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.     

Listen to the Dreams: Interview with Russell Arthur Lockhart at 65

Los Angeles-born Russell Lockhart has a doctoral degree (human psychophysiology) from the University of Southern California. In 1974 he graduated from the C. G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles, where he served as Director of Analyst Training from 1979 to 1982. Since 1974 he has been in private practice. He has served on the faculties at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and University of California, Berkeley. He was a research psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Director of the Psychophysiological Research Laboratory at Camarillo State Hospital. Dr. Lockhart is the author of Words as Eggs: Psyche in Language and Clinic; Psyche Speaks: A Jungian Approach to Self and World; Secrets of Undergroundtrader.com (with Jay Yu), and two books in progress: Gleanings from the Dreamfield and Hints and Helps for Short-Term Traders. He and his wife Frankie have been married 44 years and have four children. My first contact with Dr. Lockhart occurred in 1973, when he shared with me his work with cancer patients. We met again in 1982, when he presented the inaugural series of The C. G. Jung Lectures at the C. G. Jung Foundation of New York. Since that meeting Dr. Lockhart and I have maintained a relationship online, which enabled us to produce this interview.     

John L. Horn (1928-2006)

John Leonard Horn was born in St. Joseph, Missouri, on September 7, 1928, and he died in Los Angeles, California, on August 18, 2006. John Horn was a world-renowned scholar of immense intellect, and he was highly respected in his time. I believe his major contributions to psychology, as well as his influence on psychologists, will continue to grow. His challenging factor-analytic methods of the 1960s, the important methodological debates of the 1970s and 1980s, and his continuing resistance to faddish trends in psychological research all represent fundamental contributions. Through his research and teaching he forced people to question popular assumptions and to evaluate all the data available. He challenged us to think longer, harder, and better. His work will continue to inspire important research in the fields of multivariate analysis and human cognitive abilities for many decades to come.     

The clinical revolution of the ‘wise baby’

In an historical context focused on a close examination of the complex relationship between Freud and Ferenczi, the author shows Ferenczi's contribution to the evolution of psychoanalysis. He describes how his ideas and his therapeutic sensitivity anticipated modern clinical thought (for example, Winnicott and Bion), especially the understanding of borderline and narcissistic pathology. The paper considers the following topics: transference and countertransference; early affectivity; the different psychic trauma; phenomena connected with dissociation; the healing factor of the analysis.     

Reflections on thomism and client-centered psychotherapy

Conclusion To summarize, Rogers and Aquinas both stress the importance of existential experience and sense data. Although Rogers is more concerned with human freedom and being than are many modern adjustment psychotherapists, he is still circumscribed by his initial positivistic assumptions about the nature of man in his therapy. but these assumptions may be in the process of change.But like Aquinas, Rogers has a deep respect for the person, a respect for his emotions, a respect for his whole existential being.³⁸ Rogers once stated that the client-centered point of view is devoid of thequid pro quo aspect of most experiences we call love. It is the simple outgoing human feeling of one individual for another, a feeling it seems ... which is even more basic than sexual or parental feelings. It is a caring enough about the person that you do not wish to interfere with his development, nor to use him for any self-aggrandizing goals of your own. Your satisfaction comes in having set him free to grow in his own fashion.³⁹ Isn't this the spiritual detachment of real Christian love?He has taught at the University of California at Los Angeles and at Loyola University (Los Angeles), and has been a staff psychologist at the Metropolitan State Hospital, Los Angeles. He is a member of the American Psychological Association and the American Academy of Psychotherapists.Portions of this paper were presented at the 16th Annual Scientific Session, Guild of Catholic Psychiatrists, Los Angeles, 1964.     

Symmetric frenzy and catastrophic change: A consideration of primitive mental states in the wake of Bion and Matte Blanco

The author explores the connections between Matte Blanco's notion of symmetric frenzy, i.e. the turbulence characteristic of the deepest levels of mental functioning, and Bion's concept of catastrophic change. For Bion, mental links are retrieved from the formless darkness of infinity. With catastrophic change, emotional violence and the confining nature of representation come into conflict, leaving the subject prey to an explosiveness that paralyses mental resources. Matte Blanco identifies indivisibility as the abyss in which all differentiation ceases; he bases his model on the conflict between symmetry and asymmetry. Infinity, he maintains, is where the first forms of mentalization develop. Both Bion and Matte Blanco emphasize the contrast between the immensity of mental space and the spatio-temporal order introduced by the activation of thinking functions. The author presents clinical material from the analysis of a psychotic patient, stressing the need to encourage both working through the defect of thinking (Bion) and 'unfolding' manifestations of symmetry (Matte Blanco) so as to foster the activation of the resources of thought, meanwhile postponing transference interpretation. He concludes with two later sessions, in which recognition of the analyst in the transference allows the analysand to develop his capacity for containment and asymmetric differentiation.     

A conversation with Dr Michael Fordham. Interview by James Astor

In this interview in Dr Fordham's 83rd year he describes how he started to work with children, and how Mrs Jung was supportive. He talks about the initial suspicion this interest generated in the wider Jungian community. He refers to his acceptance of and interest in the psychotic elements in child analysis and his transference-based approach to working with these elements. He reflects on his own birth, his work with evacuee children in hostels during the war years and the politics of supervision. He describes the core Jungian concepts which underpinned his work and the theoretical differences from the Kleinian and Anna Freudian positions.     

Dreaming as a 'curtain of illusion': Revisiting the 'royal road' with Bion as our guide

One of Bion's most unique contributions to psychoanalysis is his conception of dreaming in which he elaborates, modifies, and extends Freud 's ideas. While Freud dealt extensively with dream-work, he showed more interest in dreams themselves and their latent meaning and theorized that dreams ultimately constituted wish-fulfillments originating from the activity of the pleasure principle. Bion, on the other hand, focuses more on the process of dreaming itself and believes that dreaming occurs throughout the day as well as the night and serves the reality principle as well as the pleasure principle. In order for wakeful consciousness to occur, dreaming must absorb (contain) the day residue, and transfer it to System Ucs . from System Cs . for it to be processed (transformed) and then returned to System Cs . through the selectively-permeable contact-barrier. Dreaming, consequently, allows the subject to remain awake by day and asleep by night by its processing of the day's residue. Bion seems to conceive of dreaming as an ever-present invisible filter that overlays much of our mental life, including perception, as well as attention itself. He further believes that dreaming is a form of thinking that normally involves the collaborative yet oppositional (not conflictual) activity of the reality and pleasure principles as well as the primary and secondary processes. He also conflates Freud 's primary and secondary processes into a single 'binary–oppositional' structure ( Lévi-Strauss, 1958, 1970 ) that he terms 'alpha-function', which constitutes a virtual model that corresponds to the in-vivo activity of dreaming. He further believes that the analyst dreams as he or she listens and interprets and that the analysand likewise dreams while he or she freely associates.     

Bion’s discovery of alpha function: Thinking under fire on the battlefield and in the consulting room

This paper has traced Bion’s discovery of alpha function and its subsequent elaboration. His traumatic experiences as a young tank commander in World War I (overlaid on, and intertwined with, childhood conflicts) gave him firsthand exposure to very painful emotions that tested his capacity to manage. Later, in the 1950s, after his analysis with Melanie Klein and marriage to Francesca Bion, he undertook the analysis of psychotic patients and learned how they disassembled their ability to know reality as a defense against unbearable emotional truths in their lives. This led Bion to identify an aspect of dreaming that was necessary in order for reality experience to be given personal meaning so that one may learn from experience. Simultaneous with working out this new theory of dreaming, Bion also revisited his World War I experiences that had remained undigested and all these elements coalesced into a selected fact – his discovery of alpha function. In subsequent writings, Bion explored the constituent factors of alpha function, including the container/contained relationship, the PS?D balance, reverie, tolerated doubt and other factors which I have termed the ‘Constellation for Thinking’.     

Doing Science,Technology and Society in the National Science Foundation

The author describes his efforts to become a participant observer while he was a Program Director at the NSF. He describes his plans for keeping track of his reflections and his goals before he arrived at NSF, then includes sections from his reflective diary and comments after he had completed his two-year rotation. The influx of rotators means the NSF has to be an adaptive, learning organization but there are bureaucratic obstacles in the way.     

A Structural Approach to the Understanding of Causes, Effects, and Judgment. Review of Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference, by Judea Pearl

Judea Pearl is Professor Emeritus of Computer Science and Statistics and Director of the Cognitive Systems Laboratory at University of California, Los Angeles. He has authored the books Heuristics (1984) and Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems (1988). He has also published close to 300 articles on automated reasoning, learning, and inference. In 1999, he was awarded the IJCAI Research Excellence Award in Artificial Intelligence fundamental work in heuristic search, reasoning under uncertainty, and causality.Susan F. Butler is a doctoral student at Tufts University. Her work is in modeling of judgment and decision making, stochastic processes, and the examination of choice behavior under uncertainty.     

Psychoanalytic transformations1

The author describes how Bion took Freud's conception of dreams as a form of thought and used it as the basis of his theory of transformations. Bion developed an expanded theory of ‘dream thought’, understood as a process of selection and transformation of sensory and emotional experiences. In this theory, the work of analysis is in turn conceived as a process not only of deciphering symbols, of revealing already existing unconscious meanings, but also of symbol production‐of a process for generating thoughts and conferring meaning on experiences that have never been conscious and never been repressed because they have never been ‘thought’. Analysis, in its specific operational sense, becomes a system of transformation whereby unconscious somatopsychic processes acquire the conditions for representability and become capable of translation into thoughts, words and interpretations. The rules of transformation applied by the patient in his representations and those applied by the analyst in his interpretations have the same importance for the analytic process as those described by Freud for the process of dreaming. The author discusses the broad categories of transformation adduced by Bion (rigid motion, projective, and in hallucinosis) and introduces some further distinctions within them.     

Alexander W. Astin: Higher Education's Relentless Reformer

Alexander “Sandy” W. Astin of the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), probably the most prolific and influential researcher in American (U.S.) higher education today, talks about his development as a professional in the field, his mentors, his professional contributions, his personal development, his family, dual career issues, and his hopes for the future of the field.     

Regression in the countertransference: working with the archetype of the abandoned child

Abstract :  The author describes briefly some experiences of his sense of non-existence as an analyst in relation to five patients. He considers the possible countertransference significance of these experiences and puts forward a hypothesis that his sense of non-existence as an analyst might be a clue to regression in the patient to the anxieties of a baby without a mother, even though other clinical evidence of regression might be lacking. Referring back to Jung's early formulation of transference and countertransference as aspects of the unconscious identity shared between analyst and patient, he further develops his hypothesis, suggesting that, in the cases he has presented, analyst and patient were relating through shared dynamic roots in the archetype of the abandoned child. He briefly demonstrates how the understanding thus achieved was of clinical use in the analyses of the patients he has presented.     

Say hello to the scream extractor: working with an autistic child with psychotic mechanisms

This paper describes the first two years of intensive psychotherapy with a six-year-old boy diagnosed with autism. I explore the many ways in which he retreated from reality, most frequently by taking refuge inside the maternal body or flying off into an imaginary space world. He fragmented his identity and that of his objects by using the discourse of fictional characters. Everything was externalised; there was little transmutation of material available for thought. I consider his dilemma – the wish to fuse with the object and the fear of being engulfed; the omnipotent denial of the need for an object and of the parental relationship, leading to an inability to make links. The paper discusses working with a child who experienced any ‘paternal’ firmness as persecuting and destructive. The softer, receptive maternal mind of the therapist was more easily tolerated. He gradually began to internalise a more benign combined object, as he became more able to bear separateness from the other.     

An introduction to the reading of Bion

The author suggests that a good deal of the confusion that arises in the course of reading Bion derives from the fact that Bion's analytic writing is comprised of two periods of work that involve markedly different conceptions of psychoanalysis. These two periods require of the reader very different ways of reading and generate contrasting experiences in reading. Bion, in passages in Learning from experience (1962) and Attention and interpretation (1970), offers advice to the reader regarding how he would like his 'early' and 'late' work to be read. The author treats the experience of reading these passages as ports of entry into the fundamental tenets underlying Bion's widely differing conceptions of the psychoanalytic enterprise. The experience of reading early Bion generates a sense of psychoanalysis as a never completed process of clarifying obscurities and obscuring clarifications, which enterprise moves in the direction of a convergence of disparate meanings. Incontrast, the experience of reading Bion's later work conveys a sense of psychoanalysis as a process involving a movement toward infinite expansion of meaning. The author offers a detailed account of an analytic experience which he discusses from a point of view informed by Bion's work, particularly his late work.     

Passion in group: thinking about loving,hating, and knowing

In his early work, Bion (1961) established the goal of learning about and getting beyond the basic assumptions to become a work group. Later, in his structural theory of affect, passion became a key concept. Passion describes the necessary and sufficient condition for a psychotherapy group to be a work group. Passion is an intersubjective process of bearing and utilizing one's most basic affects to reach self-conscious emotional awareness. Bion postulated three primary affects: loving, hating, and knowing (LHK). A clinical example illustrates how the therapist may represent, mentally organize, and mobilize the group's potential for passion by attending to the evolution of his or her own affects. Passion transcends transference-countertransference in that an optimal level of personal meaning from LHK is achieved and utilized in emotional participation.     

Subjectivity, objectivity, and triangular space

The author reviews his ideas on subjectivity, objectivity, and the third position in the psychoanalytic encounter, particularly in clinical work with borderline and narcissistic patients. Using the theories of Melanie Klein and Wilfred Bion as a basis, the author describes his concept of triangular space. A case presentation of a particular type of narcissistic patient illustrates the principles discussed.     

A Review of Live and Become (Schlomo's Odyssey). (2008). Written by Radu Mihaileanu and Alain-Michel Blanc. Directed by Radu Mihaileanu

It was not hard to see that an archetypal image had triggered the awful conflagration that swept over Los Angeles. Indeed, for anyone owning a television set, it was not hard to see the image and to feel that it was the wrong archetype for this nation. A black man was supposed to lie face to the ground, his entire body flat against the ground. Should he attempt in any way to rise, police with clubs would beat him until he was again knocked flat, and when he later complained about such treatment, the law would side with the police, not him. It seems faintly obscene to psychologize in the face of such pain, and the painful events the image of it has triggered, and yet the psychological questions come at such collective moments, along with the nerve to answer.