Jung's psychoid concept and Bion's proto‐mental concept: a comparison

Jung and Bion both developed theoretical concepts propounding a deeply unknowable area of the psyche in which body and mind are undifferentiated and the individual has no distinct identity, from which a differentiated consciousness arises. In Jung's case, this is enshrined in his psychoid concept and the associated notion of synchronicity and, in Bion's case, in his proto‐mental concept and his ideas on group dynamics. It is by means of these two concepts that Jung and Bion approach and locate a combined body‐mind, a monism, in which body and mind are seen as different aspects of the same thing. This paper reviews the claim that although the two concepts are associated clinically with very different situations, their commonality may arise from a similar intellectual basis: both men appear to have been influenced by the same source of vitalist ideas in philosophy including Henri Bergson, and Jung's ideas also exerted a direct influence on Bion.     

Bion and C.G. Jung. How did the container‐contained model find its thinker? The fate of a cryptomnesia

This paper investigates the possible impact of C.G. Jung's Tavistock Lectures on Bion's concept of the living container. In the first part of the paper, the author offers clues pointing to such an essential impact, which can be found in text passages as well as in the facts of the Bion‐Beckett case, up to and including Bion's first publication of ‘The imaginary twin'. The author suggests that cryptomnesia is the result of repression targeting a highly cathected author's communication which functions like a deep interpretation for the recipient, whose new theory then is a return of the repressed content as well as a transformation of it. The second part of the paper investigates the fate of the assumed cryptomnesia. From this point of view Bion's concept of the container in itself appears to be the result of growth in the container‐contained mode. Finally the author deals with the question whether cryptomnesia in psychoanalytical literature can frequently be seen as the result of psychic growth.     

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.     

A Review of “Trauma and Human Existence: Autobiographical,Psychoanalytic and Philosophical Reflections”

Abstract

The author sets out to locate Bion's model of the mind within the developmental history of psychoanalysis, from Freud to Klein to Bion, using biographical material and clinical case examples, to illustrate Bion's concepts of container/contained, his understanding and use of projective identification, his extension of the use of the countertransference, and his differentiation between the psychotic and non-psychotic aspects of the mind. Links, and attacks against linking are discussed, as well as Bion's thoughts about learning versus knowing, being versus becoming and his emphasis on the essential importance of the development of the capacity to think.     

Book reviews

Wilfred Bion is regarded as a psychoanalytic purist and his austere portrayal of the analytic aim and attitude is often considered to make impossible demands on patient and analyst alike. Not surprisingly, the applicability of Bion's theory and recommended practice to once-weekly psychotherapeutic work is often questioned. Bion is thus ambivalently regarded by psychotherapists as the embodiment of an analytic ideal, whose developmental theories are important, but whose practical utility is doubted, especially in the context of the typical therapeutic setting. This paper seeks to challenge these assumptions by presenting the once-weekly therapy of a woman with attenuated mentalizing capacity and a tendency to destructive acting out. The therapy was guided by the application of central concepts, models and ‘technical’ principles emerging from my understanding of Bion's work. The aim of the paper is to demonstrate that Bion's utility is not confined to formal psychoanalytic settings and that his work may be usefully applied in more modest psychotherapy contexts.     

The present and absent object—on thinking and the capacity to symbolize

In this paper, Bion's different theories on the development of thinking will be introduced: on the one hand, his theory of thoughts as resulting from tolerance for the absence of the object, and on the other hand, dream thoughts and thoughts as resulting from the presence of the object, originally through the mother's containing function. The effects of failures in this development will be discussed; among other things, a hypertrophy of the apparatus of projective identification at the expense of thinking capacities. Briefly, a comparison will be made between a facilitating relation between container and contained and the oscillation between the paranoid-schizoid and depressive position, which Bion describes as a prerequisite for open symbolizing processes. Bion's theories and concepts will be supplemented by Winnicott's theories on the “creative illusion” and the breast/the mother as a “subjective object” as a precondition for the symbolizing capacity that later develops in the “potential space”. Very briefly, a comparison is made between Winnicott's term “the subjective object” and Segal's term “symbolic equation”. Clinical vignettes are interpolated.     

The origins of Bion's work1

This study attempts to identify the scientifi c, philosophical and psychoanalytic origins of Bion's work, and includes an organization of these in a comprehensive and synthetic way with the help of a synoptic table. Investigation has revealed Bion's scientifi c orientation, fed by classical and modern authors‐notably, Locke, Hume, Kant, Sylvester and Cayley, Poincaré, Heisenberg, and the German Romantics. Bion was able to rescue certain transcendent aspects of human, and also of Freudian, knowledge that had largely fallen into neglected obscurity. He made an original use of new verbal expressions related to the immaterial facts of psychic reality, the unconscious and the id. The method involves a search for counterparts in reality with two kinds of evidential source: some works and their authors have appeared ipsis litteris in Bion's work. In those situations where Bion does not cite the sources, the study has been able to establish connections with the lengthy marginal notes which Bion left in the texts of the books from his library.     

Bion and the sublime: The origins of an aesthetic paradigm

In constructing his theory Bion drew on a number of symbolic matrices: psychoanalysis, philosophy, mathematics, literature, aesthetics. The least investigated of these is the last. True, we know that Bion cites many authors of the Romantic period, such as Coleridge, Keats, Blake and Wordsworth, as well as others who were held in high esteem in the Romantic period, such as Milton. However, less is known about the influence exerted on him by the aesthetics of the sublime, which while chronologically preceding Romanticism is in fact one of its components. My working hypothesis is that tracing a number of Bion's concepts back to this secret model can serve several purposes: firstly, it contributes to the study of the sources, and, secondly, it makes these concepts appear much less occasional and idiosyncratic than we might believe, being as they are mostly those less immediately understandable but not less important (O, negative capability, nameless dread, the infinite, the language of achievement, unison etc.). Finally, connecting these notions to a matrix, that is, disclosing the meaning of elements that are not simply juxtaposed but dynamically interrelated, in my view significantly increases not only their theoretical intelligibility but also their usefulness in clinical practice. In conclusion, one could legitimately argue that Bion gradually subsumed all the other paradigms he drew on within the aesthetic paradigm.     

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.     

The seventh servant: The implications of a truth drive in Bions theory of 'O'

Drawing upon Bion's published works on the subjects of truth, dreaming, alpha‐function and transformations in ‘O’, the author independently postulates that there exists a ‘truth instinctual drive’ that subserves a truth principle, the latter of which is associated with the reality principle. Further, he suggests, following Bion's postulation, that ‘alpha‐function’ and dreaming/phantasying constitute unconscious thinking processes and that they mediate the activity of this ‘truth drive’ (quest, pulsion), which the author hypothesizes constitutes another aspect of a larger entity that also includes the epistemophilic component drive. It purportedly seeks and transmits as well as includes what Bion (1965, pp. 147‐9) calls ‘O’, the ‘Absolute Truth, Ultimate Reality, O’ (also associated with infi nity, noumena or things‐in‐themselves, and ‘godhead’) (1970, p. 26). It is further hypothesized that the truth drive functions in collaboration with an ‘unconscious consciousness’ that is associated with the faculty of ‘attention’, which is also known as ‘intuition’. It is responsive to internal psychical reality and constitutes Bion's ‘seventh servant’. O, the ultimate landscape of psychoanalysis, has many dimensions, but the one that seems to interest Bion is that of the emotional experience of the analysand's and the analyst's ‘evolving O’ respectively (1970, p. 52) during the analytic session. The author thus hypothesizes that a sense of truth presents itself to the subject as a quest for truth which has the quality and force of an instinctual drive and constitutes the counterpart to the epistemophilic drive. This ‘truth quest’ or ‘drive’ is hypothesized to be the source of the generation of the emotional truth of one's ongoing experiences, both conscious and unconscious. It is proposed that emotions are beacons of truth in regard to the acceptance of reality. The concepts of an emotional truth drive and a truth principle would help us understand why analysands are able to accept analysts’ interpretations that favor the operation of the reality principle over the pleasure principle—because of what is postulated as their overriding adaptive need for truth. Ultimately, it would seem that Bion's legacy of truth aims at integrating fi nite man with infi nite man.     

FROM EXTENSION TO REVOLUTIONARY CHANGE IN CLINICAL PSYCHOANALYSIS: THE RADICAL INFLUENCE OF BION AND WINNICOTT

This paper addresses the radical departure of late Bion's and Winnicott's clinical ideas and practices from traditional psychoanalytic work, introducing a revolutionary change in clinical psychoanalysis. The profound significance and implications of their thinking are explored, and in particular Bion's conception of transformation in O and Winnicott's clinical‐technical revision of analytic work, with its emphasis on regression in the treatment of more disturbed patients. The author specifically connects the unknown and unknowable emotional reality‐O with unthinkable breakdown (Winnicott) and catastrophe (Bion). The author suggests that the revolutionary approach introduced by the clinical thinking of late Bion and Winnicott be termed quantum psychoanalysis. She thinks that this approach can coexist with classical psychoanalysis in the same way that classical physics coexists with quantum physics.     

Interpretation as Freud's specific action,and Bion's container‐contained

This is a paper showing how a concept central to the work of Wilfred Bion, and one of Klein's important recommendations concerning the practice of analysis with adults and small children, can both be seen in the light of Freud's earliest formulation of the origin of anxiety and the mother's first responses to her infant in distress. In the paper I suggest that these clinically influential concepts of Klein and Bion show an underlying consistency and affinity with Freud's early ideas about the management of anxiety in the mother‐infant relationship, described in two of his pre‐psychoanalytic writings, How Anxiety Originates (1894b), and The Project for a Scientific Psychology (1950 [1895]). The specific mode of operation of psychoanalytic interpretation is clarified by the comparisons made, with no attempt to suggest that Klein or Bion based their concepts upon these particular early formulations of Freud's.     

The Theory of Transformations and Autistic States Autistic Transformations: A Proposal1

This work integrates two areas of thinking: one in which the author develops considerationsregardingobservationmethodsofmentalphenomenainpsychoanalysis according to Bion's theory of transformations; the other in which she is concerned with the investigation of primitive mental states‐protomental states‐more specifi cally, the autistic states of neurotic patients, described by Tustin. Some ideas on the ‘philosophical’ position underlying transformations theory are elaborated, particularly emphasizing the idea that the same phenomenon in psychoanalysis may be considered from different perspectives, as long as it is situated within the theoretical reference frame to which it belongs. The author considers the idea that this method of phenomenon observation is part of a wider context of general human knowledge, in which uncertainty and relativity of concepts are the main components. By adopting transformations theory as a perspective of phenomena observation that pervades the analytical meeting, the author questions whether it is possible to include other groups of transformation of emotional experiences in this theory, which shows particular phenomena with specifi c qualities, distinct from those emphasized by Bion. She hypothesizes that autistic phenomena present in neurotic patients, characterizing autistic states, may be considered and detached, making up a particular group of transformation of emotional experience, which analysts often face in their daily practice. She names this group ‘autistic transformations’.     

Aesthetic Judgment and Perceptual Normativity

I draw a connection between the question, raised by Hume and Kant, of how aesthetic judgments can claim universal agreement, and the question, raised in recent discussions of nonconceptual content, of how concepts can be acquired on the basis of experience. Developing an idea suggested by Kant's linkage of aesthetic judgment with the capacity for empirical conceptualization, I propose that both questions can be resolved by appealing to the idea of “perceptual normativity”. Perceptual experience, on this proposal, involves the awareness of its own appropriateness with respect to the object perceived, where this appropriateness is more primitive than truth or veridicality. This means that a subject can take herself to be perceiving an object as she (and anyone else) ought to perceive it, without first recognizing the object as falling under a corresponding concept. I motivate the proposal through a criticism of Peacocke's account of concept‐acquisition, which, I argue, rests on a confusion between the notion of a way something is perceived, and that of a way it is perceived as being. Whereas Peacocke's account of concept‐acquisition depends on an illicit slide between these two notions, the notion of perceptual normativity allows a legitimate transition between them: if someone's perceiving something a certain way involves her taking it that she ought to perceive it that way, then she perceives the thing as being a certain way, so that the corresponding concept is available to her in perceptual experience.     

Psychoanalytic process and thought: Convergence of Bion and Matte‐Blanco1

Using the convergence between Bion and Matte‐Blanco, in this article the author attempts to stress the view of the psychoanalytical method as promoter of expansion of the ability of the patient to think his emotional experiences. After a brief résumé of the ideas of both Bion and Matte‐Blanco, certain points of congruence between the two are emphasised: the way of perceiving the range of phenomena observed by psychoanalysis, intuition as a method for observing this field, the feelings as the raw material for thinking, and the importance of the concept of infinity in psychoanalysis. The way in which the ideas of Matte‐Blanco assist in the understanding of Bion's propositions is highlighted. Following these correlations, the author discusses certain questions pertinent to the psychoanalytical method and proposes a model in which the analyst acts as a mediator/catalyst in the process of revision of the ways in which the patient has organised his emotional experiences and the theories constructed to support these hypotheses. Samples of clinical material are presented.     

A Meaningful Intercourse: Some Thoughts about Thinking

This article traces the development of ideas about consciousness, symbolisation, thinking and affects in the works of Freud, Bion, Meltzer and Stern. Consciousness is viewed as a special quality of psychic functions and therefore related to the complexity of the world of experience, to its different dimensions as Meltzer describes them. Freud's initial idea about direct and reproductive thinking and a compulsion to associate returns in Bions development of an epistemological instinct and are referred to by Stern as an ongoing, omnipresent milieu of thoughts in which instinctual life takes place. Bion develops Freud's thinking of unpleasure, primary and secondary processes, when he formulates the difference between pain and suffering, which also makes it possible for him to develop Freud's views on symbol formation. Bion's grid describes the relation between different forms of symbols and makes it possible to understand the importance of the reverie of the mother and how a feeling of meaning unfolds, when symbol formation takes place in a process in which the individual is in contact with the underlying structure. These ideas are in its turn developed in another direction by Stern in his theories of a pre-narrative envelope. Freud's ideas about perceptual identity and thought identity as a criteria for the release of motor activity are looked upon as a criteria for truth, which returns in Bion's ideas about the relation between truth and the development of the capacity to think. Meltzer takes up this thread when he claims that truth is beauty and beauty truth.     

The Oedipus complex: A confrontation at the central cross‐roads of psychoanalysis

The theory of the Oedipus complex as Freud formulated it rests on the following pillars: the child's characteristic sexual and aggressive impulses concerning the parents, phallic monism, and the castration complex. This paper reviews the context in which Freud discovered the Oedipus complex, as well as Freud's theory. It then examines the proposals of later authors whose general Oedipal theories differ from Freud's in an attempt to point out both their possible correlations and confrontations with Freud. It includes Klein's pre‐genital Oedipal theory, Lacan's structuralist reinterpretation, Bion's reconception of the complex under the knowledge vertex, Green's generalized triangulation theory, Meltzer's notions of the aesthetic object and sexual mental states, and Chasseguet‐Smirgel's archaic Oedipal matrix     

BION'S THINKING ABOUT GROUPS: A STUDY OF INFLUENCE AND ORIGINALITY

One of Bion's least‐acknowledged contributions to psychoanalytic theory is his study of the relationship between the mind of the individual (the ability to think), the mentalities of groups of which the individual is a member, and the individual's bodily states. Bion's early work on group therapy evolved into a study of the interplay between mind and bodily instincts associated with being a member of a group, and became the impetus for his theory of thinking. On the foundation of Bion's ideas concerning this interaction among the thinking of the individual, group mentality, and the psyche‐soma, the author presents his thoughts on the ways in which group mentality is recognizable in the analysis of individuals.     

BION'S “EVIDENCE” AND HIS THEORETICAL STYLE

The author discusses “Evidence” (1976), a brief but very intense and fascinating paper in which Bion provides a unique opportunity to see him at work in his clinical practice. In the story of a patient, Bion reconstructs two sessions that are all the more true for being imaginary—i.e., narrated (“dreamed”). The matter of language and style in psychoanalysis is of the utmost importance, according to Bion—one could say, literally, a matter of life or death. In Bion's discourse, writing, reading, and analysis converge in the same place, the author notes; all are significant if they involve an experience of truth and the ability to learn from experience.