal for mentoring to address professional health, as an under‐developed element in the profession.