Psychoanalysis with Wilfred R. Bion: Contemporary Approaches, Actuality and The Future of Psychoanalytic Practice 9780367333348, 9780367333362, 9780429319273

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PSYCHOANALYSIS WITH WILFRED R. BION

Psychoanalysis with Wilfred R. Bion is the product of François Lévy’s efforts over a period of twenty years to represent clearly the classical elements and the innovatory propositions of the thought and work of Bion, who offers both new and modified ways of practising and thinking about the psychoanalytic experience. Bion’s thought, methodical and intuitive, gave rise to profound modifications in the approach to the psychology of groups, clinical work with psychoses, and the conception of the genesis of thought. Some of his original notions – psychic growth, processes of thinking, transformations, alpha-function, maternal reverie – constitute valuable tools for rethinking psychoanalytic practice. This book places Bion’s thought within a filiation that is faithful to those of Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein. It shows the parallels that exist between Bion’s formalisations and those of Lacan. It also lays emphasis on the mechanisms of thought arising from the negative (André Green), from logic (Lewis Carroll), from causalist philosophy (David Hume), from literature (Milton, Blanchot), and from the physical sciences (Stephen Hawking). Finally, Lévy underlines the importance of placing individuals within the collective from which they have originated. Psychoanalysis with Wilfred R. Bion will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists looking to draw on the ideas of one of the most important and influential figures in the history of psychoanalysis. François Lévy is a psychoanalyst and member of the Société de Psychanalyse Freudienne (SPF), Paris, France. He has authored many articles as well as the preface for the French edition of Bion’s Clinical Seminars. He has run a teaching seminar on Bion’s work for more than two decades in Paris.

The Routledge Wilfred Bion Studies Book Series Howard B. Levine, MD Series Editor Editorial Advisory Board: Nicola Abel-Hirsch, Joseph Aguayo, Avner Bergstein, Lawrence J. Brown Judith Eekhoff, Claudio Laks Eizerik, Robert D. Hinshelwood, Chris Mawson, James Ogilvie, Elias M. da Rocha Barros, Jani Santamaria, Rudi Vermote

The contributions of Wilfred Bion are among the most cited in the analytic literature. Their appeal lies not only in their content and explanatory value but in their generative potential. Although Bion’s training and many of his clinical instincts were deeply rooted in the classical tradition of Melanie Klein, his ideas have a potentially universal appeal. Rather than emphasizing a particular psychic content (e.g. Oedipal conflicts in need of resolution; splits that needed to be healed; preconceived transferences that must be allowed to form and flourish), he tried to help open and prepare the mind of the analyst (without memory, desire, or theoretical preconception) for the encounter with the patient. Bion’s formulations of group mentality and the psychotic and non-psychotic portions of the mind, his theory of thinking and emphasis on facing and articulating the truth of one’s existence so that one might truly learn first-hand from one’s own experience, his description of psychic development (alpha-function and container/contained), and his exploration of O are “non-denominational” concepts that defy relegation to a particular school or orientation of psychoanalysis. Consequently, his ideas have taken root in many places . . . and those ideas continue to inform many different branches of psychoanalytic inquiry and interest.1 It is with this heritage and its promise for the future developments of psychoanalysis in mind that we present The Routledge Wilfred Bion Studies Book Series. This series gathers together newly emerging and continually evolving contributions to psychoanalytic thinking that rest upon Bion’s foundational texts and explore and extend the implications of his thought. For a full list of titles in the series, please visit the Routledge website at: www.routledge.com/The-RoutledgeWilfred-Bion-Studies-Book-Series/book-series/RWBSBS. 1 Levine, H.B. and Civitarese, G. (2016). Editors’ Preface, The W.R. Bion Tradition, Levine and Civitarese, eds., London: Karnac, p. xxi.

PSYCHOANALYSIS WITH WILFRED R. BION Contemporary Approaches, Actuality and the Future of Psychoanalytic Practice

François Lévy

First published in English 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business The first French edition was published in 2014 © 2020 Éditions Campagne Première The right of François Lévy to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. This book is a translation of a work previously published in French by Éditions Campagne Première, Paris, France, as La psychanalyse avec Wilfred R. Bion (2014). English language translation © Andrew Weller, 2020 Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-33334-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-33336-2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-31927-3 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

For Laura Julien and Lilas Pierre and Claire Dalva and Victor Lola and Amaia

“Working with François Lévy in Paris for nearly 20 years, I have been able to appreciate his profound knowledge of Bion’s writings that is witnessed now by the book published in its English translation. I recommend it to all interested in a deeper understanding of Bion’s work.” Gianna Williams, former Director, Observation Course, Tavistock Clinic “François Lévy conveys readers his enthusiasm for breaking into the Bionian universe, an expanding universe that has its starting point in Freud and Klein’s ideas. For the author, the justification of the book is to ‘represent a container with the purpose of revealing the content that made it’. It is undoubtedly an important contribution to those interested in Bion’s ideas.” Celia Fix Korbivcher, member, Brazilian Society of Psychoanalysis; author, Autistic Transformations: Bion’s Theory and Autistic Phenomena (Routledge, 2013)

CONTENTS

Acknowledgementsviii

The Grid

1



Overture: taking the trouble to get into the book

3

1 Changes of perspective

12

2 Hostile and friendly life

33

3 Emotional experience and alpha-function

49

4 The negative at work

67

5 The genesis and development of thought

81

6 The rejection of causation

104

7 Transformations, or reality in analysis

123

8 Group and psychoanalysis, survival or destruction?

140

Conclusion

164

References169 Index174

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to express my thanks to all those who participated in bringing this book to fruition: • • •

• • • •

Marie Lacôte, for her efficiency in conducting bibliographical research and resolving all the technical questions; Louise L. Lambrichs, for her attentive rereading of the manuscript and suggestions as to how to render things more elegantly; Alain Gillis, a former medical director of the Medical Educational Institute (IME) Michel de Montaigne at Chelles, near Paris, and a long-standing friend of more than fifty years, for his help with the cover illustration; Michael Lévy and Pierre Lévy, for their talent in translating spatially the idea of temporality outlined in this book; Andrew Weller, the translator of this book, for the quality of his translation and the shrewd advice he gave me in preserving the intended meaning of my work; Howard B. Levine, for the enthusiasm with which he has welcomed my work in his innovative series; Finally, Laura Dethiville, who accompanied me faithfully during the writing of this book, for her infinite patience, shrewd advice, permanent support, and kindness.

THE GRID

Definitory Hypotheses 1

Ψ 2

A β-elements

A1

A2

B α-elements

B1

B2

B3

B4

B5

B6

 . . . Bn

C Dream Thoughts, Dreams, Myths

C1

C2

C3

C4

C5

C6

 . . . Cn

D Preconception

D1

D2

D3

D4

D5

D6

 . . . Dn

E Conception

E1

E2

E3

E4

E5

E6

 . . . En

F Concept

F1

F2

F3

F4

F5

F6

 . . . Fn

G Scientific Deductive System H Algebraic Calculus

G2

Notation 3

Attention 4

Inquiry 5

Action 6

. . . n.

A6

OVERTURE Taking the trouble to get into the book

In Wilfred R. Bion’s terminology, this book is “a realization of K”. For a long time, I did not understand what this expression meant – it was, however, not what Bion would have called a “link −K” (minus K). Well before I threw myself into studying his work more thoroughly, I had been introduced – to some extent – to this peculiar vocabulary by a work of supervision that I had been led to undertake with an analyst familiar with this way of thinking, work which led me, on an “emotional” level, to reconsider many of the presuppositions that I employed in my relatively new practice. Of this “transformation”, Bion would have said that I had abandoned a number of “preconceptions” which, hitherto, had “saturated” my thinking, and that I had become acquainted with a mechanism of great value that he called a “reversal of perspective”. I had already been able to appreciate the effects of this in my psychoanalytic activity with my patients of that time. Thus, like my patients, I had “realizations” that made it possible to discover unconscious formations, perhaps caused by an “intolerance of frustration”, to which Bion had given, I think, the name of “bizarre objects”. I pictured them, however, in the form of “unsaturated elements” which led me to make contact with zones that I had been unable to reach previously. I was able to follow paths that were supposed to make it possible to explore more deeply the “turbulence” of thought processes and that led me to discover how, in this or that patient, a “forced split” had even led to a loss of any contact with reality – a phenomenon for which Bion had proposed to construct a “negative grid”. Thus, suspecting that beyond this first formula – a “realization of K” – an impressive abyss of thought lay in waiting, I picked up again the book that I had already begun, continued the effort of reading I had already begun, and persevered without seeking any longer to take into account my “understanding” of it. The first thing I noticed was that the book I was holding in my hands was rigorously written, the sentences were solid, the terms well chosen, and the classical style of the writing corresponded to what I like to find in an author.

4 Overture

At the psychoanalytic level, I found in it a good number of concepts with which I had finally become familiar; others, on the other hand, left me somewhat perplexed because I was less accustomed to using them, and because, it has to be said, they were part of a conceptualization from which, in France, at least, many had turned away. Moreover, beyond this theorization, I was acquainting myself with a practice that was rather disparaged at the time, a practice that consisted – according to certain early texts, in any case – in alternating relatively concise propositions, quite equally distributed between patient and analyst, of the kind: associationinterpretation-association, or: interpretation-association-interpretation, leaving no place for silent thought, for example, or for an opening that would have made it possible to escape from this kind of “circular argument”. But certain passages held my attention, passages that Bion, in his own experiences, had identified as “notations”, to which he ascribed great value. These formulations hit home directly. When I came across them in the course of my reading, they found their way to a precise point within me due to a self-evident meaning that imposes itself by virtue of its soundness, and this in spite of my surprise at this style of practice. They encouraged me to explore lines, pages, and whole chapters in more depth. I regularly stumbled over rather obscure “statements” which sometimes aroused in me a sense of deep anxiety, and sometimes the intuition of a luminous perspicacity − Bion was very interested, following Henri Poincaré, the French mathematician, in the participation of the phenomenon of “intuition” in the process of understanding. I told my colleague and friend Claude Sevestre about my interest, my curiosity, and also my perplexity. We decided that, together, we would get down to reading Bion but, as is often the case in such circumstances, there were very soon five of us. We had thus formed, with a great deal of seriousness and regularity, a “work group” and we tried to make it function like a “leaderless group”. And it was only several years later that we realised that this kind of set-up is defined, by Bion himself, as being characterised by an internal rigour that is attained at the price of excluding “basic hypotheses” which, in general, manifest themselves with a view to destroying any attempt to be efficient. But we persevered and overcame many obstacles, some of which often obliged us to return to the original English text, only to discover obvious things that the translator had overlooked by complicating unnecessarily the translation from one language to another. We worked in this way for three years before giving shape to the collective project of suggesting to the Société de Psychanalyse Freudienne (SPF) in Paris an “Introductory Seminar to Wilfred R. Bion’s Thought”. The input at each meeting came from several participants, rather like an enlarged work group in which some members participated more actively than others. Gradually, our respective roles became clearer and Sevestre and I, each in turn, led the work in tandem − Bion would perhaps have spoken of “binocular vision”. He might even have said that the seminar was now underpinned by a “basic assumption” of “pairing” − distinct from those of “dependence” or “fight-flight” − a

Overture  5

configuration in which the group expects the two leaders to give birth to revelatory ideas whose importance would be comparable to the “messianic ideas” of an inspired figure. We bore those expectations. Unfortunately, after a few years of fruitful collaboration, but also of ruthless struggle, Sevestre succumbed to the onslaught of a relentless illness, leaving us all distraught and in grief. Personally, I had the feeling that a certain equilibrium had been lost that we had established together, an equilibrium that I could not imagine ever being able to re-establish, which is still the case today. I feared having to take into account an event that had already taken place, and which Bion would describe as a “catastrophic change”. He would have added that experiences felt to be meaningless reveal underlying significations. In any case, I had to reorganise myself in order to be able to discover what would enable me not only to continue the work the two of us had begun but also to take into account from thereon my constantly painful solitude. Bion would certainly say that I was considering the situation from another “vertex”. Perhaps. The seminar is still continuing today, in the same form, and the participants, of whom there are many more than at the beginning, are actively involved without, as far as I can tell, fearing that they will be judged for what they say, and I would like to thank them for that. We all assume a dose of what Bion, drawing on John Keats,1 calls “negative capability”, a term that refers to the capacity to remain in a situation of doubt or waiting without itching to respond to it prematurely. Furthermore, through their interventions, they help me become aware of the overall direction in which my remarks are leading – a “selected fact”, as Bion would say, drawing inspiration this time from Poincaré2 − and they try, with much kindness, to let me know at what point they are no longer able to follow me. In doing so, they are very useful to me because, unbeknownst to any of us, elements are exchanged that throw light on the way in which “alpha-function” operates, which is so essential, in Bion’s view, for the very constitution of thoughts and for the development of the “K” link that unites us. We are confident that we are sharing an experience that enriches us all in different respects and, through our combined regularity and diligence, we are contributing to an experience of psychic “growth” that each member of the group has as we progress in studying this work of thought. Without “arrogance” − a term Bion employs, on the one hand, in connection with Oedipus, and, on the other, as a warning to psychoanalysts who are tempted to behave like looters with regard to the unconscious “contents” of their analysands − we are forging, perhaps individually, a sort of “deductive scientific system” which depends on the understanding each participant derives from my remarks once, in each participant’s mind, the words I use have been shorn of their inevitable “penumbra of associations”, as Bion would say. The present book has evolved over a period of more than fifteen years. It seemed to me that the current components of the psychoanalytic environment were favourable for trying to bring together the elements that I have gradually isolated during this period of time, elements established thanks to the use of the “constant conjunctions” that fix them, as Bion would have said, while waiting to confer a

6 Overture

“meaning” on them. In my view, this book will already have found its justification if it represents a “container” whose aim, it may be inferred, is to reveal the “content” which constitutes it. The terms in the preceding text that are inside quotation marks are largely ones derived from Bion’s vocabulary, and I already feel a form of “accomplishment” in the fact that I have had the opportunity of discovering them.

The psychoanalytic galaxy I consider psychoanalysis as a discipline with scientific aims which is distinguished from others by the fact that the major part of its hypotheses are based on theory that has arisen from clinical experience, a theory according to which there is a universe separating unconscious thought from conscious thought. Albeit simple in appearance, this difference requires a detailed understanding of the elements that comprise it. The theory just mentioned is the fruit of the work to which Freud devoted his whole life, marked by discouragements, goings-astray, hopes, and successes, and this research was carried out more often than not in the greatest solitude, sometimes with the help and support of colleagues and disciples who were faithful but also rebellious, continuators but also derailers. This elaboration was always pursued in such a way that its author maintained a close connection with clinical work and experience; indeed, no advance in this domain could take place without the active contribution of patients. At the same time, the elements gathered together through observation only acquire meaning if they are ordered according to a selected logic. An authentic and profound work of thought was necessary for its author to produce a corpus generally considered by psychoanalysts, and some others, since Freud, as one of the three narcissistic revolutions in human thought. Freud was an immense discoverer whom it is easy to criticise – like all the great explorers – concerning aspects that he did not (or could not) explain and concerning those where, in a way that has become more apparent today thanks to certain enhancements in our knowledge made by others, he got things wrong. These imperfect aspects of his personality and his research allowed other researchers, fascinated by the unknown continent that he had begun to explore, to take up the major part of his elaborations and to carve out for themselves their own path in the spaces unexplored by the pioneer. They also contributed to establishing the original theoretical corpus in a way that was sufficiently solid and transmissible for his followers to be able to find, in an elaborated form, something to help them reflect on the clinical situations encountered, even if Freud himself had warned his readers against the temptation of passing over from theory to dogma. He had made it clear that analysts should be ready to call the whole theoretical scaffolding into question when faced with each new patient. We are necessarily being reductive when we only mention the great psychoanalysts who have contributed to the formation of the theoretical arsenal of psychoanalysis. We can mention, in the first place, with pleasure and pain, Sándor Ferenczi, the “Paladin and secret Grand Vizier” (Letter from Freud to Ferenczi, dated 13 Dec

Overture  7

1929, in Freud & Ferenczi, 2000, pp. 373–374), who put all the subtlety of his thinking in the service of psychoanalytic research, which suggests that today we cannot read Freud without, in parallel, reading Ferenczi, to the point that some analysts have spoken, wrongly in my view, of a “Ferenczian theory” that has clinical implications that are fundamentally different from those that are derived from “Freudian theory”. No! Psychoanalysis is one, but there are many psychoanalysts, who are also unique. It would be necessary to say as much of Anna Freud, Karl Abraham, and many other contemporaries of the birth of psychoanalysis. In the same vein, a very special mention must be reserved for Melanie Klein, a passionate clinician who set up her own school of psychoanalysis once she had settled in London. She uncovered a number of incoherent elements in Freud’s theory that were in contradiction with the observed facts, and she “shaped” a clinical approach that made it possible to analyse children who were more real and tangible than those that emerged in adult analyses that sought to define what the child is for psychoanalysis. Owing to its perspective on early mental processes, “Kleinian theory” is interested just as much in the psychopathological “disorders” that reveal themselves in many mental illnesses – borderline states, schizophrenia, paranoia, melancholia – and opens up a privileged path of access to the understanding of the psychoses. “Kleinian theory” found an audience that was particularly attentive to its clinical aims in the New World, in North and South America, where disciples of great importance contributed to the consolidation of its thought. In a different way, France benefited from an important renewal of its psychoanalytic thought thanks to the personality and work of Jacques Lacan, who had become one of the classical figures of thought in Europe and who upturned many comfortable ways of thinking about and practising psychoanalysis. By refounding the discipline on both a semantic and linguistic approach to the unconscious and by bringing this approach into direct relationship with the clinical domain of the neuroses and psychoses, Lacan enriched psychoanalytic discourse with a structuralist contribution. This renewal spread to all the continents, even those most “extraneous” to psychoanalysis, in cultures where the notion of the “individual” does not exist. Many other psychoanalysts ought to see their name appear in this rapid overview aimed at drawing up a list of all those who have served as pillars, whether of primary or secondary importance, in consolidating the edifice of psychoanalysis. Heinz Kohut, Didier Anzieu, Donald W. Winnicott, Herbert Rosenfeld, Hanna Segal, Ignacio Matte Blanco, André Green, Wilfred R. Bion, Thomas Ogden – each at his or her own level has contributed to strengthening the basis of a discipline permanently threatened on account of the view of the human mind that it has forged from clinical experience, a scandalous view insofar as it reminds us that “the ego is not master in its own house” (Freud, 1917a, p. 143).

Unnoticed relationships Wilfred R. Bion did not build an additional theory; he studied the Freudian and Kleinian theories, which he found for the main part to be perfectly appropriate to their function as theories. Nonetheless, he sometimes modified them slightly each time

8 Overture

that he felt that they strayed from the reality they were supposed to account for, which required on his part perfect knowledge of his domain of study and a deep capacity for reflecting on elaborations which were far from easy to understand. His theory, he writes, “does not replace any existing psycho-analytical theory, but is intended to display relationships that have not been remarked” (Bion, 1970, p. 87). “Analysts”, he says, “finding themselves in an impasse, may prefer to produce a new theory ad hoc rather than undergo the ardours of using existing theory properly” (Bion, 1962a, p. 88). And a little further on he adds that “the danger lies in being cramped by a theoretical system that is frustrating not because it is inadequate but because it is being improperly used” (ibid.). Adopting the opposite position, Bion conducted himself very respectfully and showed great application with regard to the corpuses constructed with patience and stubbornness by Sigmund Freud and by Melanie Klein – figures who were perhaps his psychoanalytic “parents”. His critical attitude led him to keep sufficient distance from them to allow him to create something new that unites and contains them both, that surpasses them but would not exist without them. Moreover, the man of thought that he was had the means to nourish himself with books on which he could draw permanently, like a library rat – the number of works produced in the psychoanalytic field was considerable – particularly as, in the area of relationships, he frequently felt ill at ease. However, in order to preserve the living and animated character of the exchanges from which some of his patients would have readily removed any flicker of life, he pointed out that “it is the patient as a real man or woman whose affairs are under scrutiny and not just the supposed mental mechanisms of a dummy” (1962a, p. 88). But fortunately, in his clinical practice there were a sufficient number of precautions and restrictions to induce him to codify the different exchanges – with patients, colleagues, and so on. But nevertheless, in his own words, he had “approached a mental life unmapped by the theories elaborated for the understanding of neurosis” (1962a, p. 37). Although he was very involved in clinical practice, to the best of my knowledge, he wrote very few accounts of treatments, having decided quite early on that clinical accounts are incapable of restoring the emotional – as well as intellectual content – of situational exchanges. This did not prevent him, however, from sprinkling his writings with clinical “moments” which display a particularly revealing situation, not of a state of mind, but of the patient’s state of mind in a certain session. This being the case, all conjectures, both imaginative and rational, remain open, whether appropriate or not – that is not the question. For Bion, the most important thing is that there are as many openings as possible, even if a large number of them must be excluded depending on the thoughts that are gathered from these situations. The fact that these clinical accounts were quickly abandoned in favour of intellectual reflection with a scientific air was due to the psychic constitution of their author. At the same time this fact illustrates Bion’s concern for transformation, which he saw as representative of analytic work, for behind the lengthy developments on a given question that are sometimes laborious to follow, it is not difficult

Overture  9

to discover both the original clinical situation which gave birth to the transformation and also the invariants which have remained unchanged between the scene shared by the analyst and the patient and the intellectual elaboration that the author provides us with. This is an opportunity to emphasise once again that the essential part of analytic work resides in what goes on when the patient and analyst are in each other’s presence. “In each other’s presence” does not mean that they have to agree with each other in their exchanges or agree about the opinions and judgements that they may emit respectively concerning a given situation, or about the choices to which their exchanges should lead. On other occasions, I have been led to speak about the risks that an agreement presents for both of the protagonists insofar as this agreement may very well be of a nature that inhibits another way of thinking (Lévy, 2014). As Bion writes: The significance of the agreement between analyst and patient lies in the fact that the agreement is obvious and obtrusive but the disagreement, which may be just as obtrusive, is by no means obvious. . . . The conflict between the view of the patient and analyst, and in the patient with himself, is not therefore a conflict, as we see it in the neuroses, between one set of ideas and another, or one set of impulses and another, but between K and minus K (−K) or, to express it pictorially, between Tiresias and Oedipus, not Oedipus and Laius. (Bion, 1963, p. 51) From disagreement to conflict, it is indispensable to remind ourselves that a psychoanalysis unfolds from one session to another, bringing with it its share of words, silences, thoughts, associations, dreams, and interpretations, and that it should be an opportunity, for both the analyst and the analysand, to oppose two distinct ensembles that are not necessarily reconcilable, and are even sometimes “incompatible” in the sense that they cannot bear each other. An analysis does not have the aim of extracting agreement or adhesion from the patient, which would merely serve to obtain a submission to the views of the analyst considered as the one who knows.3 Bion is an adept of the idea that a psychoanalysis is defined as a long series of conflictual elements which must pass through the sieve of analysis – sequences which analyst and patient can both survive and continue to develop respectively without necessarily having had to celebrate their agreement. We may consider things, moreover, from another “vertex”: we are still in a clinical situation as long as it is still possible to interpret. By way of example, I was heartened on reading, among the Clinical Seminars (Bion, 1994) published in French in 2008, the case of a patient who was due to have an operation – to have something removed – and who refused to analyse a dream with her analyst. Faced with the analyst’s perplexity, Bion’s intervention, as a supervisor, consisted in helping him to understand that by considering her thoughts in the form of images as having no importance, the patient was, in fact, revealing her fear that the analyst

10 Overture

would take something valuable away from her and use it for his own purposes (Lévy, 2008, p. ix).

One Bion or several Bions? Many commentators have not hesitated to compartmentalise Bion’s work into different “periods” − group, psychotic, epistemological, mystical – according to the main concerns that seem to constitute the framework that underlies certain works, even if one can divide his work up in other ways just as well that depend on other criteria that are just as evident and efficient in the subjects of research. Thus, depending on the “vertex” according to which Bion evolved from one period to another, it is perfectly acceptable to consider that his participation in the murderous fighting in the First World War and his total immersion in the services of the British army during the Second World War, coupled with the experiments conducted with desocialised persons at the Tavistock Clinic, represent, in effect, a “group” period which had enormous importance for its author and led, without a solution of continuity, to the one after. The following period, in which Bion once again immersed himself in exploring and trying to understand the mode of functioning of psychotic thinking, was described, quite rightly, as a “psychotic” period, and his contributions to the knowledge of psychotic thought processes are now considered as indispensable and essential. Three important works bring together his elaborations concerning this domain of investigation and are full of clinical indications relating to the manner of practising psychoanalysis with this type of patient. But this period preserves the idea from the one before that the traditional analytic setting, represented by a psychoanalyst and a patient who meet each other on fixed days and at fixed hours in a consulting room, is merely a variant of group practice. Indeed, each of the two persons in each other’s presence contains a plurality of persons who, as internal objects, interact in the unfolding of the session and have to be taken into account in order to understand the active tensions and conflicts. The period described as “epistemological” led Bion to consolidate, by virtue of “masterly” elaborations, the intuitions and observations drawn from clinical situations from the period before, thereby putting at our disposal a conceptualisation that went beyond the existing frontiers within which psychoanalytic practice sometimes felt cramped. One has the feeling that, in so doing, Bion freed himself from any sense of allegiance to his predecessors in order to develop his own way of formulating what constitutes the essence of the work. The very last period, called the “mystic period” because Bion was interested in everything in the field of thought that he still found mysterious (from the Greek mystikos), offered him the opportunity of returning to his first themes of research – the tensions that govern the relations within a group and between the group and the individual – thereby closing, according to a certain vertex, a loop, which, considered from another vertex, appears as the trajectory that leads, in a spiral, from a point of departure to a point of culmination defined by comparable coordinates.4

Overture  11

Some are opposed to linking up the different parts of Bion’s work with each other. For them, there is Bion the experimenter, observer, and researcher, who, from being a modest disciple, got to the top of his profession without his ideas necessarily being well received and understood. And then, they consider with perplexity that his trajectory became “unhooked” and that he lost himself in mystic-religious wanderings that it would be better, today, to pass over in silence, in order to preserve the “healthy” part of the thinker. It seems to me, on the contrary, that Bion never ceased to have the experience of his own relationship to the world, and that what seems to be far removed from the concerns of a psychoanalyst – ultimate reality, Deity, the Trinity pulled towards threeness, ultimate truth – is in fact very close, both close and far away like the analyst listening to his patient lying on the couch. I will allow the reader to form his/her own opinion. I merely hope that I have succeeded in sharing with him/her the transformations that the study of Bion’s work has enabled me to bring about in myself.

Notes 1 Translator’s note: Keats in a letter of 1817 to George and Thomas Keats: “When Man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after facts and reason.” (See Forman, 1952, p. 72.) 2 Translator’s note: in Science et méthode, Poincaré (1908) refers to the “fait choisi”. 3 The Lacanian “subject who is supposed to know” (sujet supposé savoir). 4 In his Brazilian Lectures, Bion (1973–1974[1990]) states that etymologically, mystery is the “capacity to have feelings of respect for the unknown” (p. 100).

1 CHANGES OF PERSPECTIVE

Wilfred R. Bion is first and foremost an astonishing, disconcerting, and destabilising thinker, an adept of uncertainty in situations where we generally rely only too readily on our comfortable ways of thinking which have made us, as it were, guarantors of the established order. But Bion is not an “agitator” out of pleasure; he is so due to his particular “turn of mind”, and this indeed is what I hope to show. Bion is also an original thinker, encouraged by his turn of mind to approach “tangentially” certain questions and situations that others tackle head on. Among the myths, for example, which accompany those who are familiar with psychoanalysis – and the Oedipus myth has a central place among them – there are two that Bion considers as indispensable supports, the myth of the Garden of Eden and the myth of the Tower of Babel; and there are epic events – the discovery of the royal cemetery at Ur and the epic tale of the death of Palinurus – whose importance has raised them to the rank of quasi-myths. Concerning the Oedipus myth, Bion (1963) writes: “The Oedipus myth may be regarded as an instrument that served Freud in his discovery of psycho-analysis and psycho-analysis as an instrument that enabled Freud to discover the Oedipus complex” (p. 92). It has to be said that he was more interested in the “character” and myth of Oedipus than in the complex, establishing a parallel between an Oedipus who had become King of Thebes entirely devoted to discovering the truth about the death of Laius, at whatever price – and we know just how far he took this, in spite of the attempts of Tiresias to dissuade him from doing so – and the psychoanalyst insofar as he/she is also at risk of only being interested in bringing to light repressed or split-off elements in the discourse of his patients, without measuring the “risk” that such a task of “excavation” (Bion, 1957a) represents. For every psychoanalyst, the Oedipus myth is of particular importance insofar as Freud, in his self-analysis, came across the feeling of “being in love with my mother and jealous of my father, and I now consider it a universal event in early

Changes of perspective  13

childhood”, as he put it to Wilhelm Fliess in one of his most famous letters: “Everyone in the audience”, he adds, was once a budding Oedipus in fantasy” (Letter to Fliess, dated October 15, 1897, in Masson, 1985, p. 272). But, as we shall see, Bion does not make any attempt to conceal his reservations concerning the use Freud makes of this myth. The other myths, like this one, have to do with attempts to gain access to knowledge that men do not have – and to which they perhaps do not have right of access! In this sense, they concern what is at the basis of epistemology and scientific discovery, that is to say, curiosity which, in moral terms, “is a sin” (Bion, 1963, p. 46). In the first version of the Garden of Eden, for example, it is forbidden to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Once the commandment has been broken, the revelation of disobedience is accompanied by guilt and awareness and shame of nudity. The outcome, as for Oedipus, is banishment (ibid., p. 64). In the myth of the Tower of Babel, men seek to reach Heaven in order to take possession of the knowledge that it is supposed to contain. “The outcome”, Bion writes, is exile . . . but an important precursor is the destruction of a common language and a spreading of confusion. . . . There is a god or fate, omniscient and omnipotent . . . who belongs to a moral system and appears to be hostile to mankind in his search for knowledge, even moral knowledge. (ibid., pp. 64–65) Among the epic events mentioned, the first is situated during the second millennium before Jesus Christ and appeared thanks to the discovery of the cemetery of Ur, the city of Abraham, by Sir Leonard Woolley, who carried out excavations there between 1926 and 1931. The archaeologist reconstituted the funeral ceremony during which the King’s suite accompanied him into the beyond. It was not a matter of executions but rather of collective suicide; the individuals concerned were generally found in their graves holding a little cup that no doubt contained the poison that they had taken themselves (Woolley et al. 1934). Such spectacular funeral practices are clearly an expression of specific religious beliefs. The organised sacrifice of the dignitaries and courtiers on the death of their king or queen and master is aimed at ensuring the latter a court to accompany him or her into the beyond; it also symbolises the extreme submission of a court to the leader. Concerning this practice, Bion (1971, pp. 9–10) asks himself two series of questions: (1) “What was in the hearts and minds of those courtiers of Ur, Abraham’s city, when they walked into that death pit, took their potion, and died?” What psychic forces, what conventions drove them towards this fate? (2) Was it simply a question of ignorance or of “something unknown and more dynamic than ignorance?” The unknown is what permanently motivates the author of these questions. He constantly turned his interest towards thought, its origin, its development and its

14  Changes of perspective

growth, making knowledge one of the three possible links between an animate subject and his/her objects (animate or inanimate), and questioning forms of knowledge in such a way that they could encompass the unknown elements for which we do not have the necessary tools for thinking about them, and, therefore, for acquiring knowledge of them. In the same cemetery, a second event unfolded five centuries later: a gang of plunderers, unafraid by the sacred character of the spot, excavated the funeral citadel and made off with the riches that it contained. Bion wonders about the motivations that were behind these men’s actions, and sees them as the prototype of investigators driven by scientific interest. They were in search, of course, of riches, but also of the motives that drove the dignitaries to follow their sovereign into the death pit. The second epic narrative evokes the character of Palinurus, a secondary figure in the Roman mythology of the Aeneid. He was the helmsman of Aeneas’s fleet. He is seduced by (p. 30) the god Somnus who, disguised as Phorbas, his chief mate, encourages him to get some sleep because the sea is calm and favourable. Palinurus tries to resist, but finally the god sends him to sleep and throws him into the sea during the night while he is guiding his fleet towards Italy. Seeing his ship yawing, Aeneas takes over the helm, disappointed and saddened by the fecklessness of his helmsman (Virgil, Aeneid, Book V, 334–338). In this ocean of the unknown, the story of the death of Palinurus illustrates the state of mind of all those who are driven by a certain taste for failure, by a definite repugnance for success, by a yearning for solitude, by a desire to abandon everything at the last moment. Palinurus is the individual who deserts his post at the very moment of victory . . . and who cannot spare himself the “bliss of a shipwreck” (Enthoven, 1990, p. 150). The unknown (inconnu), finally, or the insu, is also the term in France that Jacques Lacan chose to employ to refer to the Freudian Unbewußt (Unconscious) which now leads me to draw the parallel that I have personally observed between Lacan and Bion each time I have delved more deeply into their respective works and lines of research.

A gain for psychoanalysis The myths that psychoanalysis uses relate as a whole to ancient times which, although they were once historical, it is true, have now become ahistorical due to their particular mode of narration, to the renown and reputation they have acquired. The epoch in which psychoanalysis emerged and the consecutive periods of discovery stretched over several decades, during which a number of governments offered ethnologists and anthropologists financial aid enabling them to plan potential excavation sites and to carry out explorations in Italy, Greece, Egypt, Turkey, Mesopotamia, and so on. This new harvest of knowledge and of common objects relating to lost civilisations was of inestimable value in that they also threw light on our own civilisations and provided us with news ways of thinking. At the same time, we also discover – and here, too, Bion formulated it in a way that is interesting

Changes of perspective  15

for psychoanalysis when he looks at how the possibilities for the fulfilment of a personality have been impeded, or even destroyed by the circumstances of life and of time – that, for Bion, the metaphor, if there is one, is to be found in the comparison between the archaeologist and the analyst who discovers “not so much of a primitive civilization as of a primitive disaster” (Bion, 1959, p. 40). We know that Freud considered himself, at the level of the unconscious, as the equal of Schliemann discovering the remains and vestiges of Troy. We also know how much the father of psychoanalysis was torn between the passion for discovery and the growing pessimism that accompanies successive revisions. “You will be able to convince yourself ”, Freud wrote, “that much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness” (Freud, 1895, p. 305). Furthermore, we know that for Freud, the psychotic’s delusion is to be understood as an “attempt at healing”, like a reconstruction. What is less well known is that for Bion “psychotic” and “non-psychotic” are not dissociated in such a clear-cut way. At the heart of each individual, psychotic parts and non-psychotic parts coexist and influence each other mutually, depending on the circumstances and situations, and it is above all the links between these different parts that condition more or less “mad” forms of understanding and reaction. Here, again, the parallel is obvious with Lacan (1967a), who states: “If we do not become aware of our own psychotic core, we will never be anything but alienists.” It is for this kind of reason, among others, that Bion writes that it is necessary, more often than not, to be attentive to the differences that exist between an “insane neurotic” and a “sane psychotic” (Bion, 1967, p. 149). In this book, it is not my intention to refer in an exaggerated way to the episodes deemed to have been turning points in Bion’s life in order to explain his work, even if it is impossible to exclude the idea that there exists a connection between the life and work of an author. At any given moment in our journey through life, we are the sum of our experiences – and something more as well! Wilfred R. Bion was no exception. It has been said that his early childhood spent in India played a part in prompting him, at around the age of 70, to leave England for California in order to find a warmer climate; he spent the last years of his life there with a great deal of happiness and satisfaction. It has been said that being sent to boarding school in England at the age of eight, far away from his parents who remained in India, caused him to lose all his reference points and obliged him to build others for himself, as best he could, in the strongest sense of the expression. All this is no doubt true. It has been said that his involvement as an officer in His Majesty’s army in the battle of the Ardennes during the First World War, at Ypres, contributed more particularly in forging a character of being “brave – only just having escaped being branded with a cross, bronze, for valour; wooden to mark the spot where my body lay”! (Bion, 1985, p. 19)! But Bion cannot be reduced to the sum of his experiences. His analyses and, above all, his “retrospective thoughts” that he was able to derive from them, considerably increased his capacities for reflection and his own elaborations touching on the “ways” of approaching the emergence of thoughts in the mind. Bion interests

16  Changes of perspective

us – insofar as we are analysts – because he makes us, as it were, participate in the constant growth of his fields of thought. Bion is both a rigorous thinker who seeks through his “formulas” with a mathematical air about them to make psychoanalysis a transmissible “science” thanks to concepts endowed with a strong dose of abstraction, and a “dreamer” who strives to situate himself as closely as possible to experience insofar as “fantasy” allows us to approach it, when, for example, he develops the idea that it is the sensations experienced by a baby that we see reappearing in the form, transformed, to be sure, of certain psychic mechanisms. He writes, for example, “We may be dealing with things which are so slight as to be virtually imperceptible, but which are so real that they could destroy us almost without our being aware of it” (Bion, 1987, p. 320). I will try to show in the following pages that it was due to his classical analytic training – and not just psychiatric – that Bion was able to carry out the experiments that initially led him to work in groups, to which I would add that it is psychoanalysis, ultimately, that has greatly benefited from the inventive, highly surprising, and constantly unexpected aspects that Bion brought to it. In other words, it was thanks to the broad spectrum of his training as a psychiatric doctor in Her Majesty’s army, and then as a psychoanalyst “knighted”, so to speak, by the other queen at the time, namely Melanie Klein, and to his professional experiences faithful to a strict albeit varied Freudian orthodoxy, as well as to the interested and curious company of his colleagues, that Bion was able to forge for himself a vision of what psychoanalysts “are” (and “do”), irrespective of the degree of completion of their own analyses. With Bion, to a certain extent, two debates are played out again. The first concerns the “scientificity” of psychoanalysis – I will come back to this when the time comes to evoke the influence exerted on him by the philosophers, mathematicians, and physicists of the Vienna Circle, posing a certain number of questions concerning the relationship between the individual and the reality of his environment (physical and linguistic). The other debate concerns the question of the “transformations” that occur in the mind so that, starting from a sensation, work is produced – or is not produced – work, in any case, that is inevitable as soon as we consider that it is possible to translate somatic and emotional “experiences” into a language that is intelligible to the mind. This language is assumed to be common to all human beings and to be at the basis of all idioms, even if this language, like all languages, has its source in the body. It is assumed that only the intellectual adepts of the human species reflect on what is universal in all human beings (see DavidMénard, 1997), but nothing proves that deer do not do as much! And Bion is one of the adepts of this kind of thinking; for, in reality, we don’t know anything about it, even today!

A clinician first and foremost Where Bion is concerned, nothing is quite like reading his work directly, written with as much precision as it is ambiguity, and the present book is no exception. My constantly renewed interest in exploring his books, irrespective of the “period” to

Changes of perspective  17

which they belong, convinced me that I was dealing with one of the most demanding and rigorous thinkers in his domain – psychoanalysis – a conviction reinforced by the precision and richness of the vocabulary and concepts that he uses to help his readers understand his line of reasoning. Bion constantly tracks down approximations and is scrupulously painstaking in the choice of the terms that he uses as well as in clarifying the sense that he ascribes to them. This is the case, for example, for the terms “function”, “link”, “valency”, “emotion”, “factor”, “thought”, “element”, “selected fact”, “constant conjunction”, and “intuition” – all usual terms, which, in the context of psychoanalysis as Bion conceives it, both retain the meaning of their original domain or discipline and correspond to the designation that they may have in the field he establishes (which goes beyond the psychoanalytic universe). On each occasion, he clarifies the reasons why he is using such and such a term and the meaning he is giving to it. Bion was first and foremost a clinician, and it was from this activity that he derived all the questions which he subsequently tried to elucidate in the light of his reflections. Frances Tustin (1981), who was in analysis with him, writes: “I have often been asked whether Dr Bion talked in the somewhat inscrutable, oracular way in which he sometimes wrote. I can say very firmly that this was not so. He was always brief, to the point, and extremely simple and clear” (p. 175). She adds that Bion constantly showed “incisive insight, patience and persistence” and a “capacity to withstand boredom”. He aroused in her the “courage to see things from a perspective different from those of the current and accepted ones” and also “different from his” – which is the most important point. “He provoked me to think for myself, to have a mind of my own” – something that was confirmed by all those who “journeyed” with him. “He did this by asking challenging questions and making unexpected remarks rather than by imposing a rigid interpretive scheme. . . . In so doing, he made me think about what was happening to me on my own terms” (ibid., p. 176). “He did not let me down”, she continues,“even though I was a rather impenetrable patient.” There was a generosity, elegance and rectitude about him, the last of which qualities he was able to put aside by writing a sympathetic letter to the patient’s husband concerning the baby she had just lost, a clearly extremely transgressive gesture at that time and in this context! An essential point in my view is that Frances Tustin mentions the “feeling of security” that she felt thanks to the way Bion had of being present in a session. “It was Bion’s respect for the organic process of analysis”, she writes, “which he allowed to take its course, and which he never tried to manipulate that made me feel so safe” (ibid., p. 176). James Grotstein, one of his American analysands who became one of his most prolix biographers and commentators, has written the following: Bion the analyst is indescribable. Insofar as analysis is so unique and private an experience, it is too laden with subjectivity, and is also too unrecoverable an experience to journalize about. Nevertheless, most of those who have

18  Changes of perspective

been analysed by Bion agree that he constituted perhaps one of the most formidable and impressive psycho-analytic instruments of ours or any time. His sense of self-discipline was monumental, and yet his fount of interpretation was almost overflowing in its richness, depth, perspective, hue, allusion, and originality. . . . Herein lay his genius as an analyst and also his deep respect for human beings who may have long since forfeited their own self-respect. (Grotstein, 1981, p. 34; also in Tustin, 1981, p. 176) Contrary to Tustin’s declaration, Grotstein states that those who have been in analysis with Bion have noted, as he has, “the peculiar admixture of confusion and clarity” and the sense of being “dazed and confused” after he had been intervened in the course of a session. Once, Grotstein reports, “he gave me a series of interpretations which, unusually, caused me to say, ‘I think I follow you.’ His reply to that was an ironic, ‘Yes, I was afraid of that!’ ” (1981, p. 10). For Bion did not want to be followed or understood . . . he wanted me and anyone who was in his presence to be responsive to his/her own emanations. . . . He chided me for trying to “understand” him rather than observe my own responses to his “second opinion” about my associations. (Grotstein, 1981, p. 10) As for his relations with wider circles, Grotstein mentions that Bion was the bane of his publishers and an enigma to his audiences. His manner of speech and of writing presents startling clarities – often of delayed action – seemingly desultorily strewn about in complex recondite divagations and circumnavigations. . . . He never prepared his lectures. Once . . . he began one by saying, “I can hardly wait to hear what I have to say.” (ibid., pp. 9–10) His qualities of mind and character made him a figure whose vigilance struck all those who knew him. He managed in this way to breathe into any situation a degree of attention that “isolated” the scene and made it possible to take the full measure of it while being “without memory, desire and understanding” – an attitude in which only the perception of what is going on in the here-and-now of the session plays a part. It then became possible to understand its unique character. He was capable of considering a situation from several different angles simultaneously, which he was to elaborate subsequently by proposing the terms “vertex” (plural, vertices) (preferable to “point of view” which gives too much importance to the sense of sight), “binocular vision” – that which is shared between the patient and the analyst – and “reversible perspective”, when the analyst makes use of the possibility of seeing the situation differently from his patient, or of “reversal of perspective”, when the process is brought into play dynamically by one of the protagonists.

Changes of perspective  19

A rigorous way of thinking Bion had a rigorous way of thinking that was the fruit of the kind of mind he had, his personality, his training (school, military, university, medical), his experience, and the impressive culture that he acquired in the course of his numerous readings in the domain of psychoanalysis, of course, but also in philosophy, physics, and astrophysics, mathematics, literature, poetry, and in the different artistic disciplines. As I heard one of my colleagues say, several years ago: “We analysts should be the heirs of the Encyclopaedists of the 18th century.” This statement describes perfectly Bion’s constant interest and is entirely fitting in his case because it attests, first and foremost, to a healthy curiosity which psychoanalysts should show not only for the world as it is organised but also for the human capacity to give a description and representation of it which can be shared with others – the aim being both to enlarge the sum of our knowledge and to find a language that allows us to communicate (as far as possible) with others who are similar and dissimilar by “nature”, even though Nature does not have much to do with it! For Bion, this question is a permanent subject of reflection; the chief problem for him lies in the imperfection of language, that is, in its inherent incapacity to convey the meaning to be given to the “thing-in-itself ”, in the “penumbra of associations” attached to every term when it is employed. In psychoanalytic investigation, the problem analysts have is linked to “the lack of any adequate terminology to describe it and in this respect it resembles the problem that Aristotle solved by supposing that mathematics dealt with mathematical objects” (Bion, 1962a, p. 68).1 Moreover, we are accustomed to using concepts relating to objects, but “we sometimes need to consider [them] as if they were related to machines, that is to say as if they were inanimate, and sometimes as if they were functions, which, since we are dealing with human beings and not machines, are certain to be suffused with the characteristics of life” (ibid., p. 26). Thus, he is strongly in favour of a psychoanalytic formulation that would not be just another theory to be added to the already existing theories (which he considered for the main part to be adequate for the domain they concerned) but would be a formulation capable of “replacing” the theories elaborated hitherto by offering them a common formal expression (thus mathematised).2 Having a deep knowledge of the work of Poincaré, he liked to cite the following words: “I don’t understand how people cannot understand mathematics” for, as Raymond Queneau said, “[M]athematics is the very structure of the human mind” (Queneau, 1963, p. 89). A large part of Bion’s work is thus devoted to defining and redefining the terms that he promotes, sometimes with a meticulousness that verges on obsessionality at the limits of the absurd. He writes, for example: “The concept of beta-element includes only sense-impressions, the sense-impression as if it were a part of the personality experiencing the sense-impression, and the sense-impression as if it were the thing-in-itself to which the sense-impression corresponds” (Bion, 1962a, p. 26). Elsewhere, he dwells on the difference, which he sees as necessary, between “preconception” and “pre-conception”, between “premonition” or premotion”

20  Changes of perspective

and “pre-motion”, which sometimes seems to be a matter less of scientific rigour than of mental rigidity, from which he was not exempt!3 Finally, we may note in Bion a number of language tics scattered throughout his writings. I have already mentioned a few, including the expression “penumbra of associations”, full of quasi-poetic fantasy. In the same vein, I would like to draw attention to the expression “imaginative conjecture”, which denotes an associative hypothetical offer obeying no predefined rule and which is often associated with, but opposed to, the “rational conjecture”, concerning which we can infer immediately the logic to which it corresponds. “Very few analysts understand him”, writes Olivier Lyth, an analyst at the British Psychoanalytic Society and a contemporary of Bion cited by Frances Tustin, and even more do not understand how much they do not understand, and therefore have difficulty in learning from him. . . . He is in an entirely new area and dealing with a problem which most analysts seem not to have realised exists. (Tustin, 1981, p. 176)

The major questions Beyond these considerations, the depth of Bion’s thinking and his renown are based on the essential contributions with which he enriched psychoanalysis, particularly as these contributions concern elements that provided tools that had never been thought of before, thereby making it possible to approach psychic complexities that had previously been more or less inexplicable, and thus unapproachable. Of course, it was through clinical experience that these elements emerged, but a mind was still needed to note them, to define them, to link them up with each other each time that they manifested themselves in one patient or another, and to think about them in such a way as to attract the attention of readers who are generally little inclined to re-evaluate their own conceptual equipment. I would point out in this connection that, generally speaking, Bion had difficulty in being understood by his peers,4 even if part of the reason for this incomprehension must be put down to his somewhat provocative ways. In any case, the innovative ideas that emerge from Bion’s work concern domains pertaining to the major timeless questions with which the different disciplines that seek to approach what is most specific about the human being have been faced. Among these questions may be mentioned: (1) How is the human mind constituted and, furthermore, how does it function depending on the situations in which it is involved? (2) How does the learning process that enables the human infant to equip himself so that he can diminish the degree of dependence in which he comes into the world and so move towards a relative autonomy (“relative” meaning primarily that the relations established suit him) come about and unfold? Linked to this

Changes of perspective  21

(3)

(4)

(5)

(6)

(7)

question is that of “experience” in which all learning originates, according to Bion, for, as an empiricist, he drew on a developed sense of observation and distrusted all established knowledge. How are thoughts formed? This requires us, first, to define what thinking is (see Heidegger, 1954), how and from what it emerges, and how it permits (or does not permit) the development of an “apparatus for thinking” designed for thinking the thoughts that the individual encounters in the course of his/her development. This question leads to a further question: as Bion suggests, if thoughts dwell in the apparatus for thinking considered as a “container”, how did they find their place there and how far is the hypothesis of the “container/ contained relationship” fruitful for establishing a model of relating? What does knowledge – of oneself, of the other, of the world – represent, if we consider it as the outcome and formation of thoughts constituted as an ensemble (or one of the ensembles) which the individual has at his/her disposal for adjusting his/her personal relationship with what is self and not-self? In this connection, it may well be useful here to differentiate between connaissance and savoir.5 Going beyond the question formulated above, why does Bion show a particular interest in “facts”, those first things which nothing enables us to apprehend directly? He utilised them, nonetheless, by making use of what Poincaré, in his domain, had chosen to call “selected facts”. Pertaining to the events themselves and to “things-in-themselves” as defined by Kant, selected facts refer to primordial and/or ultimate reality, which is both the first reality and the last reality. Bion also calls this last reality the “O” of knowledge – the round letter representing both the O of the Origin and the 0 (zero) understood as the pivotal point of whole numbers. As they are psychic elements, the mechanisms of thinking, learning, and making connections are all dependent on an element that Bion calls “link” or “linking”, an element that ensures their existence and that assumes, in the emotional domain (love, hate) and in the intellectual domain (knowledge), both positive and negative forms. If, for example, the L link describes the loving relationship that unites one person with another and the H link describes, similarly, a relationship of hate, it has to be accepted that the −L (minus L) link is different from H insofar as it represents, let’s say, falling out of love, and that the −H link represents, let’s say, the abandonment of hate, which may be a pivotal moment in the course of an analysis. Consequently, Bion examines the conditions which permit (or prevent) the establishment of these links, for it is the entire development of thoughts and of the thinking apparatus, but also of future relations, which depend on these various forms. By considering the positive and negative “valences” that I have just been evoking, the conditions that make a realization6 possible or impossible, etc., Bion is thus faced with the question of the value of the negative for the very constitution of experience, thinking, linking, and relating. For, clinically speaking, the psychoanalytic setting is based on a talking relationship – speech is the negative of the act, even in the act of speaking that is the ordinary task of the

22  Changes of perspective

psychoanalyst – and the outcome of psychoanalytic work is in danger of being modified according to whether analyst and patient have or have not taken into account one or the other or indeed both of the “polarities” of psychic functioning. There are abundant examples in this domain (see Freud and the article on “Negation” (1925); Melanie Klein and her oscillations between good and bad breast, between destruction and reparation; Winnicott, a patient of whom considered that her last and therefore absent analyst still had more importance for her than the current and therefore present analyst, and so on). It is worth recalling here the following statement discovered among Kafka’s aphorisms: “What is laid upon us is to accomplish the negative; the positive is already given” (Kafka, 1954, p. 41). (8) What point of view can we take towards the general evolution of which Bion is a part on the one hand and, on the other, towards the development of the “states” of thought that he describes and proposes to adopt: •

•

•

First, at the epistemological level, for Bion claims to adhere to (a) a philosophical filiation beginning with Aristotle and Plato and continuing with Hume and Kant and his intense questioning on the subject of the theory of causality, and (b) a psychoanalytic filiation which, far from opposing them, combines Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein; Second, at the phylogenetic level, by establishing a primary differentiation between the “course of psychic events” based on a “protomental apparatus”, where what is physical and what is psychical are still undifferentiated, and residual registrations of “vestigial” bodily parts (tail, gills) which continue to exert considerable influence on the physical and psychic functions to which individuals are subject;7 Third, at the ontological level, by establishing the progressive nature of the states of thought that he sought to describe and order by means of the “Grid”, which derives one level of thought from an earlier level once it has undergone a transformation that permitted its “realization” (see footnote 8). Each leap, from one level to another, remains determined by the acceptance on the patient’s part of the transformation imposed by the “sexual realization” of the former state. This formulation, albeit rather mysterious, will be clarified further on.

(9) Last but not least, we may ask what the clinical implications of the preceding questions are. Particularly as the calling into question of psychic causality (something Bion is in favour of ), linked to the psychic manifestations that the majority of patients (psychotic and non-psychotic) reveal in the course of psychoanalytic work, renews the basic conditions of the interpretations elaborated by the analyst by alleviating them of their moral implications. And this is by no means one of their least significant benefits! Everything that we know about Bion today comes from his clinical experience, even if, for reasons that are his own, he chose quite quickly to stop taking notes systematically at the end of sessions – he replaced them by annotations of the psychic

Changes of perspective  23

movements that had occurred throughout the session in the form of localizations on the Grid – and to cease publishing clinical accounts of his daily practice. I will come back to this. All his publications, highly elaborated, attest to a remarkable elevation of thought. They accompany us in our own research and the efforts that we make to “improve” ourselves, as much in our clinical acts as in the reflections that we organise in order to be able to make use of them ourselves and share them with others. Bion’s writings all have their source in his consultation room, in direct relationship with his patients who are kept anonymous, and at the heart of what clinical experience offers in the way of the unexpected and unforeseeable. It is there that the spark of the encounter, the flash and the emergence of understanding occurs. The rest is construction. Thus a small number of notions acquired great importance in Bion’s thought to the point that we find them constantly being called into question in his work. There are eleven of them.

(1) Knowledge The question of knowledge seems to have been a constant factor in Bion’s thought. This intellectual adventure, dating back several thousands of years – we only have to recall Socrates’s maxim “Know thyself ” – appeared to Bion to be decisive when he noticed that a certain number of his patients insisted on not knowing what psychoanalytic work brought to light, something others before him had already been interested in, without really being able to go beyond this mechanism that they called “resistance”. For Bion, these patients had reached this state because, during the course of their development, they had been led to hinder, distend, or even destroy their apparatus for thinking, which meant that they were no longer able to understand the issues involved in the effort of thinking that analysis requires. They presented themselves, therefore, to the analyst as “patients suffering from thought disorders”, which is not the same thing as presenting oneself as neurotic, depressed, persecuted, borderline, or psychotic – all of which categories come under one nosography or another. Admittedly, Bion retained these designations, but he was more interested in the precarious states of equilibrium established by these patients and by the dynamic set in motion, during the course of the session, between the psychotic and non-psychotic part of the personality, as well as by the means used by the “patient” to attack mechanisms of thought, means that had the effect of masking an impossibility – or a refusal – to become aware of the reality of the facts. Was he not saying, in substance: “I know someone who wrote The Interpretation of Dreams, but I would like to see someone interest themselves in the interpretation of facts”!

(2)  A detour via facts On numerous occasions, Bion took the trouble to insist on the importance that facts had for him. I have just given an example of this, but his entire work is teeming with them: “[I]t would be very useful”, he writes, for example, “if we could feel

24  Changes of perspective

that when we made observations of this kind they corresponded to the facts” (1961, p. 32). Or alternatively: “[T]he interpretations would seem to be concerned with matters of no importance to anyone but myself ” (ibid., p. 40). For Bion is so aware of the complexity of the phenomena that he is striving to explore and describe that he says that in future he will be careful to “provide as much material as possible for the reader to use in reaching his own conclusions” (ibid.). In many cases, he is led to recognise that it is a matter of “phenomena whose existence I have only been able to indicate by description of facts that bear less relationship to the object of our study” (ibid.). Be that as it may, many scientific discoveries and updates of facts have occurred as a result of studies of phenomena which could only stem from the facts themselves, even if these facts remained inaccessible at the level of perception.

(3) Thought, thoughts, and the apparatus for thinking thoughts Anyone who is interested, then, in the mechanisms of thought is bound to ask themselves how thoughts are organised in the psychic space of each one of us and how they came to occupy the place where we discover them. Interest is thus focused on the nature and origin of thoughts. The accent placed by Bion on the genesis of thought led him to discriminate, in accordance with the psychic mechanisms employed (splitting, more than repression, and projective identification), between a mode of psychotic thinking and a mode of non-psychotic thinking. The psyche is capable of organising some of the elements that are available to it in such a way that they acquire the value of a preconception. Bion (1962a) writes, for example, that “an infant has an inborn preconception that a breast that satisfies its own incomplete nature exists” (p. 69). If this preconception meets up with an adequate realization, the result is a conception. In other words, a preconception (which Bion, as a good Kantian, compares with a priori knowledge of the breast) is transformed into a conception when the infant actually comes into contact with the breast, that is to say when its lips manage to get hold of the nipple and extract milk from it. But when the meeting does not take place, when the infant does not come into contact with the real breast – whether it is actually a breast or a baby bottle – then, in Bion’s language, a “negative realization” occurs, that is to say the mating of a preconception with a frustration, and it is this type of mating that gives birth to a “thought”. This thought is subject to two possible orientations depending on the vicissitude undergone by frustration. Either the personality tolerates the frustration and it develops its non-psychotic part and its creative possibilities or it cannot – or refuses to – tolerate the frustration and it develops its psychotic part by attacking the processes (linking) of the extension of thinking. This exposition has the consequence, moreover, of reversing the usual line of reasoning according to which the act of thinking creates thoughts. With Bion, the change of perspective – and by no means the least of them – leads to the original

Changes of perspective  25

idea that it is the emergence of thoughts that requires the creation, in the mind, of an apparatus for thinking them!

(4)  Learning from experience The notion of learning from experience, each of the terms of which must be examined in terms of its own value, thus developed as part of the idea of growth, so dear to Bion. I will come back to this. But this is an opportunity to emphasise the importance for Bion of the notion of “experience” – all English people are more or less empiricists, even if Bion the psychiatrist was also very well-read, having integrated an impressive amount of knowledge from his readings of works of philosophy and epistemology. The notion of experience would never be abandoned, moreover, and would be developed later as constituting the basis of the acquisition of “knowledge through experience” in contrast with the acquisition (non-­ experimental and non-personal) of “knowledge about” objects. All this enabled Bion, in any case, to formulate a theory of knowledge which takes as its starting point, and as its object of study, thought disorders and the object-relations encountered in the practice of psychoanalysis.

(5)  Negative evidence Bion’s utilization of negative evidence, which he draws on to formulate his hypotheses, is of great importance and scarcely differs from certain propositions that Freud put forward in his time, such as the idea that “any attempt to explain hallucination would have to start out from negative rather than positive hallucination” (Freud, 1917b, p. 232, footnote 3).8 Perhaps one should mention here the impressive and admirable experiments conducted with different groups, both at the Tavistock Clinic and in the British army, at a time when Bion did not claim to be a psychoanalyst, even though he had a deep knowledge of Freud’s work. He writes: I shall assume, nevertheless, that unless a group actively disavows its leader, it is in fact following him. . . . I dare say it will be possible to base belief in the complicity of the group on something more convincing than negative evidence, but for the time being I regard negative evidence as good enough. (Bion, 1961, p. 58) These experiences in groups should no doubt be linked up with the “successive” analyses that Bion did, in 1939, with John Rickman and, in 1945, with Melanie Klein. We are thus led to consider that these elements of experience and reflection led him to think that, at the institutional level of psychoanalytic training, an effect of intimidation, obedience, and submission occurs that diminishes the feeling of being able to practice psychoanalysis in a free and creative way.

26  Changes of perspective

Bion himself noticed that he had become hostage to it. He speaks of the soporific interpretations that he “duly” formulated (Bion, 1967, p. 4) – “duly and dully” according to Meltzer’s (1998, p. 287) commentary. Over and over again, he refers to the disagreeable feeling he has when he gives the patient an interpretation that he/she accepts without, however, adhering to it in the slightest way. Concerning one patient, he writes, for example: I gave interpretations. . . . His responses were varied; they ranged from an almost stupefied silence to apathetic acquiescence. . . . Sometimes he would say that he had been ‘thinking’ during the silence ‘about what you said’. He would sometimes disagree with the interpretation, or some aspect of it, then, as if striving to achieve a solution, would come round to agree that I was probably, no, certainly right. On other occasions, when I felt that my interpretation was one with which he must surely be familiar, he would blandly agree as if it were a cliché that hardly stirred a ripple in his thoughts. It was not till I was able to suggest that he made this class of communication because he felt that the episodes he mentioned were utterly incomprehensible that he made a response showing that this was indeed the case. (Bion, 1963, p. 57) In other words, Bion had the feeling – at least at the end of his training – that he had learnt to keep the patient “under control”. On other occasions, it was the patient who, personally, had the impression of being the hostage of the analyst and of his analytic discourse, and it was the conjunction of these two feelings that drove Bion to rethink the analytic process from another point of view (vertex). It led him, as a matter of priority, to take into account conjointly the patient’s unconscious desire and the analysis of the analyst’s counter-transference.

(6)  Fidelity, loyalty, and filiations As a faithful disciple of Freud, Bion organises his reflections by taking as his starting point the fact that, under the aegis of the reality principle, transformations are imposed on the psyche due to the necessity of taking into account external reality. For him, as for Freud, this was a non-negotiable postulate. He furnishes a considerable work of thinking in order to re-examine the Freudian concept of “consciousness” – a concept that served as a point of departure for Freud in inventing the unconscious, initially called “double consciousness” by Pierre Janet – and to clarify its intelligibility; for, according to Freud, consciousness should be defined as “a sensory organ for the perception of the psychic qualities” (Freud, 1900, p. 615, italics in the original) of the emotional experiences encountered – a definition that could not be more mysterious. In short, consciousness takes charge of the elements that have been put at its disposal, after their elaboration by alphafunction has made it possible to give birth to “dream thoughts” and to evacuate – by means of splitting and projective identification – the undesirable elements, in the

Changes of perspective  27

same way as Freud (1911) attributed consciousness with the task of “unburdening the mental apparatus of accretions of stimuli” (p. 221). Likewise, Bion shows his fidelity to Freud on the question of the Oedipus complex. He devotes a large number of passages to it in different texts but, for the moment, we can simply point out that one of the important acts for him – contrary to Freud, whom he criticised on this point – consisted in “considering the myth in its entirety”. In other words, he rehearsed the myth of Oedipus “from a point of view which makes the sexual crime a peripheral element” (Bion, 1967, p. 86) and reintroduced in his study elements left to one side by Freud (without realising it?), namely, the oracle, the seer, the sphinx, a statue of which nevertheless adorned Freud’s desk and whose “questioning attitude” illustrates curiosity and, consequently, the epistemophilic drive already brought to the fore by Freud and Melanie Klein, the arrogance of Oedipus (guilty of immoderation [hubris] for having tried to lay bare the truth at any price), plague, and exile. Similarly, like his illustrious predecessor (whom he does not always spare from criticism, far from it), Bion erects hypotheses which serve him as instruments for conducting his investigations and, precisely, for being tested by facts! He writes, for example: “If experience shows that this hypothesis fulfils a useful function, further characteristics may be added from clinical observation” (Bion, 1961, p. 50). “In other words”, writes Donald Meltzer, “the utility of the hypothesis will not only be manifest by clarification of the phenomena it is meant to assist in observing, but will also lead to observations which will make possible the expansion and clarification of the hypothesis” (Meltzer, 1978, p. 277). As a faithful disciple of Melanie Klein, with whom he had complex relations – both as an analysand and a colleague, until her death – he gave certain concepts of the “inspired tripe seller” (tripière de génie) as Lacan nicknamed her, a prodigious degree of development. Just to take two examples, he extended the use of the mechanism of projective identification well beyond that which its “inventor” had made of it – he turned it, quite simply, into a necessary tool for the genesis of thought. I will return to this. But, in so doing – and even if he preserved the possibility of an “excessive” projective identification, for reasons that I will come back to in due course – he attributed to this mechanism a qualitative value nourished, in some of his patients, by a “hatred for emotions”, and thus a hatred for life itself.

(7)  The psychic apparatus Bion insists on promoting the idea that the mental apparatus is built on the model of the digestive apparatus, an apparatus which is the first to be activated at the beginning of life with the appearance of hunger and which receives from an other (the breast) a response that is forever decisive. From this point of view, as we shall see further on, this Bionian mental apparatus becomes the dwelling place for elements that the author describes as “digested (sic) and, thereby, made available to thought” – the alpha-elements – and beta-elements which are “stored but differ

28  Changes of perspective

from alpha-elements in that they are not so much memories as undigested facts” (1962a, p. 7). “I am therefore tackling”, he writes, a different problem from that which Freud investigated with his theories of ideation . . . I am assuming that an apparatus existed and had to undergo, still has to undergo, adaptation to the new tasks involved in meeting the demands of reality by developing a capacity for thought. The apparatus that has to undergo this adaptation is that which dealt originally with sense-impressions relating to the alimentary canal. (Bion, 1962a, p. 57) Staying in this domain, which was a priority for him, Bion states that alpha-­function “ingests” sense-impressions and “digests” them in order to provide the psyche with the alpha-elements that are the basis of thought. He writes: “We may follow up (1) the process of differentiation of the representation from the corresponding realization . . . or (2) the effects of the correspondence between alimentation and thinking . . . something must happen now if the child is to continue feeding” (ibid., p. 59), something he calls “abstraction . . . as a factor in alpha-function” (ibid., p. 61). “I have spoken”, he writes, of certain locutions as being evidence not for memory but for “undigested facts”. Implicit in this statement is the use of the alimentary system as a model for the processes of thought. There is reason to believe that the emotional experiences associated with alimentation are those from which individuals have abstracted and then integrated elements to form theoretical deductive systems that are used as representations of realizations of thought. (ibid., p. 62) There then follow fine descriptions aimed at drawing out, for example, the qualities of “softness” or of “bitterness” abstracted from the breast, depending on whether it is good (present) or bad (absent) (desired because absent). From this we can understand how we can have a “bitter” memory of an unhappy experience, or that a failure can be “abject” just as a doctrine can be “foul” or “sickening”. “Certain patients”, he writes, “are influenced by the belief that they digest thoughts and that the consequences of doing so are similar to the digestion of food” (ibid.). Thus certain patients believe that “the thoughts so treated suffer a change analogous to that undergone by food that is turned into faeces” (ibid., p. 63). And so Bion affirms that “the psychic apparatus needs truth as the body requires food”. “The effect on the personality of a deprivation of truth is analogous to the effect of physical starvation on the physique” (ibid., p. 57). But the patient is not an infant: Bion never makes this confusion. Certain abstractions, he explains, date back to the beginning of life; others are reorganised; others are “current”, that is to say, contemporaneous with the unfolding of the analysis. “It is true”, he concludes,

Changes of perspective  29

that the model with which present knowledge of the alimentary canal provides us will be very different from the model with which the infant’s knowledge of the alimentary system provides him . . . the infant’s abstractions are not those of the adult. (ibid., p. 63)

(8)  Going beyond morality Melanie Klein had taken care, when she studied projective identification, to show, from the point of view of phantasy, its omnipotent character. “The broad outline of this theory”, Bion writes, is that there exists an omnipotent phantasy that it is possible to split off temporarily undesired, though sometimes valued, parts of the personality and put them into an object. . . . It is also possible, and in fact essential, to observe evidence which shows that a patient in whom the operation of this omnipotent phantasy can be deduced is capable of behaviour which is related to a counterpart in reality of this phantasy. (1962a., p. 31) The projection of split off parts (“content”) implies that a psychic “container” – the maternal other – is able to receive them. The failure of this mechanism, which cannot be attributed to either one of the protagonists, obliges the personality, subject to frustration and pain, to reintegrate the projected parts and to find out, if this is the case, how they differ from the evacuated parts. But without a capacity for judgement provided in the beginning by the other, the subject cannot decide if the process of introjection gives him information about the true or false aspects of the re-introjected object or only about the good and bad aspects. In the domain of thought, this omnipotence changes into omniscience, and this decision, Bion writes, becomes “an assertion of moral superiority without any morals” (ibid., p. 97). The re-introjected object “shows itself as a superior object asserting its superiority by finding fault with everything” (ibid., p. 99) – see, on this subject, the patient who contests everything that the analyst proposes to him, a phenomenon that completes what I was saying earlier about Freud having detected, without exploring it in depth, a mechanism uniformly called “resistance”. The search for the truth and contact with reality comes up against “an assertion of what in sophisticated terms would be called a moral law and a moral system as superior to scientific law and a scientific system” (ibid., p. 98). There remains the “dictatorial assertion according to which one thing is morally right and the other wrong” (Meltzer, 1978, p. 306). One of the chief aims of psychoanalytic treatment consists, therefore, in reorienting the work of thinking, with its emotional implications, towards an interest in knowledge, thereby providing tools of thought for thinking thoughts and towards increased knowledge arising from analytic experience.

30  Changes of perspective

(9)  The part-object Donald Meltzer (1978) writes that, among the innovations made by Bion is “the expansion of the concept of ‘part-object’ beyond the bounds that could have been meant by Freud and Abraham and used by Melanie Klein, in a concrete way. . . .” This extension makes it possible to endow each part-object with a function. Bion (1967) writes, The conception of the part-object as analogous to an anatomical structure, encouraged by the patient’s employment of concrete images as units of thought, is misleading because the part-object relationship is not with the anatomical structures only but with function, not with anatomy but with physiology, not with the breast, but with feeding, poisoning, loving, hating. (p. 102) This interesting position nonetheless requires an apparatus of representation quite different from that of predominantly visual unconscious phantasy, akin to the act of dreaming, and has the interest of bringing to the fore the function of the part-object.

(10) Linking To deal with this question, Bion advances, in the form of deceptively old and simple word, a new concept: the “link”. The importance of this concept lies in the fact that this unit will be established even before an individual – a subject – becomes attached to another individual – an object – or will be attacked, when someone tries to destroy all contact and/or his own capacity to think and to feel emotions. The problem is thus shifted, one could say, towards the difficulty of determining how the links themselves are established and represented.9 We may ask ourselves if these links should be considered as psychic elements arising from the work of the function of linking. “I employ the term ‘link’ ”, Bion (1967) writes, because I wish to discuss the patient’s relationship with a function rather than with the object that subserves a function; my concern is not only with the breast, or penis, or verbal thought, but with their function of providing the link between two objects. (p. 102, my emphasis) Beyond the surprise of seeing Bion place the “breast” or the “penis” on the same level of conceptual abstraction as “verbal thought”, we understand, however, that Bion regards the Oedipal conflict as a kind of link that is at once universal and particular by emphasising, for example, the importance of the sphinx – a form of linking by means of questions – and by considering incest as another kind of linking! Two other models figure in Bion’s thought as prototypes of links giving birth to “learning”: the link between the penis and the vagina, a link that serves as a basis, in the Oedipus complex, for questioning sexuality, and the link between the infant

Changes of perspective  31

and the breast, a link that serves as a model for understanding what is an enriching relationship.

(11) The protomental apparatus One of the most innovative notions of his work concerns the hypothesis of a “protomental level” of mental functioning. According to this idea, there exists a level at which physical and psychic events are not yet differentiated, where multiple emotional elements are still indistinguishable because, as psychological phenomena, they are still in an emergent state and thus not yet observable. Nonetheless, these events cannot be registered in a “psychicised” form insofar as they still cannot be differentiated from their physical roots. For this reason, they are often at the origin of the serious disturbances that are encountered in the psychosomatic field – cancers, autoimmune diseases, etc. – which remain incomprehensible as long as they are not “linked” by terms of language. I will discuss this at length in the last chapter. Now that we have reached the end of this enumeration, the clinical practice that emerges is unusual because it aims to enter into intimate contact with the parts affected by specific forms of suffering due to the after-effects of catastrophic episodes. This could only have been attempted by a clinician of great originality and of extraordinary character who had lived through the twentieth century, playing a large an active role in it, and whose own experience of it had been quite catastrophic.

Notes 1 The day Aristotle established that mathematics had to do with mathematical objects (equations), he “freed” the geometer from having to go to the site to calculate the dimensions and perimeter of a property needing to be fenced off, for example. 2 In parallel with Jacques Lacan – whose work he was unaware of (as I learnt during an exchange with Joyce McDougall who had met him several times in Paris), Bion, who was influenced by a wide range of scientific thought (Braithwaite, Russell, Poincaré, René Thom, and many others), was attracted by the rigour of mathematical transformations, to which I will return later. 3 A comparison cannot fail to be made, on this subject, with Samuel Beckett, who during an interview, lamented: “Words fail me!” 4 On this subject, see the letters Winnicott (1987) (and in particular letter 57, dated 7 October, 1955, p. 89ff ) sent to him, generally the day after he had read a paper to the members of the British Psychoanalytical Society, by way of support, after Bion had been castigated by his “colleagues”. 5 Here, too, the parallel with Lacan is striking, as can be seen from a passage in which Lacan distinguishes instinct from drive: “Instinct”, he writes, “among the modes of knowledge [connaissance] required by nature of living beings so that they satisfy its needs, is defined as a kind of [experiential] knowledge [connaissance] we admire because it cannot become [articulated] knowledge [un savoir],” unlike the drive, “which is a savoir certainly, but one that does not involve the slightest connaissance, since the one who carries it,“knows neither the meaning nor the text, nor in what language [langue] it is written” (Lacan, 1960, p. 680). 6 The notion of realization represents the concretization, materialization, the “becoming real” of a thing or idea.

32  Changes of perspective

7 One has the impression here of finding something of Ferenczi seeking in Thalassa (1924) to understand the elements, natural and cultural, that are at the origin of psychic life. 8 In “Fragment of a case of an analysis of hysteria”, Freud (1905c) evokes the question of negative hallucination the day after a session in which the young girl had dreamed and spoken about fire, cigars, smoke, etc., and Freud, after adding to the usual objects laid on his desk a large box of matches, asked his patient if she could see what he had added. She noticed nothing. 9 Just as in Experience in Groups, Wilfred R. Bion (1961) plays on the quasi-homophony between fight/flight, so the notion of ‘link’ makes the quasi-homophony between attach/ attack resonate.

2 HOSTILE AND FRIENDLY LIFE

There is a long tradition behind the idea of explaining the work of a thinker in terms of his biography and the great events in which he was involved during the course of his life; this is a tradition however, which Marcel Proust (1954) spoke out against when he was still a young literary critic, in his work Contre Sainte-Beuve [Against Sainte-Beuve], which remains unequalled to this day.1 To start with, my project of putting together a presentation of the thought of Wilfred R. Bion was based, not on drawing a parallel between the work and the life of its author, but rather on the idea that it was from my own psychoanalytic practice that a form of “correspondence” (in the Baudelairian sense of the term2) would gradually emerge between my activity and the tools forged by Bion. In this way, I would have succeeded in showing the way in which Bion’s work has nourished and enriched my practice, by allowing me even to free myself from all clinical and theoretical thinking, including his own. And then, on reflection, I was led to think that there was an interest in taking into account, at least in part, certain personal elements which, even if they did not determine, in the strict sense of the term, the infrastructure of the work, nevertheless “met” the thinking apparatus of the thinker who took hold of them and put them to work. This option seemed to me all the more relevant, as Bion had lived through several significant upheavals during his life, which it is difficult not to link up with some of his ideas. I therefore started to become more flexible on the principle that I had set myself regarding what should be excluded. In the same way, it seems that what we call the “personality” of the author comes into play in the choice of his themes of research, and the reading of numerous statements by analysands and colleagues of Bion finally convinced me that certain character traits had influenced the way he handled his favourite subjects. Most commentators agree in testifying to the power of Bion’s mere presence, his imposing stature, maintained by his daily sporting activity, which allowed an

34  Hostile and friendly life

impression of reassuring physical strength to emanate from his person, a strength which inspired in everyone a high degree of respect towards this colossus with a kindly look. Bion, writes Frank Philips (1981), was “a solid, well-built man, with a broad face, a calm expression, and very dark brown eyes” (p. 39). His mood was always very spiritual, his thought constantly incisive, without ever being wounding, which added to the sense of authority which his character gave off. James S. Grotstein (1981) states: “One cannot read Bion’s later works, particularly those that refer to the genius, the mystic or the messiah, without applying that designation to him” (p. 1). Let us try all the same to avoid going that far. The name Bion – from the Greek bios, life – is French in origin, his ancestors, Huguenots from La Rochelle having fled France for England at the time of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. A feeling of belonging to that area seems to have been sufficiently developed in him that his journeys led him, in 1921, to spend a year in Poitiers to study French and to purchase, in 1970, a country house in Maroutal, in the Dordogne (Périgord Noir), where he spent all his summers after he went to California, at the age of 71.

A subject of Her Majesty Wilfred R. Bion was born on 8 September 1897 at Muttra, an average-sized town in the Imperial India of the Victorian era, in the remote United Provinces, where his father, who held a post as a civil engineer of the British Empire, was for a while the Secretary of the Indian Congress. His mother, who came from a modest background was, he said, endowed with warmth and empathy, but there was always something sad in her look. Bion had a younger sister, whom he mentions rarely, except to say that she was a “brat”, a “whiner”, a “liar”, and a “brawler”. This is what he wrote in his rather mournful letters to his second wife, Francesca, to whom he described the whole of his family as “cracked” (1985, p. 79). On the other hand, he recalls at length his “ayah”, his Indian nanny, who raised him and regaled him with fairy tales, such as the Mahabharata, in a language he barely understood, but whose melodies became deeply embedded within him. In his autobiographic writings, Bion described himself, when he was a child, as a questioning boy, continually trying to understand everything and anything, to the point of irritating everyone, including his father, to whom he never ceased to pose his questions: “Why this? Why that? So what? But then? And after that?” and so on. Even his “wriggling” – a sort of masturbation he practised by rubbing and pressing his stomach on the floor – discovered when he was 4 years old and continued until the age of eight, according to his own words, became the object of his questions! He talked about it with his mother. In return, he received a severe admonition from his parents. The young boy had not yet understood that there are things which it is better not to talk about . . ., unless one wishes to run the risk of being deprived of them! At the same time, Wilfred invented an imaginary acolyte, a double, a twin, an accomplice; in short, a strange personage, both protector and guardian, called Arf

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Arfer, a name based on the laughter sounds of adults – Arf! Arf! Arf! – and on a sort of onomatopoeia modelled on a twisted form of Our Father, Our Father, Our Father. . . . Wilfred never experienced any situation without Arf Arfer participating or, at the very least, attending. Perhaps so that they could talk to each other. . . . Perhaps so that Arf Arfer could share Wilfred’s questionings more closely. . . . Perhaps. Like many children of officials of the British Empire who went to India, the young Wilfred was sent, on his own, to England at the age of 8 to an English public school, Bishop’s Stortford College, in order to receive there over a period of 10 years, from 1906 to 1915, the best education available in the aristocratic Edwardian England of the period. According to everybody, it was there that Bion acquired his manner of speaking, which allowed him to be recognised invariably as a well-educated Englishman, and which enabled him to feel at ease among members of the “establishment”. It was there too that he took up energetically several sports: water polo, rugby, swimming (which he was to continue to the end of his life). This enterprise enabled him to build up an athlete’s body and a stature that all those who knew him described as impressive. When he left Stortford, at the age of seventeen, he suffered several rejections when he tried to gain entry to Oxford or Cambridge, where he had hoped to go by obtaining a bursary, on the grounds that his parents were too poor, on the one hand, to afford the cost of admission, and, on the other, not poor enough for him to obtain a grant. “But they never told me that they were poor”, said Bion in surprise when this reality was pointed out to him. In the meantime, the first World War had set off in England a first round of recruitment – there was no compulsory military service in the United Kingdom. The day after his return to London, he reported to the recruitment office and found himself rejected, on the grounds, he thought, that he had gone to the office wearing an inappropriate cap! Faced with the difficult mood that had come over him, his parents, who had themselves also returned to London, enlisted the help of a distant acquaintance, and Wilfred joined the army on 4 January 1916.

The Great War After several months of training, he was appointed with the rank of sub-lieutenant, to a tank regiment – mastodons weighing 28 tons, a totally new invention for this war – and was sent, with his battalion, to Flanders, where horror awaited him. As Francesca Bion writes in her introduction to her husband’s War Memoirs, “[H]e was catapulted, like millions of others, from schoolboy to combatant soldier in a few months” (Bion, 1997, p. 2). He launched the men placed under his command into the battle of Cambrai, the first engagement in which tanks were sent to attack German defences. The fighting ensued with unimaginable brutality. The immense butchery which raged over the whole region engraved on the minds of everyone images whose horror it became impossible to forget – if one survived – in which case it was the miracle of survival that became insurmountable. Whatever his rank, every soldier was close to death continuously, saw his companions die under his very eyes whether from the bullets and shells of the enemy or under the blast of

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exploding tanks whose armour was easily shattered. “Night now began to fall as we approached the ‘line’ ”, he wrote, concerning an occurrence just a few weeks after his arrival at the front line. He continued, We kept on stopping and we could hear the guns thundering away. It was of course terrific fire. By this time it had begun to rain. . . . The horizon was simply lit up with gun flashes and flares of all colours” (1997, p. 17) Just like the mud, the blood, the rain, and the cold, fear was oppressive and penetrating. At every moment, no matter what direction they faced, “[T]he result of the whole business”, Bion writes, was to confirm us in our ideas of the incompetence of our senior officers. The men, of course, thought that the officers cared about nothing so long as they were all right, and looked forward to action less than ever. As tank commanders, we tried to do our best. But the selfishness of the senior officers was too appalling for words. (p. 20) Six weeks later: The general bombardment had developed, and in the silence of the tank we could hear the shells screaming overhead from our own guns and bursting near from theirs. The shelling was simply one continuous roar. Your own guns sounded a sharp crack behind. You could, of course, distinguish nothing. You simply had the deep roar of the guns, which was continuous, and imposed on that was the shrill whistle of the shells passing overhead – just as if it was the wind whistling in a gigantic keyhole. One very big German shell that burst near us could be distinguished above the rest. It sounded like an express train coming through a tunnel – a gradually increasing roar as it came nearer. Then a deafening crash. As the nearer shells burst, the tank used to sway a little and shudder. This was very beastly as one had previously felt that a tank was the pinnacle of solidity. It seemed as if you were all alone in a huge passage with great doors slamming all around. I can think of no way of describing it. (1997, p. 29) A little later, the same day: It was very tiring and demoralising. We came upon the remains of an old strong point. I was horrified to find that we were treading amongst men and thought that something had knocked them out. I then found they were

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simply machine gunners who were lying there in the mud and shell holes asleep, resting. . . . The artillery had now opened up with heavy fire, and the Germans replied. As we went along, this officer said I should never get to the tank, as the Germans had counter-attacked, and the position was uncertain. They were opening up then, as there was great restlessness and the situation seemed very critical. As it turned out, he was right, and we need not have bothered to go any further. . . . As I turned, the moon shone out from behind a cloud, and he saw my face, and said, “Great Scot! Is that you, Bion?” So I said, “Yes”, whereupon he said he was Bonsey, and then I saw his face, and recognised him as an Old Stortfordian. There was no time to say anything except goodbye and good luck. Poor fellow! He was killed just a week afterwards. (1997, pp. 36–37) War Memoirs is, then, for more than two hundred pages, the record of Wilfred R. Bion’s service in the Royal Tank Regiment from June 1917 to January 1919, a story written in 1919, shortly after his arrival at Queen’s College, Oxford, following demobilisation, and handwritten in three hardbound notebooks which he offered to his parents “as compensation for having found it impossible to write letters to them during the war” as he had promised to do before leaving them. It was followed by a “Commentary” in the form of a conversation between two people: a man who was “somewhat surly, though rarely given to outbursts of laughter; it is noticeable that he does not smile”. His name was BION, aged 21; the other man was the same age as the author in 1977, and was called MYSELF.”3 The first person willingly admits: I was aware that I was not competent, particularly as I was so scared and that did not seem to fit in with being a soldier. I could not even be sure of what I was frightened. Death? No. Being terribly mutilated? Perhaps; I knew a bit more about the possibilities later. Going mad? No. Whatever I thought, it didn’t seem to be that. (Bion, 1997, p. 202) When we come to the end of the main story, the second person concedes: The behaviour, facial expression, and poverty of conversation could give an impression of depression and even fear at the prospect of battle. Fear there certainly was; fear of fear was, I think, common to all – officers and men. The inability to admit it to anyone, as there was no one to admit it to without being guilty of spreading alarm and despondency, produced a curious sense of being entirely alone in company with a crowd of mindless robots – machines devoid of humanity. The loneliness was intense; I can still feel my skin drawn over the bones of my face as if it were the mask of a cadaver. (ibid., p. 204)

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   (. . .)

MYSELF:  “You

don’t think that your immediate seniors had fears that likewise had to be masked?” (. . .) BION:  “They died; we were killed” (ibid., p. 205, my italics).   (. . . .)   “At Oxford, when I was writing the diary, I used to have a recurrent dream of clinging to the slimy bank of a torrent that rushed by twenty feet below. As I was slipping I tried to dig my fingernails into the mud. But as I became tired, I moved to ease myself – and this meant a further slither. This vast raging torrent which was waiting for me below was the Steenbeck. I have described the trickle of dirty water that was the geographical fact” (ibid., p. 208).   (. . .) MYSELF: “What upsets you most?” BION:  (. . .) “I hesitate to say it . . . I cannot imagine what was wrong, but I never recovered from the survival of the Battle of Amiens” (ibid., p. 209). And finally, “I died on 8 August 1918” (1982, p. 265, my italics). These words are virtually the end of The Long Week-End, a moving description of the deep psychic impressions which the fighting left engraved on the spirit of the very young man (between 20 and 21 years of age) that Bion was between June 1917 and November 1918. He was the only one of his battalion who was still alive at the end of the repeated attacks. At the beginning of 1918, after a battle in which all his superior officers had been mown down, he found himself receiving at Buckingham Palace The Distinguished Service Order (DSO), one of the highest English honours (like the Victoria Cross) for having taken command at short notice of an infantry division otherwise condemned, and some months later, the Légion d’Honneur, which the French government awarded him for his outstanding actions on 8 August 1918. The self-denigration which characterised him then led him to declare that only his cowardice had protected him from death on the battlefield and that his decorations had been awarded to him only because “he had not even managed to die”! And at the end of his life, in A Memoir of the Future, Bion (1991) admitted that he was still haunted by the horrific scenes he had lived through some sixty years earlier: “Bourlon Wood haunted me. Ypres haunted me. The rain, my God, the rain! And the sweet smell of rotten flesh!” (p. 150); and “I can remember, faintly, what it is like to go into battle in a tank; I know enough to be able to describe it in terms of terror” (p. 111). And finally: “I thought I would never survive the shame of having lived beyond my friends” (p. 450). As we shall see, his involvement in the operations of the First World War and the lessons he drew from this formed the basis for his military psychiatric work in the course of the Second World War, and then as a psychoanalytical practitioner and theoretician. The constant fear, the permanent threat of disappearance, and the certainty of not being able to count on a reprieve are emotionally unsupportable and, curiously, are only attenuated when man experiences true moments of

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depersonalisation which furnish him with a momentary sense of security. “Sooner or later”, he wrote, “my parents would be bound to have the telegram announcing my death; the war only needed to go on long enough. . . . Already I had exhausted my quota of chances of survival” (1982, p. 247) This appalling fear exceeded any idea one might have of it, it aroused in everyone feelings of shame, emotions of unheard of violence, unbearable gestures and looks, crazy relationships with comrades, torturous tensions related to death by proxy. Deep anguish, the permanent sense of insufficiency in the face of the danger experienced by one’s companions, the fear of dishonour, the solitude, the isolation – all these nightmarish emotions became the everyday lot which he had to face up to at every moment of the engagements. Between the internal world, invaded by violence and brutality, and the outside world, peopled by all the dead, men he had rubbed shoulders with and lost, the paths and roads were transformed into torrents of bloody mud filled with dead bodies and twisted metal. It was these same moments that sharpened his visual acuity and allowed him to detail, to dissect and to describe, with a semi-hallucinatory precision, the most violent scenes. In parallel with this, and paradoxically, it was his capacity to regress and to split off the fragile elements of his personality which saved him from mental breakdown.

A bachelor overwhelmed by nightmares At the end of 1918, once the war was over, Bion was demobilised and – thanks to his two military decorations and his sporting abilities – went up to Queen’s College, Oxford. However, due to the combination of two things, his lack of a family tradition of going to university and his lack of personal financial means, he lived in these prestigious surroundings afflicted by a very distressing sense of inferiority, whilst turning towards the study of modern history. “I did not see”, he wrote, “that peacetime was no time for me. I did know . . . that wartime was also no time for me. I was 24 years old; no good for war, no good for peace, and too old to change” (1991, p. 16). His intellectual qualities, however, allowed him to meet a philosophy tutor, H.J. Paton, who introduced him with kindness to the thought of Kant, and also other authors, Plato, Hume, Condillac, Pascal, Aristotle, and Socrates. As an athlete, moreover, he distinguished himself in rugby, as well as continuing to swim at a high level. But every night, the nightmare of Steenbeck returned and left him shattered on his bed, in streams of sweat and anguish. After graduating in Modern History in 1921, he returned to Bishop’s Stortford College as a teacher of history and French – and as a coach for the football and swimming teams. It was during a study trip that he had a book by Freud in his hands for the first time, lent to him by a colleague. In 1922, a sorry story led to questions about his conduct in respect of a pupil. To be precise, he had established ties of mutual esteem with a young boy, who had told his mother about it when she visited him. The mother wanted to meet the teacher in question, to which Bion responded by inviting her to tea. How did this “tea time” unfold? We do not know.

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In any case, the insinuations that he had made inappropriate gestures towards the young boy obliged Bion to resign his post. He strongly defended his innocence, but gave up on the business of asserting his rights, because he did not have the means to obtain legal help. He returned to London, and enrolled immediately at University College Hospital to study medicine, which he pursued with the intention of becoming a psychoanalyst – studies he pursued until he qualified as a surgeon in 1930. During these years, he formed close ties with Wilfred Trotter, a renowned surgeon and honorary doctor to King George V – and also the brother-in-law of Ernest Jones! – who, outside his specialisation, showed a particular interest in group psychology.4 It is easy to imagine that he was inspired in part by his treatises. During his medical studies, Bion suffered a serious emotional setback when the sister of one of his fellow students, a very lovely young girl whose beauty overwhelmed him and whom he had courted and persuaded to marry him, broke off their engagement. He became intensely sad and accused the young girl of having wounded him in such a way that no healing scar could ever form. He crossed her path several years later when she was in the company of a man, during a seaside stay. “If I had had my service revolver with me”, he wrote, I would have shot him. Then I would have shot her through the knee in such a way that her joint could not be repaired and she would permanently have had a permanently rigid leg to explain to her future lovers. (Bion, 1985, pp. 29–30) So many disappointments in his studies, in sporting competitions, and in his relationships with women, pushed Wilfred, now a young adult, to consult a highly reputed psychotherapist, by the name of J-R. Hadfield, whom he had met at University College. Professor of Psychology at the faculty, Hadfield was one of those who had played a role in the creation of the Tavistock Clinic and had a central role there in influencing the way in which therapy was practised. Hadfield assured Bion that his difficulties could be cleared up in the space of a dozen sessions or so. Clearly, this did not happen. The treatment continued and Bion soon found himself in debt to friends from whom he had borrowed several hundred pounds. In his writings, he ridiculed Hadfield with the nickname “Dr FiP” – “Doctor Feel it in the Past” – an expression that the therapist used every time his patient suffered when evoking a situation from the past or a memory that remained painful. It seems, however, that Bion attended Hadfield’s consulting room for quite a long time – at least for several years – and for several reasons. In the first place, because of his “need to admire, to adore and to idolize” which made him loyal towards this therapist from whom he merely hoped to receive praise. For, as long as that spark did not occur, Bion remained convinced that it was he himself who did not have the qualities required to bring the best (simply by virtue of his reputation) out of his therapist. In the second place, the young doctor confessed to a certain admiration towards the experienced practitioner and the role the latter had played in the creation of the Tavistock, and this also rendered him loyal to a man with such noble sentiments.

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Finally, Hadfield knew how to retain the loyalty of the novice practitioners by sending them patients, in exchange for which he “accepted” a partial payment from the fees received! With his customary uprightness, Bion tried to question the moral implications of this practice, but Hadfield would not even allow the question to be raised. So much so that after about five years of psychotherapy which had nonetheless allowed Bion to measure how his “acquisition of a fund of failure seemed to be inexhaustible” (1985, p. 34), he succeeded in putting an end to his treatment. It seems that for a period of two years, he then practised as a military doctor in the Royal Air Force before returning to London in 1932 to practice psychiatry, which the medical training he had received allowed him to do. He picked up a post at the Institute for the Scientific Treatment of Delinquency, and another at the Maida Vale Hospital for Nervous Diseases where, almost certainly, he met John Rickman, an eminent English psychoanalyst who had played a crucial role in the development of psychoanalysis in England (see Pines, 1986; King, 2003). Rickman, who had been a doctor since 1916 and was also a Quaker, had already made a name for himself in the First World War on the Eastern Front, especially in Russia, where he had gone voluntarily in order to help the civil population who were victims of war atrocities. When the war ended, he went to Vienna to do an analysis with Freud (1920–1924), and had greatly contributed, together with Ernest Jones, in the setting up of the British Psychoanalytic Society. Introduced to the analysis of children through the London lectures of Melanie Klein, in 1928 he did an analysis with Ferenczi – an act of “treachery” which resulted in his having to resign from the British Institute of Psychoanalysis! − then a third analysis with Melanie Klein between 1934 and 1941. In addition, he had already written articles of great importance on the “dynamic of groups” (homogeneous and heterogeneous), including psychoanalytic groups within the British Psychoanalytic Society, to whom he was far from tender. As we will see later, his role during the Second World War was critical. The following year, 1933, Bion also joined the Tavistock Clinic, but as an assistant doctor, where he worked as a consultant until 1948. The Tavistock Clinic, founded in 1920 by a small group of doctors, including J.R. Hadfield, had built its initial reputation by working hard on the treatment of psychic traumas due to the war. On the strength of this specialisation, it also acquired an important reputation thanks to the fact that it put its centre for consultation and treatment at the disposal of patients who could not afford to pay the fees for a private consultation. Finally, its reputation rested equally on the collection of doctors who practised a particular form of psychiatry there, profoundly influenced by psychoanalysis, which some of them had discovered in London as well as in Vienna and Budapest. The Tavistock thus attracted a certain type of patient who had, one way or another, come across Freudian perspectives. One of the first patients Bion received was a young Irishman, by the name of Samuel Beckett, who had come to London in order to resolve, if possible, the serious somatic and psychic problems which were making life unbearable for him. At the Tavistock Clinic, the young Beckett was entrusted to Bion. Although the treatment did not last long (the patient was suffering, above all, from

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having left his mother alone in Ireland), virtually all commentators have taken pleasure in imagining that each of the two protagonists profoundly influenced the other. It seems no exaggeration to suppose that Beckett and Bion had met in each other a reflection of their own schizoid and narcissistic tendencies, and that they were able, each in his own field, to benefit from the understanding that they had succeeded in developing the psychotic part of their personalities. As Didier Anzieu puts it, moreover, Bion tried at the end of his life to write an essay aimed at bringing out “the truth before birth”(!) The multifaceted dimension of this monumental work, A Memoir of the Future (Bion, 1991) has decidedly Joycian and Beckettian accents (Anzieu, 2004).

“And now this war” In 1937, caught up in tangled relationships, especially with women, Bion began an analysis with John Rickman, whilst undertaking psychoanalytical training at the British Institute of Psychoanalysis – an analysis that was broken off prematurely in September 1939 when England once again went to war. Rickman and Bion enrolled in the army and soon met up again at the Northfield military hospital where, on the strength of his training with his peers at the Tavistock Clinic, Bion found himself assigned to the post of officer in charge of military training. This assignment, however, was suspended after six weeks. This was because, in this assignment, Bion and Rickman had introduced various reforms, which by all accounts, poached on the turf of a certain J.R. Rees, a former colleague from the Tavistock now enrolled in the army with the rank of general. If he had allowed the proposals of Bion and Rickman to be introduced by the army, he would have let it be understood that a general had permitted profound reforms to emanate from a captain – a hierarchical reversal unheard of in the army! After being transferred from one assignment or post to another, Bion felt, over and over again, as though he had been “sacked”. As competent and, above all, innovative psychiatrists – in particular in the field of rehabilitating men for their original roles, a field which implied introducing changes to the unchangeable hierarchy of the power structures − Bion and Rickman were underemployed, even exploited, throughout the war. In his memoirs thirty-five years later, Bion suggested that their superiors were always driven by suspicion towards these two men, who were endowed with such intelligence that they would have overturned the whole recruitment system. They were nonetheless regarded as the two psychiatric officers who specialized in group therapy in the military environment, a reputation which brought them to the War Office Selection Board, where they brought important innovations in the process of selecting service officers. Bion put in place, after a number of experiments, the technique of “the leaderless group”, which emphasised the importance of taking into account interpersonal relations in the role of commanding officers. We will come back to this when it is time to discuss Bion’s advances in thinking about groups. However, each “victory” won on the promotion of his ideas was followed by a personal defeat, the job which he coveted going to another officer. The only “gain” he made from these war years

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occurred during his short stay at the Northfield military hospital, which provided him with the wherewithal to write the article which immediately made his reputation as an “innovator” in this domain: “Intra-group tensions in therapy: their study as a task of the group”, published in 1943 in The Lancet (Bion & Rickman, 1943) (see also Lacan, 2001). Quite subtly, Bion showed through a detailed analysis of its organisational chart how it was impossible for the hospital to fulfil its functions and, by a daring shift from individual psychology to group psychology, showed how their dysfunctioning was analogous. But this meagre success did not suffice to remedy the total feeling of persecution and guilt with which Bion was continuously poisoning himself. Ultimately, after going from disappointment to humiliation, he noted bitterly that he was the only psychiatrist who finished the war with the same rank as he had had at its beginning.5 Meanwhile, Wilfred R. Bion had undoubtedly drawn some benefit from having spent several months under analysis on Rickman’s couch, because his relationship with a woman – and a woman no less than the well-known actress Betty Jardine – had become firm, and, one thing leading to another, they got married in 1940. Their life as a couple suffered from the vagaries of displacements, both military and professional, of each of them, and then finished dramatically, in 1945, three days after the arrival in the world of their little daughter Parthenope, when the young woman who had just given birth died of a pulmonary embolism. Bion, who had agreed to be sent to Normandy for a military experiment related to a psychic degradation in ill soldiers who had been withdrawn from the front, blamed himself for not having been at his wife’s side in these events. “What killed Betty, and nearly killed her baby?”, Bion was still wondering some forty years later. “Physical malformation? Incompetent obstetrics? Callous or indifferent authorities? Or the revelations of the hollow nature of the masculine drum that was being so loudly beaten by her husband’s departure?” (Bion, 1985, p. 62). In any event, he quickly had to entrust his child into the care of the devoted nanny who had already been looking after the mother in his absence. The death of Betty Jardine plunged Bion, then aged 48, into widowerhood, whose pain was further amplified by his incapacity, as he felt it, to be a proper father. “I had begged Betty to have a baby: her agreement to do so had cost her her life” (ibid., p. 70). With the savings he had made, he bought a house at Iver Heath, in the countryside around London, where he lodged the couple who were to look after Parthenope, and acquired in Harley Street, in the heart of London, a consultation room. He worked six and a half days out of seven and visited his little daughter on Sunday afternoons. He relates, in this connection, an episode which continued to fill him with shame. One day when he was sitting on the lawn not far from his little girl aged less than one, she began to call out to him and started crawling towards him. The father remained sitting. She began to whimper and show signs of distress. The father remained impassive, but felt “bitter, angry, and resentful” towards the child whose life was certainly reminding him all the time of the death of his wife. “Why did she do ‘this’ to me?” he was asking himself, followed immediately by, “Why are you

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doing this to her?” The nurse, who meantime had been observing all this, wanted to fetch the child. The father stopped her. “No”, he said, “let her crawl; it won’t do her any harm.” He continued, We watched the child having difficulty crawling. She had started to cry with hot tears, but she determinedly pursued her attempt to cover the distance. I felt as if I were gripped in a vice. No, I would not go. At last, the nurse, having glanced at me with astonishment, got up, ignoring my prohibition, and fetched her. The spell snapped. I was released. The baby had stopped weeping, and was being comforted by maternal arms. But I, I had lost my child. . . . It was a shock, a searing shock, to find such depth of cruelty in myself. (ibid., p. 70) After many recurrences, Bion thus came to recognise this streak of cruelty within him.6 Once the war was over, Bion returned to the Tavistock Clinic, where he became the Director of the Executive Committee. He wrote other articles devoted to the benefit of psychoanalytic contributions applied to the functioning of groups (see Bion, 1961). Finally, he took up again the analysis with Rickman that had been suspended in 1939.

On Melanie Klein’s couch Meanwhile the military partnership between the two men had somewhat modified the nature of the links which united them. Rickman, who had introduced Bion to Melanie Klein, encouraged him to follow the analytic work with her, a recommendation Bion accepted, although, he wrote: “My experience of association with women had not been encouraging or conducive to growth of any belief in a successful outcome” (Bion, 1985, pp. 66–67). According to our sources, this analysis lasted from 1945 to 1950 or 1953. He was accepted as an analyst in 1947 and became a member of the British Psychoanalytic Society in 1950, after having backed up his candidature with the article entitled “The Imaginary Twin” (1950),7 a description of a treatment carried out with respect for – dare I say “allegiance to”? − Kleinian criteria for the practice of analysis. Thus it was that he was appointed in 1947 to the post of secretary of the medical section of The British Psychoanalytic Society, after the publication of “Psychiatry at a Time of Crisis” (Bion, 1948). Concerning his analysis with Melanie Klein, Bion wrote that it had taken place without his understanding what had gone on. But one has to say there was already something exceptional in the fact that he had asked for an analysis with a woman, and not just any woman! I have set out above how much the company of women was a problem for this man with his gauche manner and his clumsy gestures, even though his manner of speaking was notably sophisticated and refined. To this we

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can add that, throughout this period of analysis, Bion was thinking only in terms of groups, a field that eluded Melanie Klein completely. This meeting between Bion and Klein could not have been more of a clash, as one can imagine the shock between two worlds, the masculine world of Bion and the feminine world of Klein, and between two characters, both of them sturdy, neither of them having any intention of letting themselves be intimidated by the strong personality of the other. And if he hoped to bend the intransigent figurehead of the Kleinians by evoking his concerns regarding the subject of the child, his financial problems due to his expenditures for his home and consulting room – and the fees he had to pay – it was no good! As Gérard Bléandonu (1990) writes, “Klein had to understand that his begging was a demand for something other than money from her” (p. 90). He had to recognize that her technical mastery was impressive when, after he had so thoroughly belittled himself – as was his custom – he could only note the inflexible rigour of the framework she maintained. With regard to the analysis itself, Bion claims he rarely, perhaps never, heard his analyst formulate a “correct interpretation”, and that it was only a long time afterwards that he recognised that certain interpretations, which at first he had ignored or misunderstood, had perhaps been adequate.“When I was given an interpretation”, he wrote, “I used very occasionally to feel it was correct; more usually, I thought it was nonsense but hardly worth arguing about since I did not regard the interpretation as much more than the expression of Mrs Klein’s opinions that was unsupported by any evidence” (1985, p. 68). “But as time passed”, he added, “I did not become more amenable to her views but more aware of my disagreement. Nonetheless, there was something about that series of experiences with her that made me feel gratitude to her and a wish to be independent of the burden of time, and expense of money and effort involved.” (ibid.) It must be said that between the patient and the analyst, there was no shortage of reasons for conflict: Malcolm Pines, the biographer previously mentioned, reports that “during his analysis and later, he had felt that Mrs Klein did not favour, and perhaps was openly hostile, to his work with groups” (Pines, 1986, p. 55). When the patient let the analyst know that he was intending to end the analysis, she accepted it”, Bion said with astonishment, “partly no doubt, through the realisation that enough of WRB was enough” (Bion, 1985, p. 68). Bion, undoubtedly, had come to recognise the “feminine genius” of his analyst, by whom he was greatly inspired when he started his own elaborations. But the conceptual leap he made as soon as he was freed from her, propelled him far beyond any sense of “belonging” to the Kleinian school.

A new home At the end of the 1940s, Bion, perhaps on the way to a partial reconciliation with women, started going out with a nurse whose first name was Francesca, a young widow who was pursuing a training course at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, and who seems to have engendered in him a change that was to prove

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decisive. In the space of a few months, between March and June 1951, Bion became engaged and then married her. The letters he wrote to her every time he was separated from her are particularly vibrant with emotions. With the proceeds of the sale of the house at Iver Heath, he bought another house, bigger and more beautiful, called Redcourt, of which we have several paintings by Wilfred himself. The couple had two children, Julian in July 1952 and Nicola in June 1955. With the return of Parthenope, who had found in Francesca a loving stepmother, it was a happy family which allowed each of its members to blossom. “The mere thought of our children is inexpressibly sweet to me”, he wrote to Francesca on 11 April 1951, at a time when their children existed only in their desires. But already, he recognised: “You have given Parthenope back to me, and made me feel what it is to have a child” (1985, p. 85). From that time onwards, Bion, who at the age of almost sixty, had until that period only published one article, enjoyed a fertile disposition that enabled him to unleash an impressive creativity. It is not unreasonable to think that love had given him that which analysis had prepared for him. In the institutional field, after the end of his analysis, which Bion recognised had been a “burden” to him, the institutional man he had been, curiously enough and against all expectations – since he was, at the same time, jealous of his independence − took on the role of Director of the London Clinic of Psychoanalysis from 1956 to 1962. Then from 1962 until 1965, the maximum period allowed, he distinguished himself as an esteemed President of the renowned British Psychoanalytical Society.8 He maintained close, but complicated relations with Melanie Klein. There was a great closeness between them, he accompanied her on many trips, he acted as her loyal defender, yet strove at the same time to break free from her “tyranny”: “I must”, he wrote to Francesca, “find a way to explain to MK that I need sleep. . . . Melanie is extremely demanding. I suppose it is because she has had so many attacks and so little cause for genuine happiness in her life but I always feel sucked dry” (1985, pp. 114 and 116). But it was also in this context that he wrote and published the most important articles of this period: “Development of schizophrenic thought” (1956), “Attacks on linking” (1959), “The differentiation of the psychotic from the non-psychotic personalities” (1957b), etc. After the death of Melanie Klein in 1960, he became the Secretary of the Melanie Klein Trust. It is not unreasonable to claim that it was from this moment onwards that Bion’s creativity really bloomed, as if at that moment he had ceased to restrain himself in presenting his ideas. Some have made the point that age had pushed him to surpass himself. To this, it is probably necessary to add that this increased activity was a way of not suffering too much from the death of his analyst and mentor, and of escaping from the institutional tensions that had by then taken hold of the British Psychoanalytic Society. In any case, it was during the course of this handful of years that the three works of the period known as Bion’s epistemological period appeared: Learning from Experience (1962a), Elements of Psychoanalysis (1963), and Transformations (1965). These important works resulted in the birth of the last volume in the series: Attention and Interpretation (1970). And then came a new turning point.

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The two Americas Towards the end of the 1960s, a small number of Californian psychoanalysts became interested in the work of Melanie Klein and invited the most well-known Kleinian analysts to participate in a series of conferences. Bion was among those invited. His papers were so successful that his hosts suggested he should settle permanently with them in Los Angeles. Bion was by now seventy-one. Beyond the fact that the welcome he had received could not have been warmer, that the Californian climate reminded him of the climate in the India of his childhood and brought back to mind the immemorial songs chanted to him by his nurse, the New World seemed free of the theoretical and institutional tensions of old Europe. In short, everything came together to give the illusion that a paradise existed which had not been lost! Bion and his family moved to 225 Homewood Road, Los Angeles, on 25 January, 1968, in the middle of a winter that seemed like summer. When he was asked how he could have left his beloved England so readily, he claimed that his institutional responsibilities were “killing [his] ability to work”. And, as was his wont, he added: “The epigraph was: ‘He was loaded with honours and sank without a trace!’ ” (1970, p. 78). In a short while, his newfound reputation extended to Argentina and Brazil, countries where he was received with unbridled enthusiasm and where conferences and supervisory seminars were organised and repeated on a regular basis (see Bion, 1974, 1987). Frank Philips reported that In Brazil . . . many found [Bion’s visit] highly stimulating, some thought it intriguing, some considered it too difficult to take in, difficult to assimilate. . . . But something important has happened and nothing will ever be the same again[. . . .] Up to 1973, the Sao Paolo Institute’s Training Committee had provided a full course for teaching Freud and Melanie Klein. Following the 1973 visit, arrangements were made to include Bion in them and this has been followed with all seriousness since then. (Philips, 1981, pp. 39–40) Elsewhere, Rafael López-Corvo (2003), author of a dictionary on the work of Bion published in English, sums up his approach admirably in his Foreword: “I feel that Bion was obscure with the English, sober with the Americans, and charming and understanding with Brazilians” (p. xvi). In the United States, Bion experienced several disappointments, some of which related to various displays of petty-­mindedness related to a refusal to recognise this non-American analyst as a teaching and training analyst! Bion travelled North, South, East, and West, speaking in England (Bion, 2005a), France (Resnik, 2006),9 Italy (Bion, 2005b), in Argentina, and in Brazil, spending the 1970s writing his literary and psychoanalytical “UFO” in three volumes, A Memoir of the Future, building on a “mother idea”, in the sense used by James Joyce. At the end of 1978, the project of revisiting India – the timeless and eternal India which he carried in his heart as much as in his eyes – became more urgent,

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and preparations were made for a trip six months later. In March 1979, the Bions stopped off in London and went to Oxford, where Bion had to be hospitalised. In the space of three weeks, he was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia, and he died of this on 8 November 1979. His return to India never took place.

Notes 1 Translator’s note: An unfinished set of essays written by Proust between 1895 and 1900, first published posthumously in 1954. 2 “Correspondances” (1861) is the title of a poem by Charles Baudelaire. 3 As we can see, Bion had already, starting from this period, adopted the principle of creating conversations between different parts of his “self ”. This procedure would be taken up again in A Memoir of the Future (1991). 4 Wilfred Trotter (1916) is the author of Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War, a book cited with praise by Freud (1921) in Group Psychology and Analysis of the Ego, and considered as essential reading by all the authorities charged with preventing new wars. 5 For more details of the role played by Bion as a military psychiatrist, see Laura Dethiville and François Lévy (2012). 6 Francesca Bion regarded All My Sins Remembered, Wilfred R. Bion’s second autobiographical book, as a confession of repentance “a sad, self-searching testimony” (1985, p. 6), as the lines above demonstrate; and, to give an insight into The Other Side of Genius, she added in the second part some magnificent letters which Bion sent to her and her children on the occasion of each of his postings. 7 A reawakened phantasy leads me to recall Arf Arfer, the companion whose presence alongside him reassured Wilfred during his lonely childhood. 8 On this subject, see the letters of Winnicott to Bion in Winnicott (1987). 9 Biographie de l’inconscient (Resnik, 2006) contains the transcription translated into French of the training seminar given by Bion in Paris in 1977.

3 EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCE AND ALPHA-FUNCTION

In Second Thoughts, Wilfred R. Bion (1967) sought to highlight the reasons for which he quite quickly stopped taking notes at the end of each session.1 His personal practice, which he simply tries to communicate, is based on the fact that he very soon felt incapable of restoring in words the emotional content of what was being played out in the here-and-now of the session. He writes: “As psycho-analysis is concerned with experience that is not sensuous . . . records based on the perception of that which is sensible are records only of the psychoanalytically irrelevant” (p. 1). The very frequent use of the word “experience” should be noted here – it is perhaps the most frequently used word in Bion’s work. The first sensory elements that emerge ex abrupto from the patient’s words, from his gestures and his behaviour as a whole, are observable by the sense-organs of the analyst. This is what some call praecox Gefühl.2 They are all of equal value and must, of course, be considered as phenomena conveying precious indications. Through sight, hearing, smell, or touch – realising that the hand one is shaking is moist from anxiety, even though no anxiety is noticeable in the patient’s appearance, discourse, or behaviour – the analyst picks up various sensory data which exist as such, without any other value than their existence. But starting from this sensoriality, different stages of transformations can take place. Here is an example.

An experience that does not depend on the senses At the beginning of an article, Bion describes the “visual image” that he has of a patient: “When he came to me I saw a man of 43, just under 6 ft. in height, of wiry build, sallow complexion and dull expressionless features: by profession a teacher. The discussion of his difficulties was perfunctory, carried on for his part in monosyllabic listlessness. He agreed without enthusiasm to give analysis a trial”

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(Bion, 1950, p. 4). Seventeen years later, when Bion was preparing the publication of a book bringing together all his articles of that period, he wrote a (long) “Commentary” − fifty pages – in which he speaks of the distance covered since the first writing of these articles and the reflections aroused in him by the changes that had occurred in his way of thinking. “When I wrote this”, he writes, I believed I was giving a factual account of . . . my interpretations . . . followed by a factual account of the consequences of the interpretations. It seems to me now that it is more nearly accurate to regard this and all other articles written by me . . . as consisting of statements of varying quality. For example, the statement [which describes the patient] is a verbal formulation of a visual image. Reading it now after seventeen years, I am able to receive a visual impression which up to a point reminds me of something that cannot be sensuously grasped – depression. (1967, p. 121) “The phrase ‘monosyllabic listlessness’ ”, he continues, “. . . makes me suppose now that the patient was depressed, but it is not the same to say he was depressed as to describe him as being listless and monosyllabic” (ibid.). Then, a few lines further on he writes: [It is thus] a sensuous image . . . yet every psycho-analyst knows the frustration of trying to make clear, even to another psycho-analyst, an experience which sounds unconvincing as soon as it is formulated. . . . Yet in the days when I used to write elaborate notes on my sessions with patients, I found that I was no more successful [in understanding them]. . . . At first I thought I could easily understand notes dashed off at speed, a squiggle here, an exclamation mark there, sometimes an interpolated conjecture or comment on my own feelings on what was happening. I will not say they were meaningless when I came to read them, but they did not convey the meaning I hoped to find. They resembled nothing so much as a sleepy note that I sometimes tried to make to pin down what I felt to be an important dream for study in the morning. The squiggles remained: the dream had gone. So it is with this paper here. . . . As it is I do not recognize the patient or myself. (1967, p. 123) In other words, Bion deploys all his skills to indicate that however indispensable and inevitable the emotional experience is that is unfolding before his eyes, it is not able to provide directly indications about what is observed for psychoanalytic purposes, and that only a work of abstraction makes it possible to reveal how the psyche functions. But “abstraction” means above all that thought must be purged of the sensory elements provided, originally, by the sense-organs. That is why, in the first pages of his third book, Learning from Experience (Bion, 1962a), one cannot fail to be struck by the project that underpins the writing:

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“This book deals with emotional experiences that are directly related both to theories of knowledge and to clinical psycho-analysis, and that in the most practical manner” (p. vii). In his view, taking emotional experience into account is the starting point of psychoanalytic work. This intimate experience occurs when, in analysis, the effects of sense-impressions and qualities of pleasure and unpleasure are combined during the evocation of a circumstance or situation that has aroused, at the emotional level, such turbulence that the patient has been obliged to choose between modifying the frustration experienced due to the lack of satisfaction felt and evading this frustration. In other words, the solution adopted in response to this experience was dependent on the capacity for thought the patient was able (or not) to muster in order to appreciate the advantages and disadvantages of the choice to be made. In his article “Formulations on the two principles of mental functioning”, Freud (1911) had already encountered and described the phenomenon superbly: The state of psychical rest was originally disturbed by the peremptory demands of internal needs. When this happened, whatever was thought of (wished for) was simply presented in a hallucinatory manner, just as still happens today with our dream thoughts every night. It was only the non-­ occurrence of the expected satisfaction, the disappointment experienced, that led to the abandonment of this attempt at satisfaction by means of hallucination. Instead of it, the psychical apparatus had to decide to form a conception of the real circumstances in the external world and to endeavour to make a real alteration in them. A new principle of mental functioning was thus introduced; what was presented in the mind was no longer what was agreeable but what was real, even if it happened to be disagreeable. (Freud, 1911, p. 219) To return now to the question of frustration. In the case of hallucination developed by Freud, the connection made between recourse to this solution and the economic aspect of the benefits that can be derived from it due to the level of satisfaction attained leads the individual who is on the point of adopting this solution to question himself as to the value of this choice. Of course, hallucination is definitely the most direct path towards satisfaction, but its “unreal” character in the short term, which can even quickly become threatening and persecuting, cannot alleviate in the long term the painful tension felt owing to the lack of satisfaction. If the subject in question only attempted to submit himself to the pleasure principle, he would be unable to keep himself alive beyond a very short lapse of time. Provided he feels the desire to stay alive longer, he will have to give up the search for pleasure alone in order to encounter something real which ensures his material survival, that of his organism and of his mind. This is the reality principle which, in combination with the pleasure principle, operates in favour of choosing, in reality, an object that is perhaps less satisfying than the hallucinated object, but one that has the advantage of being real.

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Including experiences of learning These are the notions that Bion questions again at the begin of his book. He goes back to Freud who, in the same article, writes: The increased significance of external reality heightened the importance, too, of the sense-organs that are directed towards that external world and of the consciousness attached to them. Conscious now learned to comprehend3 sensory qualities in addition to the qualities of pleasure and unpleasure which hitherto had alone been of interest to it. (Freud, 1911, p. 220) At this stage, Bion already invites us to note that the “function” of consciousness is to comprehend sense-impressions. “I treat”, he adds, “sense-impressions, pleasure and pain as alike real” and the role of consciousness “which was once so omnipotent” is now that of “a sense-organ for the perception of psychic qualities”. Consequently, he continues, citing Freud, “ ‘a special function was instituted . . . the function of attention. Its activity meets the sense-impressions half-way instead of awaiting their appearance’ ” (Freud’s emphasis). This function, according to Bion, anticipates “the data of the outside world” in such a way as to translate not so much their psychic quantities (according to the quantitative principle of the quota of excitation) as the psychic qualities that they are liable to contain and deliver.

Factors and function The analyst, like the patient, has the task of “translating the psychic qualities of the sense-impressions attached to emotional experience”: “I have”, he adds, “experience to record, but how to communicate this experience to others I am in doubt.” (1962a, p. vi). He has thus presented the method that he intends to follow: he observes4 a patient whose words and acts he perceives both as perceptions obtained through his sense-organs and, thanks to his investigation, as “functions” of the personality of this patient. “Suppose”, he writes, I see [a] man walking. I may say that his walk is a function of his personality and that I find, after investigation, that the factors of this function are his love for a girl and his envy of her friend. (ibid., pp. ix and 15) By transforming the sense data arising from his observation into thoughts elaborated thanks to his sophisticated mechanisms of thought, the analyst is able to extract and deduce the factors of love and envy in the perceptions arising from the acuity of his observation. For Bion, this is a prerequisite.

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Clinical psychoanalysis thus requires work, which, starting from sense data, carries out a transformation of these data into materials that can be utilised by the psychical apparatus as described by Freud, so that the practitioner can establish his own “theory of knowledge” that permits him to meet his patient. Among these materials, some will become conscious, whereas others will pass into the unconscious but, at the point we are at, what counts is that this “emotional experience” can be considered in its entirety. Bion gives the following example: A man talking to a friend converts the sense-impressions of this emotional experience . . . thus becoming capable . . . of undisturbed consciousness of the facts whether the facts are the events in which he participates or his feelings about those events or both. He is able to remain ‘asleep’ or unconscious of certain elements . . . and awake to the fact that he is talking to his friend. (ibid., p. 15) This is a behaviour that certain psychotics are unable to sustain. I can recall, for example, a patient who, when I lowered my eyes to look at the ashtray next to my chair, would stop speaking. If we examine the problem from a different angle, we notice that Bion pays particular attention to what, in Freud, had acquired special importance, namely, the apprehension of reality; for the description that he gives of “emotional experience” makes explicit what Sigmund Freud as well as Melanie Klein had underlined concerning the breast as being a (or even unique) fundamental experience for all human beings. Bion puts emphasis on the fact that a real or actual breast is made available – which he calls the “realization”5 of the breast. What matters in this experience, he adds, is that the breast entity offered is not just another fiction in the baby’s imagination; a real breast exists and this experience acquires its emotional quality if and when it joins up with the preconception of the breast in the baby – a preconception that made it seek, without knowing that that was what it was looking for, “a breast that satisfies its own incomplete nature” (p. 69). But, above all, it acquires its full significance when clinical experience shows that, in many adult patients, their current disturbed relationships are derived from a disturbance of the infant in its relationship to the breast. This means that the emotional experience is not an event that occurs, in the internal world, in an exclusively independent way. The idea that ensues allows us, in passing, to relativise the critique of the monadic vision of a mind which, in order to function, must remain isolated from the outside world, an idea that offered many anti-Freudians the possibility of rejecting the Freudian conception of the psychical apparatus. The mind functions by receiving from the outside world information transmitted by the sense-organs. As soon as we wish things were different, we expose the psychical apparatus to bombardments of stimuli of exaggerated intensity, bombardments that may be compared with the experiences of shell shock to which

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the soldiers were subjected during the First World War and which caused so many traumas by shattering what Freud called the “stimulus barrier”. This membrane, which Bion renamed “contact-barrier” – a term that was once dear to Freud – is protective insofar as it prevents fantasies and endopsychic stimuli from suffering the interference of the sight of real things. Conversely, as Grinberg, Sor, and Tabak de Bianchedi (1993) write, “it protects contact with reality avoiding its distortion by emotions of internal origin” (p. 45). When Bion develops his conception of emotional experience, when he insists on describing it as fully as possible, it is to reaffirm that, through the work that consists in translating the psychic qualities of the sense-impressions attached to emotional experience, the latter maintains a link with the outside world, with the environment; it even procures the “stuff ” of which this link is made.6 In Bion’s view, this is what is indicated by the term “experience”. Furthermore, it attests to the existence of object-cathexes which are linked to instinctual drive sources. It provides the evidence that there does indeed exist a link which can be both outside and inside.

Alpha-function Bion continues logically, by deploying his elaboration: A central part is played by alpha-function in transforming an emotional experience into alpha-elements because a sense of reality matters to the individual in the way that food, drink, air and excretion of waste products matter. Failure to eat, drink or breathe properly has disastrous consequences for life itself. Failure to use the emotional experience produces a comparable disaster in the development of the personality; I include amongst these disasters degrees of psychotic deterioration that could be described as death of the personality. . . . An emotional experience cannot be conceived of in isolation from a relationship. (Bion, 1962a, p. 42) Bion defines alpha-function as an abstraction used by the analyst to describe a function, of which he does not know the nature, until such time he feels in position to replace it by factors for which he feels he has obtained evidence in the course of the investigation in which he is employing alpha-function. (ibid., pp. 25–26) Such a lack of precision in an author so attached to precision can only be deliberate, and designed to make analysts think and question their practice. How can one be certain that one has ever understood? It is also a call to analysts to pursue and to go into things more deeply, to engage in the process of working-through. “I shall suppose”, Bion writes, “that there are factors in the personality that combine to

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produce stable entities which I call functions of the personality” (ibid., p. 1). Bion uses the term “function” while retaining the meaning that it has in mathematics and philosophy, or in common usage. It refers to “a variable in relation to other variables . . . on the value of which its own value depends” (1963, p. 9). In this sense, it designates both something that is a function – and which, in this case, has factors – and something that has a function. He writes: The theory of functions and alpha-function are not part of psycho-analytic theory. They are working tools for the practising psycho-analyst to ease problems of thinking about something that is unknown. The term “function”, used in the sense of a function of personality, has not the meaning it possesses for the mathematician or the mathematical logician . . . its full designation, if there is any doubt, is “psycho-analytic function of the personality” but otherwise it should be designated simply “function” and given the sign ψ. (Bion, 1962a, p. 89) Bion innovates – or shows a formidable understanding of the Freud of the Project (1950[1895]) – by situating this function, originally, in the breast – that is, in the maternal other – which enables the newborn infant to cope with the increase in pain and frustration. Alpha-function is a process closely bound up with the relationship that the infant establishes with his mother and, in order for this function to be set up, the infant must be able to establish a good enough relationship with his mother. In this case, it is the maternal alpha-function that receives the disagreeable emotional experiences evacuated by the baby by means of projective identification, transforms them, and returns them to the baby in a modified and attenuated form. And it is in the course of the successive exchanges – when they unfold in a suitable way – that the alpha-function of the infant develops, when both the evacuated unintegratable elements are returned by the mother in an integratable form, and when, as a result, something of the process of modification is transmitted to him at the same time as the elements that have now been reorganised. To describe this incessant exchange, Bion compares the mother to a container (♀) and what the infant evacuates towards her to a content (♂). Consequently, the relation that is established functions according to the schema (♀♂) which becomes the model for every relationship based on the principle of alpha-function. As the exchanges are multiplied, the infant introjects the schema which becomes the “(♀♂) apparatus”, and which, progressively, will form part of the “apparatus of alpha-function”. The “container-contained relationship” (♀♂) is established. But it is essential to recall that the setting up of this entire mechanism depends on the quality of the relationship that the infant has been able to establish with his mother and also on the mother’s capacity, in turn, to offer the infant love and understanding – a capacity Bion calls “maternal reverie”. Alpha-function thus consists in the act of transforming sense data into “alphaelements”, elements that comprise “visual images, auditory patterns, olfactory patterns, and are suitable for employment in dream thoughts, unconscious waking

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thinking, contact-barrier, memory” (1962a, p. 26). Alpha-elements are thus “the outcome of the work done by alpha-function on sense-impressions. They are not objects in the world of external reality, but are products of the work done on the sensa believed to relate to such realities” (1963, p. 22 and on the primitive emotional experiences (which Bion groups under the term “beta-elements”). The aim of alpha-function is to understand reality in such a way that it can be recollected and used for thinking. Staying within a domain he prioritized, that of the parallel between the psychic apparatus and the digestive apparatus, Bion asserts that alphafunction “ingests” sense-impressions and “digests” them in order to provide the mind with the alpha-elements constitutive of thought. But before this is possible, emotional experience must give rise to a form of “learning by experience”. Bion writes: A child having the emotional experience called learning to walk is able by virtue of alpha-function to store this experience. Thoughts that had originally to be conscious become unconscious and so the child can do all the thinking needed for walking without any longer being conscious of it. Alpha-function is needed for conscious thinking and reasoning and for the relegation of thinking to the unconscious when it is necessary to disencumber consciousness of the burden of thought by learning a skill. (1962a, p. 8) Thus the first role of alpha-function is to create in the mind, and thanks to the confluence of alpha-elements, a “membrane” – a “contact-barrier” of dream thoughts between consciousness and the unconscious. As a magnificent Freudian, Bion takes care to make it clear that alpha-function does not operate directly on emotional experience but on perception, concerning which we learn that it records both the sense-impressions – probably called upon to be translated into ideation – and the emotions (affects?) of which the patient is aware, without it being possible to say anything more about the emotions themselves, a domain which still remains as mysterious as ever but which nonetheless seems to Bion to represent the central core of psychic life. In this regard, he gives additional consistency to the Freudian system Pcpt.-Cs. He also describes the mechanism which enables the psychical apparatus to produce “dream thoughts” – formed out of alpha-elements – which can be kept in memory or used for thinking. He states, above all, that “an emotional experience occurring in sleep . . . does not differ from the emotional experience occurring during waking life” (ibid., p. 6).

When transcriptions do not take place We understand better now why it is important for Bion that psychoanalytic activity – closely correlated with alpha-function – is also based on psychoanalytic “experience” (experience, let us recall, “that does not depend on the senses”) and,

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furthermore, that it consists in the task of translating the psychic qualities of the sense-impressions in order to produce alpha-elements. We have also seen why “the perceptions of the emotional experience have in both instances to be worked upon by alpha-function before they can be used for dream thought” (p. 6). Perceptions, sense-impressions, are data which are registered as such and which are not felt “to be phenomena but things-in-themselves”, Bion writes. The same is true for the emotions which are also “objects of sense” (ibid.). Bion’s argument here is not so very different from Freud’s in his letter to Fliess dated December 6, 1896, where he writes: As you know, I am working on the assumption that our psychic mechanism has come into being by a process of stratification: the material present in the form of memory traces being subjected from time to time to a . . . retranscription. . . . Memory is present not once but several times over . . . I do not know how many of these registrations there are – at least three, probably more. (Masson, 1985, p. 207) Perceptions are fixed as “indications of perception”, which undergo a second registration, unconsciousness (Ub [Unbewusstsein]) “arranged according to other, perhaps causal, relations” (ibid., p. 208), before being translated into a third retranscription, “preconsciousness” (Vb [Vorbewusstsein]) linked to word-presentations. “The cathexes proceeding from this Vb”, Freud concludes, “become conscious according to certain rules” (ibid.). “I should like to emphasize”, Freud writes, that the successive registrations represent the psychic achievement of successive epochs of life. At the boundary between two such epochs a translation of the psychic material must take place. I explain the peculiarities of the psychoneuroses by supposing that this translation has not taken place in the case of some of the material. . . . If a later transcription is lacking, the excitation is dealt with in accordance with the psychological laws in force in the earlier psychic period and along the paths open at that time. (ibid.) And, concerning what Freud calls a “failure of translation” . . . which is “known clinically as ‘repression’, the motive for it”, he writes, “is always a release of the unpleasure that would be generated by a translation; it is as though this unpleasure provokes a disturbance of thought that does not permit the work of translation” (ibid.). In Bion’s language,“beta-elements” − perceptions and indications of perception – must be worked upon, translated, transcribed by alpha-function in order to be transformed into “alpha-elements” (unconscious elements), which can be utilised by the mind for expressing dream thoughts and myths. But many patients, who, in this respect, are similar to a helpless infant, do not have a sufficiently developed alpha-function at their disposal. We will examine the reasons for this further on.

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In the current state of their difficulties, such patients have no other solution than to resort to the mechanism that Melanie Klein described as “projective identification”, an omnipotent mechanism of phantasy derived from what Freud, earlier, had described as “evacuation”, “rejection” or “elimination”, then, following the interest that Ferenczi had shown in it, “projection”. In the specifically Kleinian field of thought, projective identification is a phantasy that is used by the subject to evacuate and put into others the split-off elements of his own mind. From this point of view, splitting and projective identification always function together. Moreover, it is important to point out that these elements are evacuated because, as they have not been transformed, they remain indigestible for the psyche, except in the form of beta-elements, “undigested facts”, which only result in “encumbrances”. That is to say, the establishment of alpha-function in a subject is a very delicate process and its development equally fragile. During an emotional experience, the sense-organs are “bombarded” by sense-impressions (visual, auditory, gustatory, olfactory, cutaneous) that cannot be assimilated by the mind in their original state. Their integration will be made possible by means of alpha-function, that of the subject and/or that of another person, which translates these perceived elements into “digestible” alpha-elements. But where does this alpha-function come from, how has it been established at the heart of the personality and, as analysts, what benefit can we derive from it and how can we use it in our practice?

Alpha-function in analytic practice “As the analyst treating an adult patient”, Bion writes, I can be conscious of something of which the patient is not conscious. Similarly, the mother can discern a state of mind in her infant before the infant can be conscious of it, as for example, when the infant shows signs of needing food before it is properly aware of it. (p. 34) At this stage, we can even say that there is little chance of the infant being aware that he is hungry, as long as he is still lacking awareness of his existence as an autonomous subject. Moreover, this is what Bion says himself: It clearly will not do to say that the infant is conscious of psychical quality and transforms this emotional experience into alpha-elements for I have already said that the existence of consciousness and unconsciousness depends on the prior production of alpha-elements by alpha-function. (ibid., p. 35) For the infant, the need for food appears, then, in Bionian terms, as the “need for a breast”, which is a feeling, and “that feeling itself is a bad breast”. Consequently,

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Bion feels justified in asserting that “the infant does not feel it needs a good breast but it does feel it wants to evacuate a bad one” (ibid., p. 34). Further on in the book, he affirms, moreover, that “all objects that are needed are bad objects because they tantalize. They are needed because they are not possessed in fact; if they were possessed, there would be no lack” (p. 84). Thus the need for food is a “bad breast”, a bad situation, a bad emotional experience, because it causes the infant pain whose origin he cannot locate. Let us suppose, however, that, generally speaking, the breast offers the infant a response that is good enough, providing him not only with milk but also with “sensations of security, warmth, well-being, love” (ibid., p. 32).7 Bion now invites us to suppose further that “the infant needs – I deliberately avoid saying ‘wishes’ – to possess itself of the milk itself and the related sensations” (ibid., p. 33), in such a way as to make them his own. The need for food, understood as a “bad breast”, is unquestionably the phenomenon that appears first and which the infant distances, evacuates, in the direction of his mother, either by crying or screaming or by producing a stool, or by associating the two, so that the milk and the comforting words and gestures, which will be received as a “good breast”, may have a place in the undifferentiated space shared by the mother and child.8 The “bad breast” is chronologically the first to be felt and “thought”, whereas the “good breast”, which relieves the discomfort and pain, only appears secondarily. “Both good and bad breasts”, Bion writes, “are felt as possessing the same degree of concreteness and reality as milk. Sooner or later the ‘wanted’ breast is felt as an ‘idea of a breast missing’ and not as a bad breast present” (ibid., p. 34). As an idea that is communicated and conveyed by the mother, the idea of a missing breast underpins the sensation of hunger – which is a thing-in-itself, a beta-element – at another level than that of physiology and allows it to feature, in the infant’s emerging psyche, at the level of an alpha-element. “The physical component”, Bion writes,“milk, discomfort of satiation or the opposite, can be immediately apparent to the senses and we can therefore accord a chronological priority to beta-elements over alpha-elements” (ibid., p. 35). The mother thus transforms the beta-elements – hunger, pain, discomfort, faeces – that her baby has evacuated, into alpha-elements – feeding, love, calming, singing, reassurance – thanks to the alpha-function that she has available and that she exercises through her “reverie”.

Destruction of alpha-function But, of course, the mother’s response is always “deferred” in time in relation to the first manifestations expressed by her baby. This must therefore be taken into account and to this logical sequence must be added the “chrono-logical” dimension that is inseparable from such a process. Several facts need to be considered: as I have said, milk and the other contributions of the mother are not necessarily sufficient to satisfy the infant fully, either because they never completely correspond to the expected object, or because they produce suffering linked to the discomfort that can result from breastfeeding (stomach ache, sensations of suffocation, need to pass a motion, etc.), or because this soothing contribution has put an end to an

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experience that the infant was exploring, or finally because the mother’s response was too slow in coming. In all these cases, the infant experiences a frustration which is transformed into a sense of frustration, and it is the degree of tolerance or intolerance of this that becomes the predominant element in the evolution of the transformation of emotional experience into alpha-elements and into the extension of alpha-function. We must therefore not neglect the part played by the infant in accepting or not accepting the solution offered by the mother (milk, but also security, warmth, well-being, love) and, above all, in the consequences that the acceptance or refusal provoke in the way of disarray and disturbances in the mother. Likewise, Bion indicates, our patients are largely capable of arousing emotions in their analyst, and it is these emotions that are generally classified under the term of “counter-transference”. But, Bion continues, “[T]he theory of countertransference offers only partly satisfactory explanation because it is concerned with the manifestation as a symptom of the analyst’s unconscious motives and therefore leaves the patient’s contribution unexplained” (p. 24). I will come back to this. The focus of my interest at the moment is related to the choice of the infant, in the situation in which he finds himself, of accepting or refusing the mother’s offer – in principle, consisting of food and care, but not always. Whether it is a matter of what the infant experiences in his body or of the way he receives or does not receive the response offered by the mother, he is involved in the repeated experience of a situation during which many emotional aspects will appear. These intense emotions, as we have seen, cannot be assimilated as such by the psychical apparatus and need to be transformed by means of the mother’s alpha-function, if she possesses such a function and if the infant is ready to accept her use of it. It should be pointed out here that not only do not all adults possess an equal degree of elaboration of alpha-function, but furthermore the gaps observed lead to differences in their way of dealing with infants in the very first exchanges. A mother, distraught for a thousand and one reasons by the arrival of her baby, soon finds herself incapable of providing her child with the secure environment he needs to be able to take full advantage of the first experiences. The setting-up of alpha-function is thereby disturbed and, faced with the impossibility of transforming things-in-themselves (beta-elements) into alpha-elements, the infant has no other solution than to make use, excessively, of massive projective identification to “unburden the mental apparatus of accretions of stimuli”, as Freud (1911, p. 221) indicated. The opposite can also occur: “A baby,” Bion states, “may not be in contact with the breast” – which refuses such contact – “but quite soon it can follow the mother about with its eyes. In this way it is possible to have a good relationship with the mother who isn’t even in contact with the baby” (Bion, 1994, p. 114). Thus a variety of impediments to the establishment of good alpha-function appear for different reasons. Bion asserts that another element is liable to prevent the infant from benefiting from the resources of emotional experience, when it is disturbed. He writes: The infant receives milk and other creature comforts from the breast; also love, understanding, solace. Suppose his initiative is obstructed by fear of

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aggression, his own or another’s. If the emotion is strong enough it inhibits the infant’s impulse to obtain sustenance. Love in infant or mother or both increases rather than decreases the obstruction partly because love is inseparable from envy of the object so loved, partly because it is felt to arouse envy and jealousy in a third object that is excluded. The part played by love may escape notice because envy, rivalry and hate obscure it. . . . Violence of emotion compels reinforcement of the obstruction because violence is not distinguished from destructiveness and subsequent guilt and depression. (Bion, 1962a, p. 10) Thus fear of aggressiveness (internal as much as external) risks depriving the infant of the possibility to receive what comes from the other. As was suggested above, greed towards the much wanted object – the breast – can trigger a refusal to make use of it or to take possession of it, and attacks aimed at damaging it. Or else, and this is an undeniable clinical fact whose origin lies in the very first experiences of the establishment of alpha-function, the employment of a very particular kind of splitting can be observed – “enforced splitting”, Bion writes, “. . . a split between material and psychical satisfaction” which enables “the infant to obtain what later in life would be called material comforts without acknowledging the existence of a live object on which these benefits depend” (ibid., p. 10). On this occasion, Bion makes a point with which it is not necessarily possible to agree, owing to the allegiance Bion shows towards Melanie Klein – at least until her death – and from which he had difficulty in freeing himself, but it may be that it is a minor point, a slight lack of taste, in the general Bionian edifice. The disagreement I am referring to is related to the fact that recent research in the psychoanalytic field – that of Laura Dethiville (2008, 2013), in particular, concerning Winnicott – tends to show that the feelings of love, hate, envy, etc., presuppose at the minimum a globally unified instinctual drive organisation. In other words, in the very first stages of life, the various parts of the developing ego and the lack of differentiation that still obtains between the baby and its mother are such that it is perhaps not yet possible to speak of love, hate, and envy, which presuppose relatively unified personalities capable of experiencing “whole” feelings. Unintegration is a fruitful idea. It forbids us from speaking of love or hate because these two feelings assume the existence of a unified, that is to say, integrated personality. But our vocabulary has no other word for saying that the infant loves or hates the breast, for accepting and refusing are merely descriptive. Perhaps, indeed, we are not justified in speaking, in a definitive and fixed way, of whole feelings or of feelings experienced by a personality considered as permanently unified. It is true that we can love someone’s hands only or only their voice, or both, or their smell, or their way of walking, etc., and in such a case we are dealing with what metapsychology, in general – and not only Freudian – calls part-drives, even in a person whose various instinctual drives are globally unified. Experience has shown us that an internal disorganisation always remains possible when an individual is going through an intense emotional situation.9 This is all the more reason why this fragmentation

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should be considered as “the” reality that the infant discovers, whether it is spatial reality (the mother’s womb, vagina, the obstetrician’s hands, delivery room, maternity ward, car, home, parents’ bedroom, baby’s bedroom, drawing-room, etc.), temporal reality (time of resting, of being awake, of waiting to be fed, of breastfeeding, of digestion, of visual, auditory, tactile exploration, etc.), sensory reality (is this stomach ache located inside me or outside me? thanks to my eyes or rather to my internal nervous system?), or the reality of feelings of which he becomes aware progressively (envy, jealousy, hate, love, etc.). From another point of view, envy, to stay with this example, may be described as primary if we preserve the full value of the idea of après-coup, whose importance has not been belied among the conceptual tools, in the descriptive arsenal of psychic functioning. What can be described at an early moment in the life of an infant by the term greed can be renamed, at a later moment, with the term envy and vice versa. As indicated above, “greed” is a descriptive term, whereas “envy” and “love” are feelings (and there is perhaps no way of detecting manifestations of feelings in an infant). In any case, Bion adds, it would seem that envy emerges “massively” because it is “a function of the relationship” (Bion, 1970, p. 78). It must be added that hurt feelings – if they exist – experienced in these early stages of life play a large role in paving the way for the various forms of severity that ensue, prefiguring the importance of the superego in the very first months of life. These reflections, which have a real importance in psychoanalytic debate, call for yet a further clarification. Every theoretical elaboration and development in psychoanalysis depends on the terminology that the authors employ to supply an explanation that is as complete as possible of the unconscious psychical processes that they are trying to have recognised. Throughout his life Bion bemoaned the inadequacy of words to account for the psychical mechanisms which seemed to him to be involved in the “disorders of thought” that he came across in his patients, which he sought to link up with the original psychic events that were supposed to have taken place. He writes: The problem presented by the psycho-analytic experience is the lack of any adequate terminology to describe it and in this respect it resembles the problem that Aristotle solved by supposing that mathematics dealt with mathematical objects. It is convenient to suppose that psycho-analysis deals with psycho-analytic objects and that it is with the detection and observation of these objects that the psycho-analyst must concern himself in the conduct of an analysis. (Bion, 1962a, p. 66) To this may be added the fact that, as we are concerned with processes localised in the very first months of the infant’s psychic life, their elaboration as well as their description contain a large part of speculation, fantasy, and “mythology”, as Freud wrote with regard to the instinctual drives: “The theory of the instincts is so to say our mythology. Instincts are mythical entities, magnificent in their indefiniteness”

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(1933, p. 95). Thus feelings of love and hate must be studied on the basis of what speaking beings alone are able to say (and to write) about them, since it is frequently argued that it is necessary to have gained access to language to translate and express what one feels. But the complexity of feelings – idealisation and admiration of the loved person, of his (or her) intellectual, and above all aesthetic, qualities often to the detriment of the person who loves, who has “transferred his libidinal cathexes on to his love-object” and finds himself proportionately impoverished – also justifies considering infants as human beings capable of being affected by them, since they are capable – often in contrast to adults – of letting contrary sentimental impulses coexist within their area of exchanges. Bion thus adds that, from the point of view of development, “[E]nvy aroused by a breast that provides love, understanding, experience and wisdom, poses a problem that is solved by destruction of alpha-function” (1962a, p. 11). Consequently, the link inside-outside is in danger of rupture because it will be constituted not of alpha-elements capable of being used again, but of “undigested” elements that are simply agglutinated (and not woven), which Bion calls beta-elements. This remark helps us to better understand the manifestations of frank opposition that are unleashed in our patients when we show them ordinary goodwill.

Return to the counter-transference We have seen that, in order to develop in an individual who has accepted to make it his own, alpha-function must have been modelled on contact with another person who possesses this function. The refusal of this function or its destruction, each time it is liable to be established, is translated by an agglutination of beta-elements, as I have just said, which forms what Bion calls a “beta-screen”, a sort of barrier – no longer a membrane – which thwarts all exchange. “Thanks to the beta-screen”, Bion writes, the psychotic patient has a capacity for evoking emotions in the analyst; his associations are the elements of the beta-screen intended to evoke interpretations or other responses which are less related to his need for psycho-analytic interpretation than to his need to produce an emotional involvement. (1962a, p. 24) I mentioned earlier Bion’s decisive contribution to the question of the countertransference insofar as he introduced the factor of the “patient’s contribution” to it. Other developments must be added here, including that of Leon Grinberg, who suggests making a distinction between the traditional counter-transference, if I may put it like that, and what he calls “projective counter-identification”. For him, as for every analyst, the counter-transference reaction is the response of the analyst based on the reactivation of his own anxieties and conflicts aroused by the patient’s conflicts. In projective counter-identification, Grinberg (1962) writes, the analyst’s response is largely independent from his own conflicts and depends essentially, or

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exclusively, on the intensity and the nature of the analysand’s projective identification (p. 436). If we now recall that alpha-elements play a role, as I have said, in the composition of dream thoughts and myths, we can understand the reasons why Bion states: If the patient cannot transform his emotional experience into alpha-elements, he cannot dream. Alpha-function transforms sense-impressions into alphaelements which resemble, and may in fact be identical with, the visual images we are familiar with in dreams, namely, the elements that Freud regards as yielding their latent content when the analyst has interpreted them. Freud showed that one of the functions of a dream is to preserve sleep. Failure of alpha-function means the patient cannot dream and therefore cannot sleep. (1962a, p. 7) It seems particularly pertinent to explain many cases of insomnia in our patients (and in ourselves) by the impossibility or fear – for many reasons – of dreaming. Bion even adds that “as alpha-function makes the sense-impressions of the emotional experience available for conscious and dream thought, the patient who cannot dream cannot go to sleep and cannot wake up” (ibid.). He does not possess the elements that make it possible to appreciate the particularities of sleeping and being awake, and he cannot discern the level or the degree of reality in which he finds himself.

Reversal of alpha-function Every “realization” of emotional experience requires us to look for the underlying experience from which it has arisen and, once again, it was in his clinical experience with psychotic patients that Bion found many examples of this: In “the contact with a psychotic patient”, he writes, “the analyst does not meet a personality but a hastily organized improvisation of a personality, or perhaps of a mood. . . . It is an improvisation of fragments” (1992, p. 74). What does this mean, if not that the analyst is dealing here with a “deficient” personality, endowed with capacities reduced by the presence of the potentially pathological dimension of the mechanism of projective identification, as Melanie Klein had described it. In the Kleinian conception, where splitting concerns unassimilable elements by which the patient may let himself be affected – things seen or heard or felt – it often happens that, along with these elements themselves, those parts of the personality involved in the perception of the reality from which these elements originate are also projected. Furthermore, certain functions of the personality concerning relations with reality – attention, memory, judgement, thought – are themselves fragmented and projected into the objects affected by the projective identification, objects that retain the original function (vision, audition, etc.). Consequently, with the reversal of alpha-function, the subject is no longer invaded by beta-elements but rather by what Bion calls “bizarre objects”, that is to

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say, (external) objects equipped with particles of the functions expelled during the recourse to projective identification. Thus Bion writes: Each particle is felt [by the patient] to consist of a real object which is encapsulated in a piece of personality that has engulfed it. The nature of this complete particle will depend partly on the character of the real object, say a gramophone, and partly on the character of the particle of personality that engulfs it. If the piece of personality is concerned with sight, the gramophone when played is felt to be watching the patient; if with hearing, then the gramophone when played is felt to be listening to the patient. (1957b, pp. 47–48) We can see, therefore, the extent to which the reversal of alpha-function produces lasting damage that is liable to destroy all hope of rediscovering the capacity to establish contact. Let me repeat: “The spectacle presented”, Bion writes, “is one, to borrow Freud’s analogy, similar to that of the archaeologist who discovers in his field-work the evidence, not so much of a primitive civilization, as of a primitive catastrophe” (1957b, p. 88). And elsewhere he states,“[I]n analysis we are confronted not so much with a static situation that permits leisurely study, but with a catastrophe that remains at one and the same moment actively vital and yet incapable of resolution into quiescence” (1959, p. 101). Thus, for Bion, beyond the question of projective identification, the notion of alpha-function is a further opportunity to develop the idea that it is in the meeting with the other, in the link with the other, and in exchanges with the other, that the foundations of individual personality are located. Just as he evoked, for the baby, a meeting with the breast, so he describes here a meeting between patient and analyst. He does not make use here of a concept. We can also see that, in this theorisation, no emotion can exist without a notego or external stimulus, a conception that tallies with Freudian formulations concerning psychic cathexes directed towards objects as the sources and aims of the instinctual drives. At the same time, when an emotional experience occurs, if it is not elaborated in the form of symbolic representations, the “sum of excitation” (quantitative aspect) must be evacuated in one way or another outside the mental apparatus (by means of projective identification). The attention devoted to emotional experience makes it possible to place emphasis on the importance of the symbolisation of the meaning (alpha-function) contained in the emotions mentioned. But in contrast to symbolisation, the absence of symbolisation is noticed in clinical situations which highlight the search for states in which the absence of meeting and the absence of thought predominate, in other words, by a “flight from of emotional experiences”. Bion speaks, then, of a “collapse of nascent thoughts” and describes states that reveal “beta-elements with traces of ego and superego”. As Meltzer (1986) writes: “This means something like, ‘Symbol-formation commences but meets with such mental

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pain that it cannibalises what has begun to form; and the debris of this has shreds of meaning clinging to its fragments’ ” (p. 23). It is therefore not surprising to see undigestible beta-elements, or even bizarre objects, appear through hallucinations. “Such a manoeuvre”, Bion writes, “is intended not to affirm but to deny reality, not to represent an emotional experience but to misrepresent it to make it appear to be a fulfilment rather than a striving for fulfilment” (1962a, p. 49). Thus, as I have said, the paradigm of emotional experience is illustrated by the meeting with the breast which initiates the establishment of alpha-function. This meeting, however, has its negative counterpart, the loss of this same breast, or “nobreast”, equivalent to the idea of a missing breast or an absence of breast, that is, a bad breast. But with a bit of luck, this experience, if it procures, as Bion says, “the idea of a no-breast”, will offer the subject at the same time a very precious tool for thinking about absence. “We must assume”, Bion writes, “that the good breast and the bad breast are emotional experiences” that occur from the beginning of life (1962a, p. 35).

Notes 1 In no case am I encouraging anyone else to do the same. 2 See Jean Oury (1998) who, in Les Séminaires de la Borde (1996–1997), speaks of “praecox Gefühl”, a term used by H. Cornelius Rümke (1893–1967), a Dutch psychiatrist, equivalent to Lacan’s “instant of seeing” (see his paper “Logical Time” (1945). 3 My emphasis. 4 Concerning the function of observation in psychoanalysts, see the ideas put forward in my “Preface” to the Séminaires cliniques de Wilfred R. Bion (Bion, 2008). 5 See above, footnote 12. 6 See Chapter 8, “Only inside-also inside”. In: The Work of Psychic Figurability: Mental States without Representation (Botella, 2001). 7 From the work of supervision that I did with Joyce McDougall, and then from the friendly relationship we had until the end of her life, I learnt that “an infant has less need of food than he does of being nourished by someone who loves doing that”. 8 The “intermediate space” or “transitional space” in Winnicott’s language. 9 Lacan evoked the same reversal in his reading of the “complex of the fellow-human being”, as developed by Freud in the Project. Since in Freud the fellow-human being is always both the “helping person” and the one who is responsible for the first experience of unpleasure, teaching the subject about his own division, Lacan pushes the contrast until it reaches a certain paroxysm. Drawing on the teaching of Sade and on the disunion of the part-drives observed in certain extreme conditions, Lacan indicates that “my neighbor’s body breaks into pieces” depending on the desires I have for it, “The ‘Other’ comes undone” (Lacan, 1959–1960, p. 202).

4 THE NEGATIVE AT WORK

As a concept, the “negative” has always accompanied the adventure of psychoanalysis, and this has been the case since its origin. The first reason for this is that the very term “unconscious”, in the Studies on Hysteria, published with Josef Breuer (Freud, 1895), was employed by Freud to refer to that which is not conscious. The second reason is that, in the Project for a Scientific Psychology (Freud, 1950[1895]), Freud asked himself how the neuronal apparatus – it was in these terms that he expressed himself at the time – functions to make the distinction between the hallucinatory reminiscence caused by the cathexis of memory-traces and the actual perception of the object. In other words, how does the ψ (psi) apparatus differentiate between what comes from the inside (which is thus related to the past) and what comes from the outside (and which is thus “contemporary”). His answer is unambiguous: through a differentiation of energy. The ψ (psi) neurons store the cathexes channelled on the inside for the benefit of the adaptive interest of the nascent ego; for, if the ego cannot differentiate between perception and hallucination, there is a risk that the movement towards the object will occur when the latter is not actually present, and thus not meet with satisfaction. Freud introduces a “no” to hallucinatory discharge thanks to an “indication of reality”. Negation and reality are entwined. Likewise, Freud (1905b) employs the “negative” to contrast neurosis and perversion. “Neuroses”, he writes, “are, so to say, the negative of perversion” (p. 165). Once again, in “Formulations on the two principles of mental functioning” (1911), Freud, returning to the differentiation between perception and hallucination, writes: It was only the non-occurrence of the expected satisfaction, the disappointment experienced, that led to the abandonment of this attempt at satisfaction by means of hallucination. Instead, the psychical apparatus had to decide to form a conception of the real circumstances in the external world. (p. 219)

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And elsewhere (Freud, 1917b, p. 232, footnote 3), he adds: “[A]ny attempt to explain hallucination would have to start out from negative rather than positive hallucination”, the latter being what psychiatry describes as “objectless perception”, whereas the former corresponds more to a non-perception of an object that is nevertheless present.1 It was above all with the article “Negation” (1925) that the negative acquired its full importance as an indispensable operator in psychic functioning. It would seem, then, that the central concepts of psychoanalysis contain, thanks to their potential for reversal, the indicator of negativity which a certain number of authors after Freud have been concerned to reveal.2 André Green, for example, recalls the obvious fact that “with Freud, the object appears in hate, that is to say, when the subject becomes aware of its separate existence” (1993, p. 32). This separation is to be considered, in absolute terms, in relation to love. If, in effect, the fulfilment of love is experienced in a state of fusion, which is rarely achievable, then the object appears nowhere better than in separation – in suffering – just as the ego appears once it has been differentiated from the id. There is room, therefore, for the superego. It would be necessary to explore the meaning that definitive separation, loss, acquires in melancholia. It would also be necessary to dwell on the mystery represented by the “negative therapeutic reaction” as an obstacle to the progression of analytic treatment. It is forms of the negative that “celebrate indefinitely its failure” (ibid. p. 61). The fact remains that it is these separations that condition the establishment and existence of links between entities, once they are distinct from each other. The negative is thus related in psychoanalysis: •

•

•

•

to what is absent, to what is lacking, to what is denied; the negative has the power to confer retroactively on the positive which pre-existed it a meaning that could never have been attained otherwise; to what has remained in abeyance in the constitution of psychic containers and contents: for example, something was and is no longer, which is a mark of privation or deprivation; or something was not that might have been; or something that was, but not sufficiently – this is the case of all frustrations;3 to what is a matter of differentiation and, first of all, ego/not-ego differentiation; that is to say to what, in psychic space, has the status of “what is not”: non-ego, non-occurrence, non-experience, no-thing (as we shall see); this opposition brings together questions that every child asks himself about what is not him: the not-me, the not-you; about what are not things and about what are not words. He asks himself questions about what he was when he wasn’t, what he is not in what he is, what he is not and will never be. Such questions can only be asked by an individual whose thinking has been underpinned by the bodily and psychical experience and the speech of another person; to what constitutes “diversity”, and not only opposition, in relation to identity and unity (fusional): from this point of view, this or that thing or person is perceived in relation to what they are not; for the baby, daddy is not mummy, and baby is mummy-and-daddy while being neither-mummy-nor-daddy. “Determination is negation”, Spinoza asserted. For his part, Bion writes that “a definition [is] something negative in essence” (1965, p. 88 Bion’s emphasis);

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•

to what, in a group, is rejected by its members, and the fate of which is a matter of concern when it is a question of determining whether what is rejected is rejected within the common psychic space or outside it, in order to constitute the group as a container. This is a question I will also come back to; • to the transference/counter-transference relationship which seems, at first sight, as if it can be dealt with through its oppositional modalities. In conformity with these three domains, three modalities of the negative are at the basis of the work of the psychical apparatus: (a) the necessity for the psyche to produce the negative; (b) a relative position of the negative in relation to something possible; (c) a localisation of the negative within or outside the psychic space. From this point of view, at the heart of the psychic space, the negative has at least three connotations: (a) that of the absence of representation, or of representability; (b) that of an unfortunate or harmful fate, for the subject and those around him, of psychic functioning; and, more generally, (c) that of the defect, the lack, in the ontological sense of the term (see Bartleby, “I would prefer not to” (Melville, 1853). The negative is thus understood as being involved with its opposite, the positive, in a relationship of mutual necessity; the second cannot exist and be thought about without the limit that it finds in the first, which only has reality by virtue of the fact that the second has need of it. This relationship of mutual necessity, rarely perceived, is marvellously expressed by Kafka (1954) in his famous aphorism: “What is laid upon us is to accomplish the negative; the positive is already given” (p. 41). The negative is related, therefore, to the necessity for the psychical apparatus to carry out operations of rejection, negation, denial, disavowal, renunciation, or effacement in order to preserve a major interest of the psychic organisation, namely, that of the subject himself or that of the subjects with whom he is linked as part of a whole. The notion of obligation evoked underlines both the constraint exerted on the psychical apparatus to carry out such operations and the link that is established between what has been expelled, denied, effaced, or repressed and what thereby finds it is preserved. These negativities are necessary so that different forms of linking can be formed and maintained. Another dimension of the negative, essential in psychoanalysis, must also be taken into account. For Freud, the negative groups together psychical operations which, from primal repression (Ur-verdrängung) to rejection (Verwerfung), including negation (Verneinung), splitting (Spaltung), and denial (Versagung), constitute the primordial defence mechanism of the ego. They are primary defence mechanisms which are intended to protect the link between the ego and the object, a link that is constantly attacked by another aspect of the negative, the activity of unbinding (Entbindung) inherent in the controversial death drive. The rupture of this link would expose the ego to anxieties of annihilation, emptiness, and destruction.

The development of the negative in Anglo-Saxon clinical thinking After Freud, a certain number of psychoanalysts have followed suit, attributing in turn a special place to the negative. Winnicott was one. Evoking a woman patient

70  The negative at work

who, long before being in treatment with him, had done an earlier analysis with an analyst with whom she had developed a passionate transference, he writes (citing his patient): “The negative of him is more real than the positive of you” (1971, p. 23), because she spent her sessions feeling nostalgic about the time spent with the other analyst, thereby giving, as Winnicott writes, all its importance to the “negative side of relationships” (p. 21). He suggests that the traumatic experiences suffered by the patient had produced a state where only what is negative is real. In other words, the object’s presence was unable to modify the negative model, which had become the characteristic of the lived experiences of the subject. The negative imposed itself as an organised object-relationship “independent of the object’s presence or absence” (Green, 1993, p. 5). For his part, Bion, in studying “attacks on linking”, shows above all that the interest of these two authors was turned towards cases considered inaccessible to classical treatment. In reading them, there is no doubt that they had to adapt their personal psychic disposition – their “counter-transference” – to the particularities of these unusual and still rather unfamiliar mental components. Furthermore, it seems difficult, given that the resonances are so strong, not to make a connection between the expression “attacks on linking” and the concept of “unbinding” proposed by Freud as signifying the mechanisms at work in the supposed death drive. We may also mention, as part of this enumeration, one of the most controversial notions in the psychoanalytic field and yet one of the most used in Anglo-Saxon clinical work, namely, regression.4 “Winnicott says that patients need to regress”, Bion wrote in 1960; “Melanie Klein says that they must not; I say that they are regressed” (Bion, 1992, p. 166). Regression, as we are sometimes faced with it in analytic treatments, and if it has any pertinence, attests in fact to an intolerance of bearing the sacrifices necessary for accomplishing the work of the negative that is indispensable for the unfolding of every analysis (suspension of presence, intervention of anti-cathexis, and other defence mechanisms, etc.), and thus to an inability to let go of positivity. Last but not least, we cannot overlook certain remarks of Bion (1997) in his War Memoirs, where he indicates that it was thanks to the mechanisms of mechanical depersonalisation that made him impermeable and inaccessible to what was going on in front of him that he was able to “protect” himself from a permanent form of psychotic disintegration which would have shattered his fragile narcissism. In an eminently paradoxical way, Bion convinced himself of the evident nature of these redeeming negative experiences.

Bion and the negative With Bion, the first mention of the negative as an indispensable operator of psychic functioning appears when he notes the necessity of not confusing “nothing” and “no-thing” – a distinction that is impossible to translate except by placing the accent on the difference between the no-thing (the absence of the thing) and

The negative at work  71

“nothing” (inexistence). It is a matter of distinguishing two different types of elaboration of lack – a central concept, as for Lacan, as I mentioned earlier, and one that Bion uses to go beyond what he perceived as the fundamental “positivity” of Melanie Klein, who was only able to conceive of psychic space as full, even if, within this state of saturation, she included good and bad objects. It is as if, for her, there was no place for non-presence. Moreover, for Bion, the whole problem of psychic structure lies in the two possible solutions to frustration: either elaborate it or evacuate it. In the first, negativity imposes itself due to the absence of the expected satisfaction; in the second, the solution consists in evacuating the frustration, that is to say, in striving to consider it as non-existent. Bion initiated himself in this way of thinking through his reading, in particular, of John Keats, the English poet who, in a letter to his brothers George and Tom dated 22 December 1817 wrote: [I]t struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. (Forman, 1952, p. 78; see also Crinquand, 2000) Furthermore, we must remember that, in line with Freudian thought but once again going beyond it, Bion, in order to define the fundamental links that unite people with other people or with “not-ego objects”, drew on the feelings of love (L) and hate (H) put in place by Freud starting from their instinctual drive origins, with the vicissitudes we are familiar with, reversal into its opposite makes hate appear where love reigned. The converse is also possible in the sense that the reversal of hate as a primary feeling can make love appear, in particular during an analysis. But Bion considers that this binary vision does not account for the considerable variety, given the possible degrees of modifications that these feelings can undergo. Indeed, experience confronts us with many situations in which the cessation of love does not result in hate but in the abandonment of love (-L), or indifference. Likewise, the extinction of hate does not necessarily result in love but simply in the abandonment of hate (-L). And as I mentioned earlier, a third type of link, essential in Bion’s thought, is encountered in knowledge (K), which surpasses the emotional attachments of love and/or hate which one can feel or have towards the object. In Bion’s view, knowledge is the most valuable link with regard to social and cultural values that an individual can develop towards the objects of his world – a value that requires all the components that lead to this outcome to be deployed. This is the goal of psychoanalytic work, which aims to help the subject acquire self-­knowledge – through his own research and through the recourse offered by the relationship that unites the patient and the analyst – so that the analysand is in a position, “knowingly” to choose between modifying or maintaining his psychic economy.

72  The negative at work

However, the process that consists in “learning from experience” cannot occur without encountering painful moments which are liable to check, immobilise, or reverse the course of the new revelations which lead to insight. In such cases, the K link disappears and gives way to the −K link which erects all sorts of obstacles to the increase of knowledge. Bion states: K represents the link I have adumbrated: −K represents the link constituted by NOT understanding, i.e. mis-understanding. The implications of this can best be grasped by noting that −L is not the same as H, nor −H the same as L. (Bion, 1962a, p. 52) This “negative knowledge” (−K) also makes use of notions such as mis-hearing and mis-understanding. It sometimes happens that, in the course of an analysis, we are led to observe such a reversal, which Bion often designates by the term “reversible perspective”. “The reversible perspective”, he writes, “is evidence of pain; the patient reverses perspective to make a dynamic situation static. The work of the analyst is to restore dynamic to a static situation and so make development possible” (Bion, 1963, p. 60). We can see here that the analyst, just like the patient, can also have recourse to reversible perspective, albeit with a very specific aim. But this movement can be the starting point of an “escalation” where the patient, if he realises that the analyst is sensitive to this situation, will seek to manoeuvre in such a way as to be in agreement with the analyst’s interpretations, to enter into forms of delusion that are “both static and evanescent” or to resort to “invisible visual hallucinations” with a view to immobilising the situation once again. “The situation”, Bion remarks, “is unstable and dangerous” because the motive that is at the origin of these manoeuvres is pain, the pain felt in the face of any attempt at change. “It is the dynamic quality of the interpretation”, he adds, “that evokes evasive reactions” (ibid. p. 61). Thus pain is an unavoidable element in any analysis. An analysis must be painful, otherwise it would be bypassing one of the main reasons why the patient wanted to do one. Although it has been argued that successful analysis leads to a diminution of suffering . . . [this] nevertheless obscures the need, more obvious in some cases than in others, for the analytic experience to increase the patient’s capacity for suffering even though patient and analyst may hope to decrease pain itself. (p. 62) This possible and honourable outcome is indeed much more preferable to other denouements of the analytic situation. For such situations, Bion issues this form of warning: Some patients who are concerned to prove their superiority to the analyst by defeating his attempts at interpretation can be shown that they are

The negative at work  73

mis-understanding the interpretations to demonstrate that an ability to misunderstand is superior to an ability to understand. Interpretations based on this insight can lead to further developments of the analysis. If the patient suffers from a disorder of thought, interpretations of mis-understanding lead to some illumination, but do not appear to carry matters much further. (1962a p. 95)

Destruction of the analytic capacity In one of his famous articles, “Attacks on linking” (1959), Bion evokes several cases of patients who make destructive attacks “on anything which is felt to have the function of linking one object with another” (p. 93). Here again, when reading these clinical examples, we are not far from the Freud who noted situations in which the patient’s ego, to protect itself against the threat of fragmentation, splits and divides itself. With Bion, the negative manifests itself, therefore, in different ways. More precisely, to return to what I mentioned in the last chapter, it seems in the exposition of the phenomena triggered in the severely disturbed patient by the analyst’s use of his alpha-function, that “[e]nvy aroused by a breast that provides love, understanding, experience and wisdom, poses a problem that is solved by destruction of alphafunction” (1962a, p. 11). Bion adds that, as the state of the patient has its origin in a need to be rid of the emotional complications of awareness of life and a relationship with live objects “the patient appears to be incapable of gratitude or concern either for himself or for others” (ibid.). He feels, one might say, a form of ruthless love, by means of which he simply tries to rediscover his threatened omnipotence. He thinks that all interpretations are without exception bad, and yet he must have more and more of them. Sometimes, Bion states, “a belief that a bad object exists is being expressed as an expression of envious disparagement of a good object” (ibid., p. 39). In such a case, we are not really far from the situation evoked a few lines above in which the patient, protecting himself against any possibility of progress, resorts to rejecting everything that is outside himself. Thus a relationship is established of which it must be said that it has nothing of a relationship about it. When alpha-function is defective, Bion remarks, quite rightly, that the analyst has no difficulty in feeling that he is the depository for part of the patient’s personality – “the healthy or non-psychotic part of his personality” – and that, consequently, in the analyst’s consulting room, it is as though the situation were characterised by a sort of division between analyst and patient, a division composed of agglomerated beta-elements incapable, as a result, of establishing links between themselves, a division “unsuited to the establishment of a conscious and an unconscious”, which Bion names “beta-screen”. Even an interpretation intended to help the patient become aware that he is pouring out material with the sole aim of destroying the analyst’s analytic capacity has no effect, because the patient considers it as an accusation and condemns “a response from the analyst which is heavily charged with counter-transference” (p. 23). However, this kind of remark

74  The negative at work

also contains within itself a different indication: as Bion writes,“in so far as it is purposive conduct the purpose must be controlled and dictated by the non-psychotic part of the personality” (p. 100, note 10.1.1). This means that “the patient is starved of genuine therapeutic material, namely truth, and therefore those of his impulses that are directed to survival are overworked attempting to extract cure from therapeutically poor material” (p. 101, note 10.1.1). Another approach to the same problem offers a new point of view on the question, already evoked, of envy, an important concept in Kleinian theory that Bion utilises for his own purposes. He writes: I have described the role of projective identification in K as a commensal5 relationship between ♀ and ♂. In −K . . . the relationship of ♀ to ♂ is represented by ♀ + ♂ where + can be replaced by Envy. Using this formulation to represent infant and breast . . . and using as a model an emotional situation in which the infant feels fear that it is dying, the model I construct is as follows: the infant splits off and projects its feelings of fear into the breast together with envy and hate of the undisturbed breast. Envy precludes a commensal relationship . . . [and as a result] in −K the breast is felt enviously to remove the good or valuable element in the fear of dying and force the worthless residue back into the infant. The infant who started with a fear he was dying ends up by containing a nameless dread. (Bion, 1962a, p. 96) In −K, the object reintroduced – rather than reintrojected, as it would have been in a relationship under the aegis of K – possesses characteristics, the first of which is what I can only describe as “without-ness”. It is an internal object without an exterior. It is an alimentary canal without a body. It is a super-ego that has hardly any of the characteristics of the super-ego as understood in psycho-analysis: it is “super” ego. It is an envious assertion of moral superiority without any morals. In short, it is the resultant of an envious stripping or denudation of all good and is itself destined to continue the process of stripping described [earlier], as existing, in its origin, between two personalities. The process of denudation continues till −♂ −♀ represents hardly more than an empty superiority-inferiority that in turn degenerates to nullity. (Bion, 1962a, p. 97) Furthermore, Bion says, the violence of projective processes can be so violent that “far more than the fear of dying is projected”. In this case, “it is as if virtually the whole personality was evacuated by the infant” (ibid.). It is nonetheless astonishing that Bion considers that there is a “good or valuable element in the fear of dying” (ibid., p. 96), but he explains, a few lines further on, that “the will to live, that is necessarily before there can be a fear of dying, is a part of the goodness that the envious breast has removed” (ibid., p. 97).

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To return now to clinical experience. Of course, at a fundamental level, what the patient feels first is “frustration”, because he is suffering above all from “awareness of need not satisfied”. Taking up again the model the infant represents, Bion adds that “the infant feels frustrated if we assume the existence of some apparatus with which frustration can be experienced. Such an apparatus is provided by Freud’s concept of ‘consciousness as a sense-organ for the perception of psychical qualities’ ” (ibid., p. 34). What does the infant need? He needs a breast, of course! “The taking in of milk, warmth, love”, Bion writes,“may be felt as taking in a good breast.” But, more often, “the need for the breast”, he writes, “is a feeling and that [disagreeable] feeling . . . is a bad breast”. Consequently, “the infant does not feel it wants a good breast but it does feel it wants to evacuate a bad one” (ibid., p. 34).6 For, “under domination of the, at first unopposed, bad breast, ‘taking in’ food may be felt as indistinguishable from evacuating a bad breast” (ibid.). In any case “sooner or later, the ‘wanted’ breast is felt as an ‘idea of a breast missing’ and not as a bad breast present”. In other words, the wanted but absent breast is a bad breast. “All the objects needed are bad objects because they tantalize. They are needed because they are not possessed in reality. . . . As they do not exist, they are particular objects which differ from existing objects” (ibid., p. 84) – just as milk exists after it has been taken! – insofar as they strongly resemble ideas that have been thought or are waiting to be thought. Can it be said, then, that the idea of a missing breast or of a “no-breast” – an idea that we can also designate by the name “no-breast” – is equivalent to a no-thing? “If there is no ‘thing’ ”, Bion writes,7 “is ‘no thing’ a thought and is it by virtue of the fact that there is ‘no thing’ that one recognizes that ‘it’ must be thought?” (p. 35) To answer this question, Bion takes, once again, the infant as a model. He writes: Let us suppose the infant to have fed but to be feeling unloved. Again it is aware of a need for the good breast and again this “need for a good breast” is a “bad breast” that needs to be evacuated . . . [t]he infant could be supposed to feel that the “need for the breast” bad breast was being evacuated if it passed a motion while taking milk; in that case it would associate a physical act with a result that we could call a change in its state of mind from dissatisfaction to satisfaction. (1962a, p. 35) Thus “intolerance of frustration could be so pronounced that alpha-function would be forestalled by immediate evacuation of the beta-elements” (ibid.). But there is worse! If, as Bion describes it, the infant is aware of a very bad breast inside it, a breast that is “not there” and by not being there gives it painful feelings. This object is felt to be “evacuated” by the respiratory system or by the process of “swallowing” a satisfying breast. This breast that is swallowed is indistinguishable from a “thought”, but the “thought” is dependent on the existence of an object

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that is actually put into the mouth. In certain conditions, dependent on factors of personality, the sucking process and its attendant sensations are equated with evacuation of the bad breast. The breast, the thing-in-itself, is indistinguishable from an idea in the mind. The idea of a breast in the mind is, reciprocally, indistinguishable from the thing itself in the mouth. Keeping for the present to two situations only, one of which is an actual breast, indistinguishable from an emotional experience which in turn is thing-initself and thought, but in an undifferentiated state, and the other the bad “need-of-a-breast” bad breast which is equally an object compounded of emotional experience and thing-in-itself the two being as yet undifferentiated. . . . Thus an infant containing a “need-of-a-breast” bad breast may evacuate it by sucking at the breast. . . . It may evacuate it by the respiratory system [or alternatively] by seeing the actual breast; for this an actual breast needs to be in sight, that is to say, it is in a position in which being in sight is the same as being in the mind’s eye and both are the same as being in the mouth. When all these events are evacuations of the “need-of-a-breast” it is clear that if no breast is then in fact available the “no breast” will be felt to be not only bad in itself but made worse because it, as it were, is concrete evidence that this bad breast has been successful evacuated . . . [A] “bizarre object” rather than a “beta-element would be the correct descriptive term for the object felt by the infant to exist. (Bion, 1962a, pp. 57–58)

Brief detour via the Grid As he was elaborating the major axes of his innovative theoretical contributions, Bion gradually set about constructing, essentially for himself, an instrument that was supposed to enable him to “situate” the levels at which the statements – the “elements” of psychoanalysis – are exchanged within a session. He called this instrument the Grid and constructed it in a way not dissimilar to how the chemist Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev conceived his “Periodic table of elements” on which the atomic masses of elements are listed – for example, platinum, iridium, potassium, cesium – arranged according to their “valency”8 – a term Bion also imported into the psychoanalytic field.9 As I shall look in detail at this tool further on, I will simply give a succinct presentation of it here. The Grid has two axes: one vertical, from A to H, designates the degree of evolution of thoughts from the most rudimentary to the most evolved; the other, horizontal, from 1 to n, details the interpretive uses that can be made of these thoughts. Let us now take an example. In the course of an analysis, as we have seen, the material may suggest that the patient, a few weeks only after having come into the world, experienced a fear of dying that an attentive person in his entourage was able to identify and thus deal with in such a way that the baby was able to overcome it calmly. In terms of elements, the fear of dying, which is a beta element, was modified by the benevolent person who made an alpha-element of it that could be

The negative at work  77

Definitory Hypotheses 1

Ψ 2

A β-elements

A1

A2

B α-elements

B1

B2

B3

B4

B5

B6

 . . . Bn

C Dream Thoughts, Dreams, Myths

C1

C2

C3

C4

C5

C6

 . . . Cn

D Preconception

D1

D2

D3

D4

D5

D6

 . . . Dn

E Conception

E1

E2

E3

E4

E5

E6

 . . . En

F Concept

F1

F2

F3

F4

F5

F6

 . . . Fn

Notation 3

Attention 4

Inquiry 5

Action 6

. . . n.

A6

G2

G Scientific Deductive System H Algebraic Calculus

FIGURE 4.1 The

Grid

integrated by the baby. According to the categories of the Grid, the fear of dying, located in A1, was transformed into a tolerable fear, located in B1. As for the negative, it is column 2 of the Grid, the column ψ, which represents it particularly. Why? Because in Bion’s own words, column 2 contains “a series of palpably false statements, preferably known both to the analysand and to the analyst as such” (1971, p. 5). In other words, it regroups the false and untruthful elements used by analysand and analyst with the sole aim of introducing a principle of contradiction where a single proposition does not make it possible to determine the “value” it contains. It “enshrines statements valuable against the inception of any development in [the analysand’s] personality involving catastrophic change” (ibid., p. 6). It is thus also used to “keep knowledge at bay” (1963, p. 98). By way of example, when I say that the analyst who has chosen to use the Grid recognises its value, I am indicating at the same time that he has a preconception of it (which is to be placed

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in row D). But if I discover that this analyst uses it to express feelings and thoughts that are critical of this instrument, then I will classify these feelings and thoughts in D2. Column 2, Bion adds, might be “replaced by a negative sense to the horizontal axis”. Thus “all the ‘uses’ 1 ↔ n can be used negatively, as a barrier against the unknown or known but disliked” (1963, p. 99). When an analyst, for example, ends a session by saying to his patient: “We will take that up next time”, there is a good chance that he does not know how to bring the present session to an end by using more appropriate words. He knows, on the other hand, how to distort the analytic process by inducing in advance the beginning of the next session!

The psychological dimension of the lie This “use” of the lie, which is reminiscent of the importance that Jacques Lacan ascribed to it,10 is for Bion the sign that we are in the presence of “a form of profound disturbance” which requires a distinction to be made between a lying statement, the false statement being related more to the inadequacy of the human being, analyst or analysand alike, who cannot feel confident in his capacity to be aware of the ‘truth’, and the liar who has to be certain of his knowledge of the truth in order to be sure that he will not blunder into it by accident. (1971, p. 5) For Bion, being a liar implies being “intelligent and sophisticated”. “The patient”, he writes, “offers every inducement to bring the analyst to interpretations that leave the defence intact and, ultimately, to acceptance of the lie as a working principle of superior efficacy” (1970, p. 99). Performing a pirouette, in typical Bion fashion, he offers the reader a commendation of the liar “stated in terms of fable”, in which he shows that: The liars showed courage and resolution in their opposition to the scientists who with their pernicious doctrines bid fair to strip every shred of selfdeception from their dupes leaving them without any of the natural protection necessary for the preservation of their mental health against the impact of truth. . . . It is not too much to say that the human race owes its salvation to that small band of gifted liars who were prepared even in the face of indubitable facts to maintain the truth of their falsehoods. (Bion, 1970, p. 100) But beyond its amusing aspect, this parable is useful to him in putting forward yet another innovative idea, according to which “the liar needs an audience” – which someone who tells the truth can do without! The liar needs an audience – an analyst, for example – because he needs someone to attest to his capacity to bring together incoherent elements according to a pattern of his own composition

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which provides them with a coherence and a meaning which they would not have without it, a description, Bion adds, that “does not differ from that of the transformation of the paranoid-schizoid to the depressive position” (ibid., p. 102). For the liar, then, it is already a means of providing evidence that he is capable of making this transition. What is more, Bion states that “the lie requires a thinker to think” whereas “the truth . . . does not require a thinker” (ibid.). He continues, “[T]he true thought . . . awaits the advent of the thinker who achieves significance through the true thought. . . . In contrast the lie gains existence by virtue of the epistemologically prior existence of the liar. The only thoughts to which a thinker is absolutely essential are lies” (ibid., pp. 102–103). From this assumption it follows that “the paranoid-schizoid state [the disparate state] may then be seen as peculiar to the thinker [liar] who is in a state of persecution by thoughts that belong to a non-human system” (ibid.). I would readily venture the surmise that it is possible to recognise the liar through this criterion. “It is”, he concludes, “the link between host and parasite in the parasitic relationship” (ibid.).11 The same conclusion is reached at the end of the Witz reported by Freud (1905a) in Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious where two Jews meet on the platform of a railway station in Galicia: “Where are you going?” asked one. “To Cracow”, was the answer. “What a liar you are!” broke out the other. “If you say you’re going to Cracow, you want me to believe you’re going to Lemberg. But I know that in fact you’re going to Cracow. So why are you lying to me?’ ” In his commentary Freud indicates that “this excellent story . . . evidently works by the technique of absurdity12 . . . linked with another technique, representation by the opposite”. In effect, “[T]he second is lying when he tells the truth and is telling the truth by means of a lie” (1905a, p. 115).

Notes 1 See Freud’s experience with Dora, reported above in Chapter 1, p. 32, note 8. 2 Among them, I would cite Jean Guillaumin (1987, 1988); Guillaumin et al. (1989); and André Green (1993). 3 We should dwell on the salutary work carried out by Jacques Lacan concerning the category of lack (real, symbolic, imaginary) and of the type of object (idem) that is involved in the trilogy “privation – frustration – castration” which he highlighted. 4 See also, on this subject, the polemic between Jacques Lacan and Wladimir Granoff concerning this notion, a polemic that led the former to say: “You’re surely not going to try to have us believe that it is an infant who is yelling on your couch”. See Granoff (2001, p. 129) 5 “Commensal” refers: (1) to a person who usually eats at the same table as someone else, thus a table companion; (2) to an organism which is living in close association with another organism without causing it harm. Bion often uses this term to describe a beneficial relationship and contrasts it with “parasitic”, which refers to a relationship formed to the ultimate detriment of both. 6 I should like to mention a remark by Gilles Deleuze who, during an interview with Claire Parnet on the painter Francis Bacon, stated that, when the painter takes a blank canvas with the intention of painting it, “he does not have to cover a blank surface, but rather would have to empty it out, clear it, clean it” of everything it contains that “saturates” the surface. See Deleuze, 1981, p. 86.

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7 That is to say a “thing” which permits the transformation of a pre-conception into a conception thanks to the meeting with a positive realization. 8 The valency of a chemical element is the maximum number of links that it can form with other elements in accordance with their electronic configurations. It is thus not surprising that this term was imported by Bion into the psychoanalytic vocabulary. 9 It will come as no surprise, either, that the explanation of the Grid is to be found in Bion’s book titled Elements of Psychoanalysis (1963). 10 See Jacques Lacan (1946, p. 136), “Man’s language, the instrument of his lies, is thoroughly ridden with the problem of truth”. 11 The parasitic relationship is opposed to the commensal relationship (see note 36, page 79). 12 Absurdity (non-sens) of which Lewis Carroll was the undisputed champion.

5 THE GENESIS AND DEVELOPMENT OF THOUGHT

“Problems associated with disturbance of thought”, Bion writes, “compel us to think about thought and this raises a question of technique – how are we to think about thought”. (1962a, p. 62)

As we have seen, with Bion the problem is twofold, and this is for a reason linked to his clinical practice, devoted essentially to psychotics or, in his own words, patients “who suffer from disturbance of thought”. A series of questions concerns, then, “the processes involved in thought”, while another seeks to elucidate “the processes involved in thought about thought” (ibid.). For it is not only a matter of closely examining thoughts, as they have formed in the disturbed mind of an individual who has gone through painful and difficult episodes in his development, to the point that his mental productions have been altered by them, even if such a study would, on the other hand, undoubtedly furnish very valuable indications concerning the genesis of the thoughts within a so-called undisturbed mind. It is a matter of dwelling on the apparatus for thinking which has either given birth to the thoughts evoked above or has had to accommodate the thoughts encountered in the course of his maturation and has had to develop itself in order to be able to think them. In other words, what is characteristic of Bionian thought lies in the fact that: (1) thoughts are always the product of the meeting between at least two minds;1 (2) thoughts pre-exist the thinker who thinks them, which also attests to the existence of thoughts without a thinker.

The negative and thought: reminder of the Freudian conception In the last chapter, we saw that negation is the most efficient model for the activity of the psyche because, as Freud (1925) writes, it is “a first measure of freedom from

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the consequences of repression” (p. 239). So Freud had already placed the negative at the source of thought processes: the loss of the first object of satisfaction is regarded as a precondition of the reality principle and the judgement of existence. Likewise Bion, by positing the experience of the no-breast and of the no-thing at the foundations of thought, establishes a theory of thought that has its origin in the primordial absence of the subject/object differentiation, then in the absence of the object as such, permitting the constitution of an apparatus for thinking thoughts, culminating in the establishment of relationships. Thought is thus about linking and the linking of thoughts. If thought is thought about linking, it implies a theory of psychic spaces and time, a theory of containers and contents and of après coup. We know how the latter differs depending on whether we are dealing with the neurotic universe, with its capacity for linking (this false linking that is, in and of itself, the transference) or with that of the psychotic in whom the massive nature of the experience of non-satisfaction leads either to fusional agglomeration without space in the socalled psychotic transference or to the destruction rather than to the weaving of a continuous psychic fabric. It depends, then, on whether the negative is simply the negativation of presence (the “no-breast”, the no-thing) or whether it becomes destructive annihilation. On the neurotic side, this organising axis of the negative means that the maternal object disappears as an object of primary cathexis, making way for the cathexes specific to the emerging ego of the child, the disappearance of the maternal object resulting in its transformation into structure (see Baranès, 1989, p. 92).

The negative and thought: the Bionian conception In “A theory of thinking”, Bion (1962b) suggested that thinking involves gaining access to a space occupied by no-things, it involves constructing and organising a finite space-time “won from the void and formless infinite”2 governed by the infinite play of symbolic equivalences intended to replace persecutory things. Thinking presupposes, therefore, a container for the objects to be thought about, a container of transformation which is constituted first of all in the psychic function of the other. As we can see, thinking supposes that links have been established between oneself and the other before other sorts of links present themselves within the psyche. Thinking is thus, for Bion, as for any Englishman, an activity. “It is convenient”, he writes, to regard thinking as dependent on the successful outcome of two main mental developments. The first is the development of thoughts. They require an apparatus to cope with them. The second development, therefore, is of this apparatus that I shall provisionally call thinking. I repeat – thinking has to be called into existence to cope with thoughts. (1967, pp. 110–111)

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As a result, it is necessary to distinguish thinking as an activity from thought as the result of this activity and, in this case we will employ the noun thought. A few lines further on, he adds, “thinking is a development forced on the psyche by the pressure of thoughts and not the other way round” (ibid., p. 111).

The pre-conception, a pivotal concept A brief reminder of the facts previously discussed proves necessary here. As we have seen, the transformation, thanks to the mother’s alpha-function, of beta-elements into alpha-elements, makes material available to the psyche of the infant that it can keep in order to produce dream thoughts (whose latent meaning appears when they are interpreted), dreams, and personal myths. It is this material that Bion calls “preconception”. It is of capital importance in the sense that the process of thought depends entirely on what becomes of it. Bion states: “Thoughts” may be classified, according to the nature of their developmental history, as pre-conceptions, conceptions or thoughts, and finally concepts. . . . The conception is initiated by the conjunction of a pre-conception with a realization. The pre-conception may be regarded as the analogue in ­psycho-analysis of Kant’s concept of “empty thoughts”. Psycho-analytically the theory that the infant has an inborn disposition corresponding to an expectation of a breast may be used to supply a model. When the pre-­ conception is brought into contact with a realization that approximates to it, the mental outcome is a conception. Put in another way, the pre-conception (the inborn expectation of a breast, the a priori knowledge of a breast, the “empty thought”) when the infant is brought into contact with the breast itself, mates with awareness of the realization and is synchronous with the development of a conception. . . . Conceptions will thus be expected to be constantly conjoined with an emotional experience of satisfaction. (Bion, 1967, p. 111) Starting from this definition, Bion continues logically: I shall limit the term “thought” to the mating of a pre-conception with a frustration.3 The model I propose is that of an infant whose expectation of a breast is mated with a realization of no breast available for satisfaction. This mating is experienced as a no-breast, or “absent” breast inside. (ibid.)

The role of frustration A further detour is still necessary to show Bion’s complete fidelity to Freud concerning his way of envisaging the process from which thought originates. In the

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first place he acknowledges a debt towards Melanie Klein: “the perceptions of the emotional experience have in both instances to be worked upon by alpha-function before they can be used for dream thoughts” (Bion, 1962a, p. 6; see Chapter 3, p. 57 of the present book). In other words, thanks to the normal mechanism of projective identification, the infant evacuates outside of himself the elements that his psyche cannot assimilate. In doing so, he is not behaving differently from the infant described by Freud who, concerning motor discharge – the first means of evacuating disagreeable experiences – indicates that it “has served as a means of unburdening the mental apparatus of accretions of stimuli” (Freud, 1911, p. 221). The difference with Bion is that he argues explicitly that the mother, who, in general, is never far away from the child, gathers the unassimilable elements evacuated by the infant – at this stage, evacuation via motor functioning constitutes a mode of communication to which the mother ascribes a meaning – in order to transform them into integratable elements that she then returns to the infant. This is why he writes: “The activity we know as ‘thinking’ was in origin a procedure for unburdening the psyche of accretions of stimuli and the mechanism is that which has been described by Melanie Klein as projective identification” (Bion, 1962a, p. 31). Just as Freud, for his part, wrote: “Restraint upon motor discharge (upon action) was provided by means of the process of thinking. . . .” (1911, p. 221). It is not difficult to imagine, then, that, thanks to the reduction of tension procured by the mother, “thinking was endowed with characteristics which made it possible for the mental apparatus to tolerate an increased tension of stimulus while the process of discharge was postponed” (ibid.).4 Further on, Bion returns to this question: Freud said thought provided a means for the restraint of motor discharge (Two Principles); it was no longer concerned with unburdening the mental apparatus of accretions of stimuli but was now employed in the appropriate alteration of reality. According to this, thought is a substitute for motor discharge although he does not say that motor discharge ceases to function as a method of disburdening the psyche of accretions of stimuli. But through projective identification thought itself takes on the function previously entrusted to motor discharge – namely ridding the psyche of accretions of stimuli; like “action” it may be directed to altering the environment, depending on whether the personality is directed to evasion of frustration or modification of it. (Bion, 1962a, p. 83) It remains the case that the infant of whom we are speaking remains prey to frustration and finds that he has to think because his preconception (expectation of a breast) has mated, not with a positive realization – which would have produced a conception –, but with a negative realization. “The next step”, Bion writes, “depends on the infant’s capacity for frustration: in particular it depends on whether the decision is to evade frustration or to modify it” (1967, pp. 111–112).

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Elaborating or evading frustration Here we are touching on the nodal point of Bion’s theory of thinking. Though it is interesting to imagine how thought is born at the heart of or within (au sein de) the psyche of a person – and, from this point of view, Bion’s theory is of as much interest as any other, even if it offers me the opportunity of emphasizing that, for Bion, thought has its source “at the breast” (“au sein”) – it is even more interesting, assuming that it is formed thanks to the mechanism that I have explained in detail, to try to understand what becomes of this thought in the psyche of the infant depending on the fate that he reserves for frustration, which is very real. As psychoanalysts, this is what we are dealing with. Session after session, our patients communicate thoughts to us – sometimes silent thoughts, it is true – which may not differ from the beta-elements we were discussing earlier, and then we find that we are the depositaries for those “things-in-themselves” which we are supposed, thanks to our alpha-function, to transform and modify because they are all painful and/or inexact propositions. That is why Bion writes: “The choice that matters to the psycho-analyst is one that lies between procedures designed to evade frustration and those designed to modify it. That is the critical decision” (1962a, p. 29). “I wish to focus attention”, he adds, “on phenomena genetically related to the co-existence in the personality of feelings of frustration, intolerance of feelings of frustration, related emotions and the decision that emerges from such a concatenation of elements” (ibid., p. 30). This, then, is how Bion envisages the process of an emerging thought: “If the capacity for toleration of frustration is sufficient the ‘no-breast’ inside becomes a thought and an apparatus for ‘thinking’ it develops” (1962b, p. 112). This description overlaps with the situation described by Freud in which dominance by the reality principle is synchronous with the development of an ability to think and so to bridge the gulf of frustration between the moment when a want is felt and the moment when action appropriate to satisfying the want culminates in its satisfaction. A capacity for tolerating frustration thus enables the psyche to develop thought as a means by which the frustration that is tolerated is itself made more tolerable. “If ”, he continues, “the capacity for toleration of frustration is inadequate, the bad internal ‘no-breast’, that a personality capable of maturity ultimately recognizes as a thought, confronts the psyche with the need to decide between evasion of frustration or of its modification” (1962b, p. 112). But very often the inability to tolerate frustration results in the subject evading frustration. In this case, what should be a thought – “a product of the juxtaposition of preconception and negative realization” (ibid.) – becomes a bad object, equivalent to a thing-in-itself, which therefore has to be evacuated. Instead of the development of an apparatus for thinking a hypertrophic development of the apparatus of projective identification occurs. Consequently, Bion adds, this psyche operates on the principle that evacuation of a bad breast is synonymous with obtaining sustenance from a good breast. The end result is that all thoughts

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are treated as if they were indistinguishable from bad internal objects. . . . The crux lies [once again] in the decision between modification or evasion of frustration. (ibid.) Bion examines these criteria clinically in an attempt to form a picture of the type of relationship a subject maintains with external reality. “An infant capable of tolerating frustration can permit itself to have a sense of reality, to be dominated by the reality principle” (1962a, p. 37), because this infant − “provided one includes with it the care it receives from its mother” (Freud, 1911, p. 220, note 4) − can tolerate the fact that reality, if not entirely satisfying, has the advantage of being real (and not hallucinated). But, Bion continues, “if its intolerance of frustration reaches beyond a certain degree omnipotent mechanisms come into operation, notably projective identification” − a mechanism which, at the very least, suggests that the infant has awareness of the value of the capacity to think as a means of softening frustration under the dominance of the reality principle. And Bion concludes convincingly: “I am here supposing that projective identification is an early form of that which later is called a capacity for thinking” (1962a, p. 37).

From thought to knowledge Now that we have arrived at this stage, we find that we are like travellers who, having embarked on an expedition of discovery, have reached the end of the known path of approach and are preparing to cross the threshold that gives access to a field or area that is still, today, unknown. Passing from the known to the unknown requires the use of thoughts, insofar as they exist, and of an apparatus for thinking thoughts, insofar as it has been developed, in order to “know” the world that surrounds us, whether this world is populated with objects or people with whom we have relationships. It goes without saying that the precondition for approaching this process of knowledge lies in the capacity to tolerate the pain that it is liable to generate. As analysts, we are not exempt from the need to take the same conditions into account when the relationships with which we are dealing in our clinical work may be grouped together under the generic term “transference”, whether it is positive, negative, adhesive, fusional, neurotic, or psychotic. We have seen that “an emotional experience that is felt to be painful may initiate an attempt either to evade or to modify the pain according to the capacity of the personality to tolerate frustration” (1962a, p. 48). We have also seen that “an emotional experience cannot be conceived of in isolation from a relationship” (ibid., p. 42) even though this emotional experience is an experience of thought which, like all thought, let us recall, has its origin in a shared experience in which the mechanism of normal projective identification has played a part. The links that Bion proposes as the basis of every relationship are L (Love), H (Hate), and K (Knowledge) – without forgetting their complements, −L, −H, and −K. “It may

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seem, “Bion writes, “since the analytic situation is complex, that there can be no merit in recording it by one of three simple signs” (ibid., p. 43). But, in reality, it is up to the analyst to appreciate the complexity of the emotional experience he is required to illuminate and yet restrict his choice to these three links. He decides what the linked objects are and which of these three represents with most accuracy the actual link between them. (ibid., p. 44) “Suppose an imaginary situation”, Bion writes, of a type with which an analyst is familiar; the patient Smith is talking freely and is co-operative and friendly; in the course of his associations he mentions that he knows a certain psycho-therapist, Jones, who is a very stupid man and knows virtually nothing about psycho-analysis. The patient knows him well and has good reason, he says, to dislike him. He once treated a friend of his, Mr. May, with shocking results. His friend’s marriage, which had always been harmonious until his friend took up treatment . . ., etc. (Bion, 1962a, p. 43) Quite clearly this is a complex communication. There are different sorts of links: a link between the patient and the analyst; different links between the patient and the psychotherapist, between the patient and his friend, and between the patient and his friend’s analyst. The link between the patient and his analyst is the only one of which we have a direct testimony. As for the account given by the patient of the other links, the testimony is largely indirect. The patient says he knows Jones. “Is this to be recorded”, Bion writes, as Smith K Jones? He says he dislikes Jones. Should it be Smith H Jones? The patient says ‘his friend’ Mr May. Should this then be Smith L May? Or is there some previous material in the analysis or some manner or intonation that suggests a link, Smith L Mrs. May? But perhaps there is some material that suggests there is a homosexual relationship between Smith and Mr. May? (ibid., p. 43) In reality, the problem for the analyst does not so much lie there as in seeking to “appreciate the complexity of emotional experience” in order to be able to formulate, in an interpretation, concerning which there is no a priori guarantee that it will touch the patient, what characterises the nature of the link. Thus, Bion continues, “the aim in making the choice L, H or K is to make one statement”, a very useful instrument for giving a true reflection of his feelings. To do this, he must construct a model that respects one of the essential components of

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the link between the analyst and patient: the animate element: In this connection, Bion writes: x K y, the analyst K the analysand, I K Smith, these are statements that represent an emotional experience. Like L and H, K represents an active link and has about it a suggestion that if x K y then x does something to y. It represents a psycho-analytic relationship. . . . It does not convey . . . that x is in possession of a piece of knowledge called y but rather that x is in the state of getting to know and y is in a state of getting to be known by x. The statement x K y . . . corresponds to statements of relationship that are said to be informed by a scientific outlook. (Bion, 1962a, p. 47) Thus, unlike x L y or x H y – relationships that contain an intrinsically animate element − the relationship x K y is more easily maintained “if y is inanimate and if x can be made to seem to approximate to the inanimate, for example if x uses a machine”. That is to say, Bion adds, “in proportion as inanimate machinery is introduced to displace the living element, L, H or K have ceased to exist” (ibid., pp. 47–48).

Abstraction as a precondition of growth Thus the aim of K activity is “to abstract from [emotional experience] a statement that will represent this experience adequately” and this abstraction further aims to “represent other experiences unknown when the abstraction is made” (ibid., p. 50). This somewhat arid formulation, entirely oriented towards the future, is nonetheless of immense importance. Indeed it contains the possibility for the infant to broaden its field of knowledge, that is to say, in the most trivial terms, to pass from the breast to a breast, that is, from the breast to the bottle, then from the bottle to semi-solid food, and so on. Why? Because, by “extracting” from a needed, thus bad, feed (which takes place, for example, in a soft and satisfying way, but which still bears the trace of a bitter product with which the mother had cleaned her nipple before offering it to her baby) the qualities that this feed contains, the infant abstracts the badness, the need, the softness, the bitterness, etc., all of which are psychic elements that, in principle, it will be able to use again during another experience, similar or different, known or unknown. “If there is a good breast”, Bion writes, “a sweet object, it is because it has been evacuated, produced” (ibid., p. 59) – that is, “abstracted” from the experience itself, of which nothing can be said. “And the same with the bad breast”, he continues, the needed breast, the bitter breast, etc. It cannot be seen as objective and it cannot be seen as subjective. From these sweet, bitter, sour objects, sweetness, bitterness, sourness, are abstracted. Once abstracted they can be reapplied; the abstraction made can be used in situations where a realization, not the original realization from which it was abstracted, approximates to it. (ibid., pp. 59–60)

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This analysis leads Bion to put forward the idea that “the infant can feel that from the total experience he can detach an element which is a belief that an object exists that can satisfy his needs” (p. 60). I will come back to this. It can be seen, then, that there is a significant interplay between abstraction and concretization in Bion’s work. “Abstraction, then,” he writes, “can be seen as a step in publication which facilitates correlation by comparison of the representation that has been abstracted with a number of different realizations, none of which is the realization from which the representation was originally abstracted” (ibid., p. 50). “Publication” – sometimes written “public-action” – represents, for Bion, any method intended to make a private, that is to say, individual, proposition public. In absolute terms the fact of communicating an idea to someone that originated in my own mind is called, in Bion’s terms, a publication. An explanation, that is valid, of course, when more than one person is involved! Bion adds: The concretization, by contrast, can be seen as a form of publication which facilitates correlation by common sense [a term very dear to Bion]; that is, by stating something so that it is recognized as an object of one sense that can yet be tested as an object of another sense . . . of more than one sense or by the senses of more than one person. (ibid., pp. 50–51) To illustrate the use of a sense, of two senses or of the same sense in several people, Bion is amazed – and makes it known – when he realizes, for example, that the intuition of heliocentricity of Aristarchus of Samos, who lived around 300 B.C., was confirmed several centuries later by Copernicus and Kepler. Why is Bion so interested in abstraction? Because he has noticed, in some psychotics, and in the psychotic part of the personality of some neurotics, that the “capacity for abstraction is destroyed” and that, consequently, “a word can no longer be used as the name of a thing but is the thing-in-itself ”. This is the case, for example, for the word “dog” which, as everyone knows, “does not refer to a specific animal but to a class” (ibid., p. 52).5 Elsewhere he adds: An object not perceived and given the name of “dog” because from the object perceived a quality of “dogginess” is abstracted. The term “dog” . . . is used when and because a set of phenomena is recognized as being related yet unknown. It is used to prevent the scattering of the phenomena. Having found the name, and thereby bound the phenomena, the remainder of history, if so wished, can be devoted to determining what it means – what a “dog” is: the name is an invention to make it possible to think and talk about something before it is known what that something is. (Bion, 1963, pp. 87–88) The same may be said of every statement. If this capacity for abstraction has been destroyed, it is very likely that alpha-function has been destroyed and that, consequently, every exchange takes place much more on the side of the −K link than of

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the K link. Thus Bion affirms that “the genesis of all abstraction . . . is a factor in alpha-function”. “Such a hypothesis”, he writes, in support of his proposition, “is compatible with the association of breakdown in alpha-function with the predominance of beta-elements which are remarkable for their concreteness” (1962a, p. 55). It also leads, he writes a few pages further on, to a “discussion of the importance of abstraction, which may, in this context, be regarded as an aspect of the transformation, by alpha-function, of an emotional experience into alpha-elements” (ibid., p. 59).

A hypothesis called Papa Here is an example. Bion writes: 2. Let us suppose the infant repeats an emotional experience in which the following elements are constantly conjoined; the sight of a man, a sense of being loved by the man, a sense of wanting the man, awareness of the repetition of a phrase by the mother of “That’s Daddy.” “Da, da, da”, says the child. “That’s right; Daddy” says the mother. From the emotional experience the infant abstracts certain elements, the nature of which depends partly on the infant . . . these abstracted elements are given a name “Daddy” in other situations in which the same elements appear to be conjoined; thus a vocabulary is established. This is not a description of a fact; I give it the status of a model from which I abstract a theory and expect to find that it is a representation to which some realization corresponds. The theory I abstract is: “Daddy” is the name of an hypothesis. The hypothesis called “Daddy” is a statement that certain elements are constantly conjoined. 3. The infant now meets another who also says Da-da-da, but in circumstances that do not appear to correspond with the circumstances with which Da-da-da is associated. There is a man, but it is the wrong one. Yet elements in this new situation correspond with elements in situations that the infant regards as realizations corresponding to the hypothesis of which the name is “Daddy”. The hypothesis must be revised to represent the realizations. It may be abandoned for another or it may become a system of hypothesis, a scientific deductive system. The experiences continue and the scientific deductive system named “Daddy” becomes progressively more complex. (Bion, 1962a, pp. 66–67, my italics) A hypothesis is thus always derived from an emotional experience within which a certain number of elements are constantly conjoined, and this particular quality – the fact that these elements are constantly conjoined – confers on this hypothesis its value as an abstraction.

What produces a constant conjunction The fact nonetheless remains that the “constant conjunction” of certain elements confers a particular significance on the emotional experience of which they are an

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integral part. We have just seen this with the hypothesis (Bion’s term) or the signifier (Lacan’s term) called Daddy. The infant abstracts from this experience a certain number of elements that are given the name “Daddy” and which, in other situations where the same elements seem once again to be conjoined, enable the infant to understand that he is once again in the presence of a daddy, even if it is not his daddy. This is true, in general, for all words, all hypotheses, and all signifiers, because, as Bion writes, “from all the elements in a realization, only some have the corresponding sense data linked with each other as being constantly conjoined” (1962a, p. 68). On the basis of this kind of situation, the abstraction achieved is capable, as Bion states, of “fulfilling the function of a pre-conception” which, if it mates with a positive realization, becomes a conception, then a concept, etc. We are led to ask ourselves why Bion pays so much sustained attention to this kind of “association” which, on the face of it, is commonplace. But in doing so, we are forgetting – and Bion does not fail to remind us of this fact – that every association between the elements linked, for example, by a narrative, as is the case in an analysis, introduces a causality between these elements and, thus, possibly a sense of guilt on the part of the one who is relating the narrative. This is a subject I will discuss in the next chapter. It is thus on this condition, and on this condition only, that “the abstraction must be capable of fulfilling the function of a pre-conception” (1962a, p. 68) and that, by providing a background of meaning that preserves this statement from being completely cut off from reality, it is capable of mating with a realization that will modify this pre-conception and transform it into a conception, then a concept, then a scientific deductive system, then an algebraic calculation, and so on. The theory thus becomes more abstract and widely embracing, including not only obvious and constant ideational elements, which Bion schematizes by using the letter ψ, but also unsaturated psychological elements (feelings, expectations, desires) whose value is difficult to evaluate, even if it becomes undeniable, and which Bion schematizes by attributing them with the letter ξ. This is the case with the unsaturated element which he attributes to the innate dimension (M) which, allied with the ideation constant (ψ) inherent to every pre-conception, produces an “innate pre-­ conception” – ψ(ξ) –, as for example for the infant,“the innate pre-conception that a breast that satisfies its own incomplete nature exists” (ibid., p. 69). The realization of the breast makes it possible to raise this pre-conception to the rank of conception – or of thought, in the case of negative realization, as we have seen – and to classify this complete emotional experience under the label of “psychoanalytic object”.

An “innate pre-conception”? Bion’s statement that the infant may be the bearer of an “innate pre-conception” is likely to arouse our astonishment, as this formula confirms the idea that the mother/baby interrelationship is not everything and that each infant comes into the world with its own baggage. But why not? It is self-evident – and it is proven by experience – that no two infants are born with the same personal, individual, and intimate equipment. Each infant is the bearer of its own equations, independent

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of all transmission, except for the fact that we speak sometimes, quite rightly, of genetic heritage, which plays a part in the personality of each newborn infant. This is the part, in all emotional experience, which cannot be attributed to anyone and which allows the environment – mothers, in particular – not to consider themselves responsible for all the troubles that the child may meet with during his development. At the same time, it is one of the elements which, from a certain age onwards, comes into play in the production of the abstractions that are indispensable for the infant so that, from the total experience he feels able to isolate the object that is independent of him or, put another way, the element that assures him that “an object exists that can satisfy his needs” (ibid., p. 60) “Almost any number of statements can be made”, Bion writes, “to represent what the infant feels. . . . Presumably, the infant also ‘can make a number of statements’ and that it is with the nature of these ‘statements’ that the analyst has ultimately to concern himself ” (ibid.) On the basis of this hypothesis the analyst may assume that an infant “has an inborn pre-conception that a breast that satisfies its own incomplete nature exists” (ibid., p. 69). “That is not all”, Bion adds: The extension of the concept of a psycho-analytic object, like the extensions of all biological concepts, includes phenomena related to growth. Growth may be regarded as positive or negative. I shall represent it by (± Y). The plus and minus signs are employed to give sense or direction to the element they precede in a manner analogous to their mode of employment in coordinate geometry. To indicate this aspect of its extension, I shall represent the psycho-analytic object by {(± Y) ψ (M)(ξ)}. Whether (Y) is preceded by a plus or minus sign is determined only by contact with a realization. The abstraction derived from the psycho-analytic object will be related to the resolution of the conflicting claims of narcissism and of socialism. If the trend is social (+Y) abstraction will be related to the isolation of primary qualities. If the trend is narcissistic (-Y), the abstraction will be replaced by activity appropriate to −K. (Bion, 1962a, p. 70) This, then, is how, according to Bion, a scientific deductive system is progressively constituted within which each element, each “psycho-analytic object” has its own logic – even if the whole system in its entirety cannot correspond to what is called, in general, a logical synthesis. “The relations in an analytic object”, Bion writes, “may be related to each other in a manner entirely different from the manner in which their representations are linked in a scientific deductive system” (ibid., pp. 73–74). In more concrete terms, this enigmatic sentence has always seemed to me to correspond to the experience that each one of us can have when in front of the Rosetta Stone, the famous fragment of engraved stele from Ancient Egypt inscribed with three versions of the same text which made it possible to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs in the nineteenth century. Everyone agrees that, from top

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to bottom, three alphabets are superimposed, the Egyptian alphabet in the form of hieroglyphs, the Demotic alphabet, and the Greek alphabet, and it is generally considered that the Demotic alphabet is a translation of the hieroglyphs and that the Greek alphabet is a translation of the Demotic alphabet. But this text for text correspondence is not even necessary for ascribing inestimable value to this unique object. We can imagine that, faced with what was understood to be three versions of the same text, Jean-François Champollion behaved like Freud who, in the famous letter dated December 6, 1896 to Wilhelm Fliess (Masson, 1985, pp. 207–208), spoke of a “process of stratification”, “memory-traces” rearranged and retranscribed, and of “different registrations”. He then enumerated, as we saw earlier: Wz [Wahrnehmungszeichen (indication of perception)] is the first registration of the perceptions; Ub [Unbewusstsein (unconsciousness)] is the second registration, arranged according to other, perhaps causal relations; Vb [Vorbewusstsein (preconsciousness)] is the third transcription. Freud is careful to note that “the successive registrations represent the psychic achievement of successive epochs of life” and that “at the boundary between two such epochs a translation of the psychic material must take place”. However, there is nothing to indicate that this translation takes places correctly. “This translation,” he adds, “has not taken place in the case of some of the material. . . . If a later transcript is lacking, the excitation is dealt with in accordance with the psychological laws in force in the earlier psychic period and along the paths open at that time” (ibid., p. 208). In other words, there is no way of knowing, for example, why, in the radio announcements broadcast during the Second World War, “le petit chat est mort” was the faithful translation of “the Resistance is organising itself in the Cevennes”. Each one has his own reading of it.

Thoughts without a thinker? This “return to Freud” allows us to appreciate just how much this schema compels us to take into account a temporal dimension, since Freud appeals to successive registrations which, according to what he wrote in 1896, occurred during successive epochs of life, because he still considered at that time that the reality principle takes over from the pleasure principle owing to the lack of satisfaction resulting from the adoption of the latter alone. We know that Freud himself subsequently revised this conception of the functioning of the psychical apparatus when he wrote in 1911: “[A]n organization which was a slave to the pleasure principle and neglected the reality of the external world could not maintain itself alive for the shortest time, so that it could not have come into existence at all” (1911, p. 220, note 4). He thus revised his construction of the mental apparatus involving several episodes, replacing it with two simultaneous principles, the reality principle, required for offering a “realistic” solution, working in concert, albeit at another level, with the pleasure principle, maintained for providing a certain amount of satisfaction. Bion did not fail to notice this difficulty. He writes: “The link between intolerance of frustration and the development of thought is central to an understanding

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of thought and its disturbances. Freud’s statement . . . needs modification to make both principles co-exist” (1962a, p. 29). Further on, he continues, The patient, even at the outset of life, has contact with reality sufficient to enable him to act in a way that engenders in the mother feelings that he does not want, or which he wants the mother to have. (ibid., p. 31) This clarification, which is decisive in Bion’s thought, is an attempt, in fact, to make the omnipotent Kleinian phantasy of projective identification a reality. He goes on to say that this can be seen, for example, in the patient who has the impulse to force others to feel that he is capable of murdering the sexual parents so that he may feel capable of a loving sexual relationship free from the fear that he would murder his partner and himself if, as he would be bound to do, he observed himself and his partner displaying evidence of mutual sexual passion.6 “I have suggested”, he continues, “that in an extreme form this may even lead to murder as a method of giving effect, in the world of reality, to the omnipotent phantasy of projective identification which, without such action, would remain only an omnipotent phantasy” (Bion, 1962a, pp. 31–32).

Prior (and not inner) thoughts There remains, however, a problem: if thoughts appear with an immediateness that makes the pleasure principle, the reality principle, and projective identification function simultaneously, nothing guarantees that they emerge within a psychic space that is capable of receiving them and designed to think about them. This is sufficient reason, Bion writes, for putting forward the idea that “the problem is simplified if ‘thoughts’ are regarded as epistemologically prior to thinking and that thinking has to be developed as a method or apparatus for dealing with ‘thoughts’ ” (1962a, p. 83). “An apparatus has to be produced to make it possible to think the already existing thought”, Bion affirms boldly (ibid.). But, if the patient cannot “think” his thoughts, that is to say that he has thoughts but lacks the apparatus of thought which enables him to use his thoughts, to think them, as it were, the first result is an intensification of frustration . . . and he therefore resorts to projective identification as a mechanism for dealing with “thoughts”. (ibid., pp. 84–85)7 That is why Bion writes:

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In the psycho-analysis of “disorders of thought”, psycho-analytic investigation must be directed towards the development and nature of the “thoughts”, alpha- and beta-elements, and then to the nature of the apparatus used for dealing with “thoughts”. . . . The division and priority are epistemologically and logically necessary, that is to say the theory that thought is prior to thinking is itself prior, in the hierarchy of hypotheses in the scientific deductive system, to the hypothesis of thinking. (Bion, 1962a, pp. 85–86) Thus, although we can easily conceive that two levels of temporality are operative in the functioning of the psychic apparatus, the first corresponding to the moment when thoughts appear and the second to the period of the development of the apparatus for thinking thoughts, it is still true that the complete model, which must take into account the simultaneity of the “two principles of mental functioning” also assumes “the exercise of a capacity similar to that which is in evidence when the two eyes operate in binocular vision to correlate two views of the same object” (ibid., p. 86). This correlation, he points out, is basically no different from “the use in psycho-analysis of conscious and unconscious in viewing a psycho-analytic object” (ibid.) Simultaneous use, true, but does this need clarifying further?

The apparatus developed for dealing with thoughts Thoughts – which acquire substance because a problem has appeared, that of the lack of mating between a pre-conception and its expected realization – need to be dealt with by an apparatus which, at the beginning of life, is embryonic and not adapted to the task that devolves upon it. This is what Bion writes when he speculates on “what part of the early psychic apparatus it is that is deflected to the provision of the apparatus needed for thought” (ibid., p. 56). Differing, on this point, from Freud, who saw the value of the reflex apparatus “as a model for the psychic apparatus involved in dreaming”, he suggests that “thinking is something forced on an apparatus, not suited for the purpose” and assumes that an apparatus existed and had to undergo, still has to undergo, adaptation to the new tasks involved in meeting the demands of reality by developing a capacity for thought. The apparatus that has to undergo this adaptation is that which dealt originally with sense-impressions relating to the alimentary canal. (ibid., p. 57) Why this apparatus and not another? Because, Bion adds, he had observed that “certain locutions [are] evidence not for memory but for undigested facts. Implicit in this statement is the use of the alimentary system as a model for the processes of thought” (ibid., p. 62). “But what is to be said”, he asks, “for using our knowledge of the alimentary system to form a model . . . for the processes involved in thought about thought?” (ibid.) Insofar as “thinking has to be developed as a method or apparatus

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for dealing with ‘thoughts’ ”, it is clear that an apparatus has to be produced to make it possible to think the already existing thought” (ibid.) “There is reason to believe”, he writes, “that the emotional experiences associated with alimentation are those from which individuals have abstracted and then integrated elements to form theoretical deductive systems that are used as representations of realizations of thought” (p. 62). To these points, I would like to add that there is nevertheless a difference between an apparatus for thinking, as conceived of by Bion, and the alimentary system, from which the first is derived, for the organ that receives and processes food is in conformity with the material it has to deal with, whereas the apparatus for thinking, whose original purpose was to get rid of accretions of stimuli, is in fact an apparatus “not suited for the purpose” (ibid., p. 57). In any case, the development of this theme – thought, its genesis, its vicissitudes – is a new opportunity for Bion to stress the importance that reality has for him and that contact with reality has for the baby.

A grid for thought It is time now to bring together the different propositions discussed so far in such a way as to arrange them psycho-genetically, as Bion (1963) does in his book Elements of Psychoanalysis, in terms of their degree of development. As he says, it is “another mode of classification for the same material [arising from his] experience with patients suffering from disorders of thought” (p. 28). Put another way, it is by presenting what seems to me to be the most “rigid” aspect of his elaboration that Bion evokes what is just about the most clinical dimension of the practice of psychoanalysis – a paradox that is undoubtedly highly significant in his case. In any case, Bion begins by defining how each horizontal “row” has its place in the Grid, since each of them represents a stage in the development of thought, from the most “archaic” element, the beta-element, to the most sophisticated element – if it exists – located at the level of algebraic calculi. I shall let the author himself comment on the Grid. The length of the passage cited is due to the incessant proliferation of Bion’s thought which constantly resorts to extremely profound ideas, even when they are evoked allusively (see below his remarks associated with the evocation of a dream). Bion writes: 1. β-elements. This term represents the earliest matrix from which thoughts can be supposed to arise. It partakes of the quality of inanimate object and psychic object without any form of distinction between the two. Thoughts are things, things are thoughts; and they have personality. 2. α-elements. This term represents the outcome of work done by α-function on sense-impressions. They are not objects in the world of external reality but are products of work done on the sensa believed to relate to such realities. They make possible the formation and use of dream thoughts. I do not consider that there is or can be any evidence for the existence of a realization corresponding to β-elements, α-function, or α-elements, other than observed facts that cannot

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Definitory Hypotheses 1

Ψ 2

A β-elements

A1

A2

B α-elements

B1

B2

B3

B4

B5

B6

 . . . Bn

C Dream Thoughts, Dreams, Myths

C1

C2

C3

C4

C5

C6

 . . . Cn

D Preconception

D1

D2

D3

D4

D5

D6

 . . . Dn

E Conception

E1

E2

E3

E4

E5

E6

 . . . En

F Concept

F1

F2

F3

F4

F5

F6

 . . . Fn

G Scientific Deductive System

Notation 3

Attention 4

Inquiry 5

Action 6

. . . n.

A6

G2

H Algebraic Calculus

be explained without the aid of such hypothetical elements. For the remaining formulations the position is different. It can be supposed that there is evidence for the existence of dream thoughts, preconceptions, and the rest. To continue: 3. Dream thoughts. These depend on the prior existence of β- and α-elements otherwise they require no elaboration beyond that which they have received in classical psycho-analytical theory. They are communicated by the manifest content of the dream but remain latent unless the manifest content is translated into more sophisticated terms.   With dreams one reaches a realm in which there is direct evidence of the phenomena with which one has to deal. At least there is direct evidence when a patient says he had a dream and proceeds to recount it. Unfortunately, such assurance evaporates when the subject of investigation is thought itself. The statement that a patient has had a dream is ordinarily sufficient evidence to allow work to proceed, but not if we need to know what has occurred when the patient says he has dreamt. For example, if a patient complains that he had a

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4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

pain in his leg are we to suppose, in the appropriate setting, that he dreamt that he had a pain in his leg or ought we to consider that sometimes the manifest content of a dream is a series of pains rather than a series of visual images that have been verbalized and linked by narrative? The pre-conception. This corresponds to a state of expectation. It is a state of mind adapted to receive a restricted range of phenomena. An early occurrence might be an infant’s expectation of the breast. The mating of pre-conception and realization brings into being the conception. The conception. The conception may be regarded as a variable that has been replaced by a constant. If we represent the pre-conception by ψ (ξ), with (ξ) as the unsaturated element, then from the realization with which the preconception mates there is derived that which replaces (ξ) by a constant. The conception can, however, then be employed as a pre-conception in that it can express an expectation. The mating of ψ (ξ) with the realization satisfies the expectation but enlarges the capacity of ψ (ξ) for further saturation. The concept is derived from the conception by a process designed to render it free of those elements that would unfit it to be a tool in the elucidation or expression of truth. The scientific deductive system. In this context the term “scientific deductive system” means a combination of concepts in hypotheses and systems of hypotheses so that they are logically related to each other. The logical relation of one concept with another and of one hypothesis with another enhances the meaning of each concept and hypothesis thus linked and expresses a meaning that the concepts and hypotheses and links do not individually possess. In this respect the meaning of the whole may be said to be greater than the meaning of the sum of its parts. Calculi. The scientific deductive system may be represented by an algebraic calculus. In the algebraic calculus a number of signs are brought together according to certain rules of combination. The signs have no properties other than those conferred on them by the rules of combination. (a + b)2 = a2 + b2 + 2 ab, is an affirmation of the rules of combination of a and b. a and b have no meaning other than that they are replaceable by numbers and must be understood to be capable of manipulation in the manner defined by the statement (a + b)2 = a2 + b2 + 2 ab. In short to say that a and b have properties could only mean that they lend themselves to manipulation in accordance with rules and that the rules to which they conform can be deduced from the statement in that, like the conception, it retains a capacity for saturation. (Bion, 1963, pp. 22–25)

The vertical columns Bion now sets himself the task of explaining the meaning of each of the vertical columns of the Grid, from 1 to . . . n, which he calls the “axis of uses”, since this axis is intended to describe the use that the analyst makes of the linguistic statements that are exchanged between patient and analyst.

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“Considering any psycho-analytic session”, he writes “as an emotional experience, what elements in it must be selected to make it clear that it had been a psycho-analysis and could have been nothing else?” (1963, p. 14). It is not uncommon for patients to feel that psychoanalysis is a cold and unemotional experience, but one that can nevertheless provoke effects appropriate to intense emotions. “The dictum”, he writes “that an analysis must be conducted in an atmosphere of deprivation is usually understood to mean that the analyst must resist any impulse in himself to gratify the desires of his own analysands or to crave gratification of his own”, for “at no time must either analyst or analysand lose the sense of isolation within the intimate relationship of analysis” (ibid., p. 15). “The sense of loneliness”, he continues a bit further on, seems to relate to a feeling, in the object of scrutiny, that it is being abandoned and, in the scrutinizing object, that it is cutting itself off from the source or base on which it depends for its existence. To summarize: detachment can only be achieved at the cost of painful feelings of loneliness and abandonment . . . part of the price paid is in feelings of insecurity” (ibid., pp. 15–16) What does psychoanalysis consist of ? “Does it involve”, he asks, “the translation of thought into action8 or some analogous process, for example of thought into a fixed idea?” (ibid., p. 17). “Since the analyst is constantly called upon to decide whether to intervene with an interpretation”, it is important that he takes as much care as possible over how he formulates the statement he wants to make. Thus amongst all the possible interpretations, it is a matter of deciding which, at any given moment, seems the most ­correct – a process of introspection that calls for a truly critical sense when one realizes that “analytic interpretations can be seen to be theories held by the analyst about the models and theories the patient has of the analyst” (ibid., italics in the original). If the patient shows, say, that he is depressed, the interpretation that the analyst will give in the form of a “definitory hypothesis” (column 1) will be formulated as a way of saying, “This, that you, the patient, are now experiencing is what I, and, in my opinion, most people, would call depression” (ibid., p. 18). As Bion explains, “[T]here can be no argument about [this kind of interpretation] because the only valid criticism would be if the statement could be shown to be absurd because self-contradictory” (ibid.). Concerning definitory hypotheses, he writes, moreover, It may be worth observing that they always presuppose a negative element, that is to say, if I say that this paper is about the Grid, that is what it is about, not cookery or measurement, etc. Equally, however erroneous my claim may be, however obvious it is to someone else that it is about measurement (or cookery or anything else) their formulation is not relevant to this discussion or any discussion for which the definition has been formulated by the protagonist. Its falsity, or otherwise is a function of its relationship to other elements in the scheme. Thus, if “we shall leave at sunrise”, is stating a definitory

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hypothesis about the “hour” of our departure, it is incontrovertible and the fact that it is a statement betraying “hubris” does not controvert the definitory hypothesis. This is my definition of a definitory hypothesis, and as a definition it is a dictate not subject to alteration. (Bion, 1971, p. 10–11, italics in the original) Column 2, or “column ψ” − a term taken up as a tribute to Freud, to his hysterical πρστον ψευδοζ (proton pseudos or first lie) and to the ψ apparatus of the Project and of The Interpretation of Dreams – represents “the realization in such a way that the analyst’s anxiety that the situation is unknown and correspondingly dangerous to him, is denied by an interpretation intended to prove to himself and the patient that this is not so” (1963, p. 18). He adds: Any practising analyst appreciates that this state of affairs belongs to the domain of counter-transference and indicates analysis for the analyst. But as even analysts cannot have all the analysis they may consider desirable, the theory used as a barrier against the unknown will remain in the armoury of analyst as well as patient. (p. 18) Thus, “column 2 relates to elements known to be as false . . . but enshrining statements valuable against the inception of any development in the patient’s personality involving catastrophic change” (1971, p. 11). I will develop further on a certain number of ideas concerning this “column of lies”. “The columns 3, 4, 5”, he continues, “are relatively simple; column 3 approximates to Freud’s ideas of memory and notation as he describes it in his paper on ‘Formulations on the two principles of mental functioning’ (Freud, 1911). Column 4 comes closer to attention – free floating – with column 5 as more directed to some particular object. . . . Columns 3–5 may be conveniently regarded as a spectrum of attention ranging from memory and desire to floating, general attention to a further extreme of particularity. . . . Column 6 is intended to categorize thoughts which are closely related to, or are transformations into, action.” But, he continues, “[T]he first difficulty to be cleared up is what relationship column 6 bears to row A (β-elements). The intention is to include a category which is not thought at all.” And he adds: Just as it can be argued that Descartes himself in his concept of philosophical doubt failed to doubt the necessity of a thinker – an omission which I have been convinced should be repaired by psycho-analysts – so I think psychoanalyst should entertain the reciprocal belief in personality without thought. In the practice of psycho-analysis it is well known to everyone that patients will often say they “have no thoughts” or are “thinking of nothing”. It seems to me that the usual supposition that resistances or denials are operating are theories which have so often proved their value that it would be dangerous,

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to say the least, to suppose anything else without convincing evidence. Yet I am certain that . . . the existence of a β-element row appears to leave room for such convictions if it should prove useful to entertain them. The column 6 category is intended for something which by contrast is thought even though it is thought apparently instantaneously transformed into action, or, to reverse Keats’s formulation of negative capability,“action which is used as a substitute for thought and not action which is used as a prelude to thought”. Keats, it will be remembered, speaks of the capacity for tolerating half truths, mysteries, etc., as essential for the language of achievement in contrast to thinking as a substitute for action. (Bion, 1971, pp. 12–13) Let us now imagine, with Bion, an example: The patient enters and following a convention established in psycho-analysis, shakes hands. This is an external fact, what I have called a ‘realization’. . . . This [fact] I mean to replace by a grid category. The grid category is determined by picking on that category to which my clinical observation of the patient’s behaviour seems most closely to approximate. Suppose the handshake is intended as a denial of hostility that the patient experienced in a dream about me. His action would then fall into a category in column 2 and row C. The sign would then be C2. The associations following this start to the session would have yielded the evidence for choosing the sign C2. (Bion, 1970, pp. 12–13) But, Bion continues, [S]uppose the evidence suggests that the patient’s experience is that my handshake was a sexual assault on him . . . I expect accordingly to find the category in column 1. If, from my knowledge of him, I am convinced that the patient is not experiencing this as a thought or idea or even as a dream, but as an actual fact, I assess the category to lie in row A – the β-elements. The category . . . is thus A1. (ibid., p. 13)

When thought comes up against its limits In Chapter 22 of Learning from Experience, Bion writes: “[T]he difficulties of a patient suffering from a ‘disorder of thought’ are similar to those that beset scientists . . . they arise through failure to ascertain facts” (1962a, p. 66) and, from this point of view, the man of science is no better off than the psychotic. The psychotic, as we have seen, is unable to establish with the analyst the equivalent of the relationship that an infant can form with a breast that dispenses material wisdom and love, for such a relationship presupposes (1) that the infant can continue to consider

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the breast as an animate object, and (2) that alpha-function, which guarantees the existence of a reality outside oneself, has not been destroyed, Yet it is precisely this twofold incapacity that prevents the psychotic patient from transforming an emotional experience into alpha-elements. The sense-impressions and emotions that he experiences remain unchanged, feeding the psyche with beta-elements, which can only be used in projective identification. “Beta elements”, he writes, are not felt to be phenomena, but things-in-themselves. . . . We are thus presented with a state of mind precisely contrasting with that of the scientist who knows he is concerned with phenomena [that is to say with representations of unattainable realities] but has not the same certitude that the phenomena have a counterpart of things-in-themselves. (Bion, 1962a, p. 6) The same problem arises in practising psychoanalysis insofar as the psychoanalytic object, which is the object of investigations both by the patient and the analyst, must remain alive, much to the discontent of the psychotic patient. That is the reason why Bion evokes the problem of the existence, in the field of psychoanalysis, of psychoanalytic objects and likens it to the problem Aristotle solved by supposing that mathematics dealt with mathematical objects. It is convenient to suppose that psycho-analysis deals with psycho-analytic objects and that it is with the detection and observation of these objects that the psycho-analyst must concern himself in the conduct of an analysis. (Bion, 1962a, p. 68) The Grid allows me now to close this chapter devoted to the genesis and development of thought. It has to be admitted that it is not the easiest element to adopt when one becomes a psychoanalyst, if even one can, at a personal level, try to learn how to use it, if one so wishes. And as Bion never “prescribed” anything concerning training – other than a process of “unlearning” which offers the possibilities of discovering one’s own movements of thought – it is up to each one to make us of it as such or to modify it. I would add, however, that a few years ago I met an analyst at a congress abroad who used the Grid fully and faithfully to present the advances, setbacks, bifurcations, restarts, and other psychic movements of a woman patient during one session among a series of sessions that constituted a turning-point in the analysis. The ease with which he handled the denominations of each box (D2, F4, C6, etc.) of the Grid was such that his paper was a high moment of that congress.

Notes 1 See this astonishing sentence: Everything that “later becomes known . . . derive[s] from realizations of two-ness as in breast and infant” (Bion, 1967, p. 113). 2 Citation from John Milton’s (1667) Paradise Lost, Book Three, l.12.

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3 On other occasions, Bion states that what is involved is the mating of a preconception with a negative realization (1967, p. 113). 4 This passage is reproduced in full by Bion in Learning from Experience (1962a, p. 28). 5 See also, in the 1966 film, Bernie, by Albert Dupontel, the reply, typical of a psychotic statement: “It’s a cat, but it is also a feline.” 6 See Freud (1909) regarding the patient’s declaration concerning the fantasy of murdering his parents when he discovered the pleasure of sexual intercourse for the first time (“This is glorious! One might murder one’s father for this” (p. 201). 7 The patient evoked by Bion is clearly psychotic. 8 A formulation which is reminiscent of Jacques Lacan’s affirmation that interpretation is a “psychoanalytic act”, an act of speech.

6 THE REJECTION OF CAUSATION

“The narrative form is associated with the theory of causation”, states Bion (1962a, p. 74), who, with quite extraordinary energy, sought in the field of psychoanalysis to transcend all limitations of thought. It is not so common for a psychoanalyst to interest himself to this point in a domain that belongs more to philosophy, physics, or logic, and mathematical logic in particular. Sigmund Freud had seen how useful this might be when, in his letter to Fliess dated 6 December, 1896, he mentioned in connection with memory that the second registration, which underpins the unconscious, “is arranged according to other, perhaps causal, relations” (see Masson, 1985, p. 208, my emphasis). In fact, as long as Freud was able to maintain a line of thinking that was based on the constitution of the mind described in terms of topographical construction bringing together three “agencies” – the unconscious, the preconscious, and the conscious – he was in possession of a model that supplied the means to describe, via word-presentations and registered traces, hysteria, repression, obsessional neurosis, anxiety-neurosis, etc., that is to say, the causes that produced the symptoms on account of which patients sought psychoanalytic treatment. But as soon as Freud was obliged to extend his field of studies because the disappearance of symptoms and the lifting of repression met with unconscious resistances, thereby indicating their origin in the unconscious part of the ego, according to a model organised henceforth in terms of structure (including the id, the ego and the superego), he found himself faced with the task of having to search for the meaning hidden behind these resistances. In other words, as an heir of the nineteenthcentury philosophical tradition postulating that thought is synonymous with logic, Freud ventured to explore the psychic foundations of this logic insofar as they elude consciousness. In this respect, it is surprising to read in Studies on Hysteria (Freud, 1895, with Breuer), that he agreed with Breuer that there was an unquestionable causal link in a paralysed female patient between her paralysis as a symptom and the repression in

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her of an idea linked to a wish, namely, that the death of her sister might give her access to her brother-in-law with whom she was in love. It is far from my intention, however, to claim that they were mistaken. What is troubling is the conjunction of the symptom and this psychic logic. One is inevitably tempted to establish a logical relationship in terms of causation between these two facts observed in different ways. If Bion was also interested in this style of thinking, it is because the patients he saw did not cease to make use – without realising it – of a theory of causation that helped them to “justify” the psychic constructions that they were advancing, even if this logic seemed unrelated to reality. It is true that a causal connection covering up any form of weakness is more convincing and reassuring – even when it flagrantly contradicts common experience. Lewis Carroll, who was a source of inspiration for Bion, proved himself a master in this respect when, for example, he states in Chapter Six of Through the Looking-Glass (1871) that rather than celebrating someone’s birthday, which only occurs once a year, one should choose to celebrate “unbirthdays”, which number 364. The patients of whom Bion speaks also make use of causation. The first reason for this is that, having destroyed their apparatus for thinking in order to avoid understanding anything about the relations in which they are involved, about the way the world is ordered, and about the relations that govern it and that govern the links between individuals, etc., they are afraid they have destroyed the meaning, including in their analyst, that would provide them with confirmation of their harmful omnipotence. Causation goes hand in hand, therefore, with guilt. I will come back to this. The form of association between the elements linked by a narrative – in other words the narrative form of any proposition – is linked to the theory of causation, and it is to Hume that we owe this revelation.

Hume and the question of causation In philosophy, causation is demonstrated by the links of cause and effect. In the so-called “hard sciences” – physics, biology, ecology – causation is a postulate, or a basic postulate. It is only in the social sciences that causation is employed to show the factors that have caused this or that social phenomenon. In An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (1748) David Hume (1711–1776) asserts that when an event is the cause of another event or, conversely, when an event seems to be the effect of another event, we believe we know the nature of the connection between the two terms of causation, a connection that is supposed, in both cases, to make the first follow from the second. But, Hume remarks, in a series of events, all we perceive is the events that constitute it; in other words, our knowledge of a necessary connection is not empirical, but for the fact that it is derived from perception. In fact, we only have an idea of causation due to the fact that two events have always followed one after the other: we therefore form a sort of anticipation which leads us to think that the second term must occur after the

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first. This constant conjunction of two events – and the expectation or anticipation that results – is all that we can know about causation: our ideas cannot penetrate further into the nature of the relationship between cause and effect. The problem lies, then, in knowing what justifies our belief in causal connection and in what this connection consists. For Hume, this belief is a sort of instinct based on the development of our habits and our nervous system. It thus seems impossible to eliminate. The concept of habit or custom has a fundamental place in Hume’s thought. Since we do not perceive causation directly, belief is forged, not through direct perception of what links several phenomena but through the constant conjunction between two or more phenomena. It was necessary, therefore, to wait for Hume and the eighteenth century to establish that there is no causation inherent in nature or in the essence of things, which Aristotle called “formal causation”. Causation does not exist independently of the mind that conceives it. The only possible causation is related to the links a subject makes between events to which he gives meaning. As this way of thinking has become more established over time, we think de facto that the past is a reliable guide for the future. This is the principle of induction, that is to say, all we ever do is make assumptions, and this is for several reasons. In the first place we think that the future must resemble the past, and this is considered as a matter of logical necessity. Indeed, it is difficult for us to conceive of an irregular and chaotic world in which the future bears no point of comparison with the past or, more simply, of a world like our own that has been regular up until today but which might then change completely. There is therefore no logical necessity in the principle of induction. The second reason appeals to the past reliability of induction: it has always worked before, so it will certainly work again. But this justification does nothing more than beg the question and is thus unjustifiable in itself. For Hume it seems that an “instinct” leads us to believe that the future will be similar to the past, an instinct based on habit, exactly as for causation. This spontaneous belief is part of mental functioning. We cannot reject it without rejecting at the same time an essential part of the process that makes it possible to create learning and knowledge, and that is where the problem lies! For want of another more reliable theory, it seems, indeed, that we cannot avoid making use of the theory of causation (see Lacan, 1946; Green, 1995). However, this theory also suffers from a (severe) limit insofar as, once an event has been experienced as pleasant – a baby suckling, for example – and one wants to reproduce it, it is well worthwhile looking for the cause. According to causal logic, “each effect has its cause”. This is extraordinarily limiting! A cause can only engender an effect. There is no question of expecting a cause to produce several effects! This is the reason why psychoanalysts are interested, both in dreams and dream narratives, in the question of causation which, in both cases, reveals combined but different elements that are considered essential for throwing light on the meaning of the dream. By way of illustration, I need do no more than cite one of the notes that Bion made as an aid to thinking: “In a dream”, he writes, an act appears to have consequences; it has only sequences” (Bion, 1958, p. 1, Bion’s emphasis). And

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if a dream is indeed made up of sequences that follow each other, nothing assures us that these sequences are linked with each other in the order in which they are communicated. Only the account that the patient gives of a dream confers on it its temporal logic that is only valid while he is speaking about it. “The narrative”, Bion writes, by introducing cause and effect as a means of binding its elements, mis-­ represents the constant conjunction relationship. Cause and effect is proper to the narrative but has no corresponding link between one element and another in the realization. In the realization, the elements are merely conjoined. (Bion, 1965, p. 97, footnote 1, Bion’s emphasis) Freud had already put forward the same idea when, in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), he suggested, for example, in a dream, inverting the order of sequences in such a way as to reveal a meaning in the dream that one would not otherwise discover. Perhaps Freud was faced with his own limitation here insofar as he could not tolerate the frustration of not being able to give meaning to a dream – a limitation that Bion strived to overcome.

The conditions of frustration The capacity to tolerate frustration is thus linked to the fact of being able to have recourse to a certain temporality, to a certain wait-and-see policy, while seeking a solution for a situation that causes real unpleasure. The “no-breast”, which does not fulfil the role that it should in order to supply what is demanded in a situation of lack, is linked to the breast, while differentiating itself from it, since it becomes a “collapsed” form of the breast. Between no-breast and breast, a constant conjunction is established that must be thought in such a way as to produce, in reality, a modification capable of procuring a remedy for the absence of a breast, that is to say, a no-breast. At this stage, I would like to point out that many of my sentences, written in a way that is designed to help the reader understand the function of causation in discourse and in narrative, are formed by drawing on the French verb devoir: for example, I wrote that Freud had to extend his field of studies; that one should celebrate un-birthdays; that it is to Hume that we owe this discovery; that the second term must occur after the first; that the future must resemble the past; that it has always worked, so it should work again; that the “no-breast” does not play the role that it should do; and finally, that a constant conjunction must be thought in order to produce a modification. This verb, and the constructions of meaning that it underpins, induces a causalist logic that Bion denounced very early on, having been accustomed to hear psychotics trying, by this means, to consolidate a world where nothing is in its place. This is the case for the “no-breast” that does not play the role that it should do. Personally, knowing what the use of the verb devoir induces unconsciously in the reader’s understanding, I have been careful, in the

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way I have constructed my sentences, to avoid using it as much as possible. This logic, Bion (1965) writes, which is a logic of frustration – since it does not provide what it should provide – offers the patient two apparently divergent courses: “he can think . . ., that is, use thoughts in accordance with rules which are acceptable to, and understandable by, others” − and “this leads to the proliferation of a range of statements” − “or, he cannot think . . . and does not elaborate or employ rules of combination and manipulation that are widely acceptable” (p. 56). Such a situation obliges him to look for a way or ways to abandon what has become persecuting within him. He must split, project, or evacuate these elements (which are betaelements), otherwise his feelings of persecution will lead to feelings of depression. The patient then feels “depressed by feelings of persecution and persecuted by feelings of depression” (Bion, 1963, p. 39). The question, Bion continues, implies the validity of a theory of causation, a theory, he writes, which I consider misleading and liable to give rise to constructions that are basically false; if it is fallacious we may discard it for one as fallacious – which may be true of the formulation, by Heisenberg, of the problem of multiple causation1. . . . If so, the logical step would be to bother no longer with causation or its counterpart – results. In psycho-analysis it is difficult to avoid feeling that a gap is left by its disappearance and that the gap should be filled. (Bion, 1965, p. 57) Here we find ourselves in a situation where a theoretical gap (a no-breast) must be filled. “Over a wide range of our problems”, he continues, “no difficulty is caused by regarding the theory of causation as fallacious, but useful. When it comes to problems presented by disturbances in thought . . . the patient has a theory of causation that requires assessment, and such assessment cannot be made without contrasting it with some other theory – presumably the analyst’s own” (ibid). To speak of a theory of causation is, as we have seen, to speak of the fact that “something causes something else”, and thus of “something that is a precursor of something else”. This can be very useful when, for example, we notice that a patient is verging on a line of thinking that risks causing an experience of pain such that feelings of persecution and depression will develop towards the analysis and towards the analyst. By way of example, in connection with a patient whose account of his problems seemed “realistic, coherent and rational”, Bion (1965) writes: “There seemed to be nothing that I could say that did not have the effect of leading him away from the theme of his communication and destroying the coherence of the material. . . . Every sentence was a series of tenuously connected splits so that interpretation was made meaningless” (p. 27). The patient constructed a causal chain of events aimed at rationalising his feelings of persecution and hoped to convince the analyst that the particular causal chain was a “valid” conjunction. And, Bion adds, “ ‘valid’ in this context meant ‘not requiring scrutiny’ ” (ibid., p. 58). Thus Bion

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defines the idea of cause as “a relatively primitive pre-conception used to prevent the emergence of something else” – an idea or a thought, obviously! The patient’s communication in so far as it is to be described as logical, is a circular argument supposedly based on a theory of causation, employed to destroy contact with reality, not to further it. In this respect it qualifies for one of Freud’s criteria for psychosis – hatred of reality. But the reality that is hated is the reality of an aspect of the patient’s personality. (ibid., p. 59) – and not necessarily an aspect of external reality.

The abolition of distinctive logic In this context, it is worth dwelling for a moment on the fact that causal logic applies as much to neurotic as psychotic patients. Bion writes: Thus a patient reported angrily that the milkman had called. The patient was angry with me and went into a sulk. For about five minutes, he would not talk. . . . I was certain that the milkman had called and that the patient made no distinction between the milkman and myself; conversely my presence in the consulting room was not distinguished from the milkman’s call. . . . The patient believes that the “milkman” me did in fact visit his house and that this same milkman has just appeared to him. (1965, p. 30) The patient thus has his logic, even if it is irrational: it consists in giving a meaning to two propositions conjoined in the patient’s mind: (1) the “milkman” me has called; (2) the “milkman” me is in front of me. In this sense, his “delusion” fulfils the conditions that Freud set out for it, namely, that it is an “attempted self-cure”. “If I do not seem to know about the milkman’s visit”, Bion continues, “it makes the patient feel I cannot be aware of my behaviour and am therefore not responsible for my actions – that I am, in short, ‘mad’ ” (ibid., p. 31). Consequently, an important concern in any interpretation given by the analyst is to preserve the link, however fragile it may be, that may have been woven between the patient and analyst, that is, between internal reality and external reality. He writes: The analyst’s interpretations have characteristics of relatedness that are applicable to his universe of discourse, but not to the phenomena they represent [that is, to the phenomena inherent to the unlimited psychic reality of the patient], since those phenomena possess a relatedness, if there is one, appropriate to an infinite universe. If a patient says that he knows that his “char” is in league with the postman because his friend left white of egg in the

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bathroom the relatedness implied by his statement may differ from forms of relatedness to which I am accustomed because his statement represents phenomena related to each other in an infinite universe. Freud made a statement, which is similar in principle, when he adumbrated the universe of discourse in which conscious behaviour is studied by postulating an unconscious, but the characteristics of relatedness remain unchanged in the new universe of discourse. The differentiating factor that I wish to introduce is not between conscious and unconscious, but between finite and infinite. Nevertheless, I use, as my model for forms of relatedness in an infinite universe, forms of relatedness operative in a finite universe of discourse. (Bion, 1965, pp. 45–46)

Growth versus causation This kind of project shows that Bion sought to free (psychic) growth from the idea of causation, which nonetheless offers the mind the idea of a progression because, in this theory, the effect always follows the cause. From this point of view, it is the entire Bionian theory of thinking that can be re-evaluated by the yardstick of enlargement. The book Transformations (1965) has as its subtitle: Change from Learning to Growth. The earlier publications, Learning from Experience (1962a), as well as Elements of Psycho-Analysis (1963), are concerned with the processes and conditions of learning through the progressive establishment and linking up of thought-mechanisms. With Transformations, Bion introduced a general reorganisation of his conception of the psychic apparatus, without in any way invalidating what he had established previously, just as Freud, in 1920, had made the transition from a topographical theory to a structural theory without in any way reneging on his earlier propositions, which he continued to treat as valid. Bion begins, moreover, by invalidating the Humean theory of causation which, according to him, suffers from a defect in form. “In spite of these objections”, he writes, “I think Hume’s argument has validity for psycho-analysis” (1965, p. 65). Furthermore, in scrutinising critically Hume’s theory, Bion increases, even more so than Hume does himself, the field of application of the principle of causation by comparing the effect of the force of one “object” on another “object” with the relationship that exists (or is established) between two people, the analyst and the analysand, for example, a conflictual relationship that Bion names “Science versus Morals”. In the same vein, he seeks to categorise what specifies the “psychoanalytic act” (see Lacan, 1967–1968) and reflects on the transformation from “scientific thought” into “moral thought” that is necessary for the former to be made suitable for action! (1965, p. 65). The same criticism is directed at Freud for the utilisation that he makes of the Oedipus myth. Among the “theories used to investigate the unknown”, Bion (1963) writes, the most obvious example is the Oedipus myth “as Freud has abstracted it

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to form the psycho-analytic theory” (p. 19). The purpose of drawing on this myth is to make interpretations “with an intention to illuminate material that would otherwise remain obscure in order to help the patient release still further material” (ibid.). But, Bion asks, how can the Oedipus myth used by Freud be employed as a preconception called upon to become a conception, or a thought, once Freud has operated a selection, a “censorship”, of the material originating from ancient Greek mythology? The elements selected by Freud – murder and incest – do not allow us, according to Bion, to understand anything about the Freudian proposition of a universal “Oedipus complex”. One cannot, in effect, imagine that it was in order to “possess” Jocasta that Oedipus killed Laius. Bion writes: Thanks to his [Freud’s] discoveries it is possible by reviewing the myth to see that it contains elements that were not stressed in the early investigations because they were overshadowed by the sexual component in the drama. . . . No element, such as the sexual element, can be comprehended save in its relationship with other elements; for example, with the determination with which Oedipus pursues his inquiry into the crime despite the warnings of Tiresias. It is consequently not possible to isolate the sexual component, or any other, without distortion. Sex, in the Oedipal situation, has a quality that can only be described by the implications conferred on it by its inclusion in the story. If it is removed from the story, it loses its quality. (Bion, 1963, p. 45) This is the reason why Bion lists in detail all the elements that form an intrinsic part of the myth2 and attributes to each of them a precise “place” in each column of the Grid. Thus the pronouncement of the oracle is a definitory hypothesis (column 1) insofar as it states the theme of the story. Tiresias “may be regarded as representing the hypothesis, known to be false (column 2) that is maintained to act as a barrier against anxiety . . .” (ibid., p. 48). The myth as a whole fulfils the function that Freud attributes to notation (column 3).“The Sphinx represents the function Freud attributed to attention (column 4), but it also implies a threat against the curiosity it stimulates” (ibid.) “Oedipus represents the triumph of determined curiosity over intimidation . . . and is thus the investigatory tool” (column 5). Finally, the “action” (column 6) is represented by the outcome, exile or dispersion (ibid., p. 65).

Going beyond morality The theory of causation thus used for the logical interest that it presents for the mind resonates strongly with the field of morality which stands in the way of a harmonious development of thought-activity. We can therefore see the close connection emerging that links thought-activity, the search for knowledge, and a sense of guilt and morality. Moreover, Bion felt justified in writing: “[T]he theory of causation is only valid in the domain of morality and only morality can cause anything.” And he adds, as if it were self-evident, though the point is essential: “Meaning has

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no influence outside the psyche and causes nothing” (Bion, 1965, p. 59, footnote 1) (Bion’s emphasis). By preventing thought-activity in this way from serving the search for meaning, some patients produce beta-elements that all have one element in common: the moral component of these products. “The moral component”, he writes, “is inseparable from feelings of guilt and responsibility and from a sense that the link between one such object and another, and between these objects and the personality, is moral causation” (ibid.). This hindrance of thought can even go as far as to create “unexpected” solutions. He writes: The observation of constant conjunction phenomena . . . and therefore the whole process . . . of definition and search for meaning that is to be attached to the conjunction, can be destroyed by the strength of a sense of causation and its moral implications. Patients show that the resolution of a problem appears to present less difficulty if it can be regarded as belonging to a moral domain; causation, responsibility and therefore a controlling force (as opposed to helplessness) provide a framework within which omnipotence reigns. (Bion, 1965, p. 64) If, now, we recall that this whole process is implied by the search for a solution linked to the incapacity to tolerate frustration, what solution remains for a personality caught up in the necessity of deferring the expected satisfaction? Bion tries to answer this question as follows: If intolerance of frustration is not so great as to activate the mechanisms of evasion and yet is too great to bear dominance of the reality principle, the personality develops omnipotence as a substitute for the mating of the preconception, or conception, with the negative realization. This involves the assumption of omniscience as a substitute for learning from experience by aid of thoughts and thinking. There is therefore no psychic activity to discriminate between true and false. Omniscience substitutes for the discrimination between true and false a dictatorial affirmation that one thing is morally right and the other wrong. The assumption of omniscience that denies reality ensures that the morality thus engendered is a function of psychosis. (Bion, 1962a, p. 114)

Generalisation and particularisation As we have just seen, the Oedipus myth, as well as the other myths to which Bion refers, show just how far sexual knowledge and pleasure is “a predominant feature of the knowledge sought and forbidden” (1963, p. 65). As we can see, each time “penetration into, or ingestion into, or expulsion from, a blissful place or state is predominant” (ibid.), a state of disintegration occurs that

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is comparable to that which Bion identifies in “certain highly disturbed patients”. The patient “attacks his object with such violence that not only is the object felt to disintegrate but the personality delivering the attack also” (ibid., p. 66). Furthermore, this disintegration fragments even the most individual components of social fabric. In this manner, each individual is the bearer of his own personal myth. Thus myths are the public and widespread version of what each one of us has begun to elaborate privately in relation to his personal individual situation. For every child, each myth is “an object of investigation” (thus column 5) which “is part of the primitive apparatus of the individual’s armoury of learning” (ibid., p. 66). Thus, Bion puts forward the hypothesis that The private myth, corresponding to the Oedipus myth, enables the patient to understand his relationship with the parents. This private myth, in its investigatory role, if impaired or maldeveloped or subjected to too great a stress, disintegrates; its components are dispersed and the patient is left without an apparatus which would enable him to comprehend the parental relationship and so to adjust to it. The Oedipus debris will in these circumstances contain elements that are components of the Oedipus myth that should have operated as a preconception. (Bion, 1963, pp. 66–67) To put this in another way, the role of the Oedipus myth is to be used “as a preconception intended to mate with the parental realization to produce understanding of the parental relationship” (ibid., p. 81, footnote 1). Approaching the myth in another way allowed us to define it, you will recall, as “a primitive form of pre-conception and a stage in publication, that is, in communication of the individual’s private knowledge to his group” (ibid., p. 92). This is the reason, Bion writes, why analysts need to consider that the Oedipal material may possibly be evidence for a primitive apparatus of pre-conception and therefore possessing a significance additional to its significance in classical theory. I am postulating a precursor of the Oedipal situation not in the sense that such a term might have in Melanie Klein’s discussion of Early Phases of the Oedipus Complex, but as something that belongs to the ego as part of its apparatus for contact with reality. In short I postulate a . . . version of a private Oedipus myth which is the means, the pre-conception, by virtue of which the infant is able to establish contact with the parents as they exist in the world of reality. The mating of this pre-conception with the realization of the actual parents gives rise to the conception of parents. (Bion, 1963, pp. 92–93) In other words, it is this Oedipal material which, if it is present in the infant’s mental apparatus in order to help him think about the relationship between the parents

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with whom he lives, offers this infant the possibility of “entering the Oedipal situation” as we say. It seems that this mechanism can be related to what Lacan, for his part, developed with the expression “a time for understanding”, and further that this time is one that offers an opening. Bion, you will recall, suggested equating each of the columns of the Grid to a character from the Oedipus myth. Thus, he writes, “when a break in analysis is impending, the break would be related to exile and the analyst should anticipate the appearance of other features of the Oedipal situation” (ibid., p. 73).

The Oedipal situation in psychoanalysis It goes without saying that the process does not unfold in a straightforward way. Its development depends in particular, as we have seen, on the capacity to think which itself depends on the aptitude of the infant to tolerate frustration sufficiently so that a mechanism of projective identification can be established that will include the infant and the mother in a common search for a solution to the problem that the expected breast does not appear automatically. If the relative capacity to tolerate frustration, on the one hand, and the envy experienced by the infant towards the breast, on the other, disturb the first exchanges between the baby and his environment, projective identification, aimed at relieving the psyche of increased excitation, functions in an excessive mode, splitting and massive evacuation of beta-elements and of parts of the ego override any other mechanism, and the thinking apparatus becomes impoverished to the point of becoming incapable of apprehending the reality of the Oedipal situation that is setting in (see Lévy, 2013a, 2013b). The attacks carried out in this way are aimed at destroying the reality of the parental couple, experienced as procreative and sexual, and even of external reality as a whole or, failing that, the link that connects the infant with this reality, or internal reality, that is to say, the thinking apparatus that makes it possible to be aware of this reality. These attacks are the instrument of a superego that has established itself at a very early stage, so early that it is contemporaneous with the constitution of the ego which, consequently does not take place, and we are then dealing with what Bion (1967) calls an “ego-destructive superego” (p. 67). This severe and destructive superego has a pre-eminent position compared with the impoverished ego, and launches attacks against any mechanism of linking in such a way as to preserve the ego from a painful confrontation with an Oedipal situation that it is incapable of thinking about. Bion continues: If we now turn to consider what there is in reality that makes it so hateful to the patient that he must destroy the ego which brings him into contact with it, it would be natural to suppose that it is the sexually oriented Oedipus situation. (ibid. p. 88) This is a way, for him, of situating the appearance of the Oedipal configuration at a time when “Oedipal” goes hand in hand with the “establishment of the ego” He

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adds: “When [in analysis] reconstitution of the ego has proceeded sufficiently to bring the Oedipus situation into sight, it is quite common to find that it precipitates further attacks on the ego” (ibid.). As soon as the patient evokes the infantile situation in which he found he was lacking the apparatus necessary for gaining a conception of the parental relationship and hence for resolving Oedipal problems, we understand that he is not the victim of a failure to resolve these problems, but rather that “he has never been faced with these problems”. This is how Bion considers the Oedipal situation of patients who seek analytic help for “thought disorders”. Basically, the originality of Bion’s conception lies in the fact that the Oedipal and pre-Oedipal situations play a particular role in them inasmuch as the patients in question were unable to reach the phase when the “Oedipal situation” poses a problem. The terror of such an encounter is at the origin of virulent attacks aimed at destroying this situation. It is thus the failure of a certain kind of extremely early communication during a “very early oedipal” phase in the infant’s life – a phase during which a primitive form of communication with his entourage lays the foundations on which verbal communication will later be based – that prevents the thinking apparatus from developing. Furthermore, when Bion states: “[T]he infant has an innate pre-conception of the Oedipus situation” (ibid., p. 93)3 – a pre-conception that is merely waiting to become a conception as a result of meeting with a realization – he is indicating that it is the non-occurrence of this meeting that deprives the infant of the capacity to form an idea of it. It does not allow him, therefore to identify himself in the difference between the sexes, between the generations and between family clans, and to project himself as a future partner in a relationship and in a sexual couple. “In each instance”, he writes, the perspective that enabled me, but not the patient, to grasp the meaning of the associations was that afforded by the Oedipus theory. In every instance, that which appeared to cause the patient to reverse the perspective was the Oedipus myth. I say myth, not theory, because the distinction is important. (ibid., p. 58) Thus the patient failed to make use of the myth as a framework for understanding the situation in which he found himself with his two parents. Likewise, in analysis, each time he finds himself faced with an interpretation whose content refers to the sexual component of the Oedipus situation, he seeks to reverse the perspective.

A creative anticipation called intuition We can see then how Bion moves from myth(s) – forms of cultural knowledge handed down as atemporal epics – to anticipation and intuition, two modes of thought that take temporality into account.

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In many circumstances linked to the material evoked by the patient, Bion states that “One would expect an intensification” of the determination with which curiosity is pursued or of resistance against the emergence of any new material, of whatever kind. He also says: “What my assumptions amount to is . . .” (1965, p. 131); “It follows that there is never any question . . .” (1959[1967], p. 102); “The way is therefore prepared for . . .” (ibid, p. 107); “The result is . . . (ibid) – all formulations containing the idea of temporal succession. He writes, for instance, that a painful emotion “should be obvious to the analyst but unobserved by the patient” because “an emotion that is obvious to the patient is usually painfully obvious” (1963, p. 74). But, he continues, “avoidance of unnecessary pain must be one aim in the exercise of analytic intuition”. The analyst’s capacity for intuition should enable him to “demonstrate an emotion before it has become painfully obvious” (ibid.).4 Elsewhere, he develops this idea more fully: Scientific training seems to suppose that capacity for anticipation is a desirable attribute and worth developing. It appears important for the psychoanalyst to be able to predict his patient’s attempt at suicide, or, conversely, his probable improvement. Let us examine this supposition more closely. If it is supposed that the psycho-analyst must anticipate his patient’s suicide it means no more than that the psycho-analyst should be able to entertain as wide a spectrum of thought and feeling, pleasant or unpleasant, as is possible. The idea that his patient might commit suicide is only one particular instance of the painful thoughts which the psycho-analyst must be capable of sustaining; otherwise he will be deflected from doing the work he exists to do and which no one else can do, namely to analyse. . . . The psycho-analyst only is in a position to know that his function is to psycho-analyse. He is under pressure, isolated, and vulnerable, subjected to the temptation to abandon his role and assume one which, however unfitted he may be for it, conforms to the accepted conventions and preconceptions of the group. . . . If he does so . . . the patient loses his psycho-analyst and gains a doubtfully valuable auxiliary. (Bion, 1967, pp. 125–126) The idea that the evolution of analytic treatment may be dependent on this sort of temporality functions in both directions; that is to say, when one comes across inductions – as we have just seen – one can equally take interest in the deductions that psychological logic has imposed. Thus, Bion writes, we are all aware that “the sexual instinct is an integral part of psychoanalytic theory.” But, he continues, “the element of sex in the sense of something for which I need to look is not sex but that from which the presence of sex may be induced” (1963, p. 74). “Therefore”, he adds, “the element I choose is not a sign of sexuality but a precursor of sexuality. . . . Thus, if the hate that a patient is experiencing is a precursor of love, its virtue as an element resides in its quality as a precursor of love and not in its being hate” (ibid).

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Positive growth and negative growth Such are the directions of thought that offer themselves to the analyst during his work, just as, on the Grid, the transition from one row to another in the vertical axis increases or decreases the development of the material. Row C – that of preconception – represents, according to Bion’s criteria, a starting point from which “a process of growth, positive or negative” occurs. “The uses”, Bion writes, “formulated in terms of myth, row C, may now be successively diminished in quality till they become analytic objects represented by the beta-elements of row A, or be stimulated to grow so that they can be represented by signs appropriate to the elements of rows D, E, F, G, and H. . . . The movement → A diminishes sophistication of the component represented, but the movement → H increases it, the latter being approximate to a prelude to interpretation” (1963. pp. 80–81). Here, too, this double movement takes up some of the modalities employed by Bion to go beyond the conception of psychic temporality elaborated by psychoanalytic theory, which he saw as being as too linear. On this question, we know that Freud, taking into account the erogenous zones pre-eminent in the infant according to his age, had postulated that one stage follows another, the first being linked, from birth, to the importance of the oral zone through which food, air, the voice, etc., transit in both directions. The so-called oral stage is followed by the anal stage, with its alternation between exits and entries (real or fantasised), a stage itself which, in principle, must be abandoned, that is to say, left behind, “resolved” in favour of the (sacrosanct) genital stage. This last is linked to taking into consideration the reality of the difference between the sexes which is supposed to enable every infant, whether boy or girl (albeit following different modalities), to find his or her place on the social stage after having confronted the Oedipal situation linked to its personal environmental elements. To this conception, which first takes into account the development of the body, in both its somatic and erotic registers, and then the capacity for symbolisation (language, speech, thought, substitution of words for things and the complex interplay of thing- and word- presentations), Kleinian theory – to which Bion often gives his allegiance – prefers a much earlier and archaic vision (but one that is also progressive) in which the constitution of the mind evolves from a first paranoidschizoid phase, described in 1946, towards a second phase, the so-called “depressive position”, which was discovered subsequently. The first is marked by forms – sometimes fantasised – of unintegration, spontaneity, wildness, brutality, splitting, projection, destructiveness, activity of a ferocious early superego, the presence of highly persecutory elements, an incapacity to take reality into account because the infant still experiences himself as fragmented, and an almost total lack of symbolisation. This is what led Melanie Klein to consider that, during this phase, the infant is “cruel”. The second phase is characterised by unification, that is, the reparation of the internal dissociated elements, the integration of the different personal components, depression as a consequence of the attacks directed at the earlier phase and the consequent feelings of guilt and remorse, a capacity to take the other into

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account as a whole object distinct from the ego (both similar and different), identification with this other object that is now loved and towards whom the infant can feel care and concern. This process of development is necessarily interpreted from a positive perspective, and if it cannot be established without too many difficulties it very quickly leads to pathological distortions of the construction of the mind which appear in the form of disharmony, infantile psychosis, very deep anxieties, early autistic withdrawal and debilitating infantile fixations.

From Ps→ D (Melanie Klein) to Ps ↔ D (Bion) This “temporal linear shift” seems, with Bion, to have freed itself of a certain rigidity that could still be found in Freud’s work, in 1920, when, for example, he wrote: But at this point we become aware of a state of things which also confronts us in many other instances in which light has been thrown by psycho-analysis on a mental process. So long as we trace the development from its final outcome backwards, the chain of events appears continuous, and we feel we have gained an insight which is completely satisfactory or even exhaustive. But if we proceed in the reverse way, if we start from the premises inferred from analysis and try to follow these up to the final result, then we no longer get the impression of an inevitable sequence of events which could not have been otherwise determined. We notice at once that there might have been another result, and that we might have been just as well able to understand and explain the latter . . . in other words, from a knowledge of the premises we could not have foretold the nature of the result. (Freud, 1920a, p. 167) The same linear process is consubstantial with Kleinian thought, as we have just seen, inasmuch as a development perspective is easily conceivable from a linearly oriented progressive point of view, a point of view that makes it possible to explain that every accident occurring in the course of this development finds expression in a “fixation” – necessarily viewed as pathological – at a given stage or phase. Bion, whose fidelity to Freud and Klein cannot be denied, considers, however, that psychoanalytic theory is based on an idealistic and reductive view of reality when it chooses linearity and progressivity alike to account for the development of the mind. It goes without saying that every observer can see for himself that developmental leaps occur, leaps that are unforeseeable, unprogrammed, unquantifiable, non-linear and random. The idea of a well-oriented uniform progression, from the back towards the front, from the past towards the future, never occurs as we imagine it, and in its place what we are dealing with rather is an irregular, chaotic, and uneven multidirectional progression, somewhat as quantum theory represents the irrationality of its movements. This apparent disorder does not, however, invalidate the theory itself, whose soundness lies well beyond its representative possibilities in a two-dimensional register.

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This is why Bion considers the two important poles of the process going from the paranoid-schizoid phase to the depressive phase as stages rather than aims. There is certainly a period in very early childhood during which paranoid-schizoid processes dominate the relations between the baby and its environment, and it is a phase during which the dispersion of elements produces a very significant number of anxieties and feelings of persecution. The discomfort of this phase, to use what is undoubtedly a euphemism – Bion speaks of nameless dread, while stressing that it is impossible to put a name to this terror – mobilises everything that can be brought together in the way of unifying dispositions in an attempt to form a container that is capable of enveloping the scattered elements and forming a content out of them. Thus we follow faithfully the passage from one phase to the other. But Bion postulates that the process does not come to a standstill, for the simple reason that the elements that have now been brought together continue to grow, extend, expand, in short, to develop. The links that unite the elements with each other have a tendency to become distended, weakened, and to come undone; they therefore once again give the elements previously linked together an autonomous and singular existence that is certainly different from the status that they had before they were linked, yet nonetheless comparable in certain respects. This new progressivity, which functions rather like children’s toys that are called “culbuto” (i.e. toys with rounded weighted bases that always return to upright), cannot be defined as a reversibility of the process involved, since the latest state in this succession of states is, in each instance, the result of the modifications that have affected the previous states. So we pass from a classical schema which is written PS → D (from the paranoidschizoid position to the depressive position), as in Melanie Klein, to a constantly dynamic schema which, with Bion, should be written: PS → D → PS → D → PS → D, etc., but which, for reasons of simplicity, Bion writes PS ↔ D. The “interaction” PS ↔ D becomes a very important mechanism, not only because it makes the reversibility of the Kleinian phases and their alternation, or their dialectic, evident, but because with each renewal of a cycle PS → D → PS → D, a transformation has taken place, of course, between PS0 and D0 and between D0 and PS1, but above all between PS0 and PS1, as between D0 and D1.

Reflections on analytic temporality All these considerations are based, of course, on the specificity of temporality which is bound up with psychoanalysis as a practice and conception of the mind. “Analytic time” can only be understood in experience and on the basis of experience, in the here-and-now of the unfolding of the session, in the practice of analysis. “Analytic time” is only conceivable from the perspective of the present – the present of the session – which aims to construct a future composed in such a way that it is not modelled on the past. It is in this way that in psychoanalysis we find ourselves having to operate with a conception of time that has no equivalent in the domain of other scientific disciplines.

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Many theoreticians of psychoanalysis have turned their attention to the question of psychoanalytic time. Freud was once again the first to do so when he pointed out – quite rightly, moreover – that “time does not exist in the unconscious”; in other words, that all the unconscious elements are characterised by timelessness. For us, as his successors, this timelessness is a source of constant questions, whether it is a matter of reflecting on the duration of the treatment, of thinking about the notion that abolishes the temporal space between the adult patient who comes to see us to begin an analysis and the infant he once was, of establishing the criteria on which an analyst determines the duration of the sessions, as well as their frequency, that is to say the interval that separates them, as well as the “holiday” period during which the analyst does not see patients, etc. − and I am only mentioning here a few technical considerations linked to the temporality of analytic treatment and to the course it takes. Another aspect of importance is the fact that elaborative thought arises from the lack of satisfaction of an expectation as lively and powerful as that of the breast that is desired each time hunger reappears. The reactivation of a similar expectation occurs in every analysis, thereby putting an end to an indefinite suspension of the satisfaction that has been desired for such a long time. “Psychoanalytic time” has to do with difference, in the temporal and transitive sense of the term, because we frequently have to defer a modification, a decision or a change insofar as psychoanalytic work and the turbulence that it induces are such that it is not possible to know with any serenity what shifts of direction need to occur in the course of a patient’s life. This psychoanalytic time thus has certain particular characteristics that should be mentioned in the present reflection on causality, and therefore on temporality. It is important to recall that an analysis unfolds in the present of the session because, whatever theme is being discussed, a dream from the night before, a contemporary anecdote, an immemorial fear, a present threat, an old recollection, an immediate or distant project, it is in the time of its enunciation in the consulting room and in the analyst’s presence that the statement will be charged with the sought-after signifying value. It is undoubtedly worthwhile for the patient or the analyst, or both, to link these speech events up with earlier events, of whatever nature they may be. They are the ordinary stuff of the links that are woven between various propositions, all of which are subject to the logic of the unconscious. That this work must be done in the here-and-now of the session, on both past and present elements, simply highlights all the better the particular temporal logic in the field of psychoanalysis, a logic that supposes that the present of the enunciation, which appeals, through the formulation of desires, to the future of the individual – desires cannot be formulated in the past! – is able to free itself from the subject’s past evoked through the patient’s associations. The opposite schema, illustrating simply the logic of this particular temporality, clearly shows that linear logic is not involved. If, in analysis, we sometimes speak about the past, we do not do so in order to speak in the past, any more than we are

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Future C Future B

Future A

Past

Future

FIGURE 6.1 Past-Present-Future

able to speak about it in the future.5 The new perception of the past modifies the evolution of the individual in his eventual future – in his eventual futures – but also creates a modification of the “reality” of the past. This work in the present creates, then, a new “trajectory” which links the past to the present like a rope. The analytic process shifts in the present the tangent point of this rope (a mid-point between past and future), thereby creating a new “trajectory” whose angle differs depending on the quantity and, above all, the intensity and depth of the “returns” made.6 The time in which speech unfolds is that of the present and the past offers no direct access to the future. The present is the only time that can be connected with the future, inasmuch as each one of us contributes to its creation.

Notes 1 Several positivist physicists, such as Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, or Stephen Hawking think that contemporary physics cannot describe reality in itself, but only what we know of it. This approach is in keeping with the philosophy of Emmanuel Kant, in which the noumenon (the thing-in-itself ) can only be known through the phenomenon (the thing as it appears to an observer), and with Bion’s conception. In other words, quantum laws are only useful for calculating and predicting the result of an experience, but not for describing reality. Hence the famous remark by Stephen Hawking: “When I hear about ‘Schrödinger’s cat’, I reach for my gun.” 2 (1) The pronouncement of the Delphic Oracle. (2) The warning of Tiresias blinded for his attack on the serpents whose coupling he had observed. (3) The riddle of the Sphinx. (4) The misconduct of Oedipus in arrogantly pursuing his inquiry and thus being guilty of hubris. Added to these are a series of disasters: (5) The plague inflicted on the population of Thebes. (6) The suicide of the Sphinx and Jocasta. (7) The blinding and exile of Oedipus. (8) The murder of the King. It is noteworthy that: (9) The original question is posed by a monster, that is, by an object composed of a number of features inappropriate to each other (Bion, 1963, pp. 46–47).

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3 The innate aspect of this pre-conception suggests that, for Bion, the infant comes into the world equipped with the knowledge of the species concerning reproduction. 4 Monique Schneider (2011) poses the question of the treatment reserved for the suffering of patients in Freud’s work. She also discusses how the absence of any echo of suffering in psychoanalysts is likely to induce a “celebration of cruelty”. 5 Even if, as Bion suggests, we can proudly state, as an indisputable definitory hypothesis: “We will leave at sunrise” – a statement that both astrologists and theologians would refute. 6 Freud said of analysts that they were “incorrigible materialists”, and Bion compared the analytic process to a probe penetrating at various depths into human “matter”.

7 TRANSFORMATIONS, OR REALITY IN ANALYSIS

Wilfred R. Bion declared that he had finally understood what poppies were the day he saw a painting by Claude Monet called “The Poppy Field” (1873). “Suppose a painter”, he writes, sees a path through a field sown with poppies and paints it: at one end of the chain of events is the field of poppies, at the other a canvas with pigment disposed on its surface. We can recognize that the latter represents the former, so I shall suppose that despite the differences between a field of poppies and a piece of canvas, despite the transformation that the artist has effected in what he saw to make it take the form of a picture, something has remained unaltered and on this something recognition depends. The elements that go to make up the unaltered aspect of the transformation I shall call invariants. (Bion, 1965, p. 1, Bion’s emphasis) It is thanks to a pictorial transformation that Bion, a psychoanalyst and observer, the visitor of an art gallery, understood something about a red flower, the reality of which he had never been able to grasp. The same is true, for Bion and each one of us, regarding everything that concerns reality. I have already recalled many times that whether it was by drawing on philosophers – Plato and the theory of Forms, Aristotle and the essence of things, Kant and the noumen (the thing-in-itself ) that is unknowable except through the phenomenon, Schopenhauer and “the world as representation”, Hegel, etc. – or by turning our attention to the various contributions of psychoanalysts who, as heirs of Freud, consider that psychic reality, as the counterpart of external reality, is knowable, an original and new approach was developed that introduced a radical epistemological rupture in the history of ideas and thought.1 Be that as it may, an enigma remains concerning the instruments of thought that enable us (1) to represent reality; and (2) to share this representation with others who we hope will understand it thanks to the means of expression we have used.

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Suppose that the artist has painted, on another canvas, a path that leads to a circular pond. We will be thankful to him for having represented the path by a line of colour that becomes increasingly narrow the further it recedes into in the landscape. We will also recognise the pond, even if it is represented by an ellipse. We would have been puzzled if he had represented the path and the pool as a circular road sign on the top of a pole sticking in the ground in the middle of a rectangular frame. We admire the talents that painters, each in their own way, deploy to restore on a canvas the sky, reflections, movements, colours, the peaks and troughs of a subject as difficult to represent as the ocean, whether it is calm or rough, dark or light, and so on. On the other hand, we are not puzzled when a child, drawing the sea, draws a line with his paintbrush to indicate a separation between the sky and the sea and then “fills” the lower part of his painting with fish of all shapes, as if, in reality – but what does this term mean? − he “saw” the sea “in cross-sections”, like in an aquarium. Each one of us carries out his own transformation. Each of us is dependent, in effect, on his or her “point of view”, an expression that Bion is reluctant to use because it gives too much importance to “sight” to the detriment of the other senses which may play a part in the representation in question. “I am unwilling”, he writes, “to use a term such as ‘point of view’ because I do not wish to be reduced to writing ‘from the point of view of digestion’, or ‘from the point of view of a sense of smell’ ” (1965, p. 91). That is why Bion chose the term “vertex”, a highly sophisticated geometrical concept used as a model. Furthermore, each vertex contains its own representational capacities – when words make it possible to describe our pond differently to a colour drawing – and each person has his own particular perception and capacity for expression. In an exchange with analysts during one of the Clinical Seminars that he gave in Brazil in 1975, Bion insisted on the need to be able to “observe a drawing, to participate in a conversation”, “to fall back on the artistic and musical skills” (Bion, 1994, p. 59) of a patient to increase the chances of better understanding the reality that the latter is trying to communicate to us or to share with us. It is for us to find the invariants common to the original reality and to the re-presentation that is made of it for us. Elsewhere, Bion writes: In his paper, “Fragment of an analysis of a case of hysteria”, Freud (1905c) gives a description of a patient Dora. The paper may be regarded as analogous to, but differing from, a painting, in that it is a verbal representation of an analysis; we can gain an impression of the experience as we can gain an impression of a field of poppies though the original field of poppies or the original analysis are unknown to us. There must then be something in the verbal description of the analysis that is invariant. (Bion, 1965, p. 3) We have, then, on the one hand, the original, unreachable, unknowable, and ungraspable reality, which Bion calls “O” and to which he attributes absolute qualities. This O is that of the origin or ultimate aim just as it is 0, which, in geometry,

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represents the meeting-point between the x-axis and the y-axis, and, in general mathematics, the result of “the subtraction of a number from itself ”, that is, a sign that represents a no-number designating nothing, that is, a no-thing, and that differs from numbers in that numbers designate one or several things. That is to say O is defined by “negative” qualities: Its existence as indwelling has no significance whether it is supposed to dwell in an individual person or in God or Devil; it is not good or evil; it cannot be known, loved or hated. It can be represented by terms such as ultimate reality or truth. The most, and the least that the individual person can do is to be it. Being identified with it is a measure of distance from it. The beauty of a rose is a phenomenon betraying the ugliness of O just as ugliness betrays or reveals the existence of O. L, H, K are links and by virtue of that fact are substitutes for the ultimate relationship with O which is not a relationship or an identification or an atonement or a reunion. The qualities attributed to O, the links with O, are all transformations of O and being O. The rose is itself whatever it may be said to be. The human person is himself and by “is” I mean in both instances a positive act of being for which L, H, K are only substitutes and approximations. (Bion, 1965, pp. 139–140) Starting from this O, various types of transformations can occur. The analyst and the patient meet in the same room, the analyst’s consulting room. The patient talks about something by selecting a certain number of words that seem to him to be more or less appropriate for describing what he is talking about. It is already a transformation of the original O. Bion discerns three ways of considering the process of this transformation. The first represents “the total operation which includes the act of transforming and the end product” (1965, p. 10). The second covers the work of transformation that the patient carries out. Bion denotes this by the sign Tp α (T = transformation; p = patient; α = process of transformation). The third concerns the result of the transformation or end product, that is, the term by means of which the patient refers to what he is talking about. Bion denotes this with the sign Tp β (T = transformation; p = patient; β = the end product). The listening analyst is also dependent on a process of transformation. He carries out his work of transformation of what he hears – Ta α (T = transformation; a = analyst; α = process of transformation) – to arrive at the end product – Ta β (T = transformation; a = analyst; β = end product). This is why Bion writes that, in his view “psycho-analysis [belongs] to the group of transformations” (1965, pp. 3–4), a group that includes painting, sculpture, engraving, music, literature, etc., in short, all the arts, as well as all human activities ranging from blast furnaces (which transform diverse minerals into steel, for instance) to nuclear sites which transform mass into energy based on Einstein’s equation E = mc2.

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It is not difficult to imagine that Tp α is different from Ta α and that Tp β is different from Ta β. They are, however, bearers of invariants. And it is on this difference and on these invariants that the practice of psychoanalysis rests. If the patient talks about a train that enters a tunnel on the edge of a forest, it is of utmost importance that the analyst is able to hear that the patient is referring to a sexual scene – though not necessary primal.2 If the analyst intervenes with an interpretation, he reveals the invariants of the lived shared experience. “An interpretation”, Bion writes, “is a transformation” (ibid., p. 4). In this domain, we are never far from the “dream work” – and, more broadly, the “work of the unconscious” – which made up the essential part of the content of Chapter Seven in Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). The difference – or the specificity – lies in the fact that, for Bion, “the dream is the evolution of O, where O has evolved sufficiently” (1970, p. 70). For memory’s sake, Freud mentions, among others, the mechanisms of “displacement” and of “condensation” that the psychical apparatus uses to store in the unconscious unpleasant elements that must be “translated” in a coded manner so that there is no risk of them producing unpleasure while dwelling within the psyche. By way of example, the facetious Octave Mannoni compared this “work” to that of a not very gifted Latin student who would translate “Caesar venit in Galliam summa diligentia” by “Caesar comes to Gaul on top of his chariot” (au sommet de sa diligence) instead of “with maximum speed”. As le sommet de sa diligence is also called “une impériale”, this term, if one makes an adjective out of it, can refer equally well to Napoleon (Imperial Bees) and to François-Joseph (“Imperial Violets”3). With Bion, every development of thought, as we meet it in the transition from one horizontal row of the Grid to another, is a transformation similar to the displacements and condensations evoked in connection with the dream work. All the mechanisms brought into play in the process of thought – projection-­evacuation (by means of splitting and projective identification) outside the psyche of an unpleasant element in the direction of a “container” (generally maternal) where it will stay in order to be “detoxified” before potentially being reintroduced and i­ntegrated – belong to the group of transformations. Then, in order to move from one row to the next, each element must meet – or “mate with”, a term whose richness we will discover further on – its realization. Thus, in the best of cases, beta-elements are “transformed” into alpha-elements, which, themselves, are “transformed” into dreams, dream thoughts, and myths. These, in turn, are “transformed” into preconception, then conception or thought, concept, deductive scientific system, algebraic calculus, and so on.

Different kinds of transformations “On the occasion of the last session before the weekend”, Bion writes, [the patient] commenced it by saying he had dreamt that a tiger and a bear were fighting. He felt dreadfully frightened lest the animals in their ferocious

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maulings would stumble across him and kill him. He woke in dread with a shout ringing in his ears. It was his own shout. The dream reminded him of a story by a famous big game shot; he could not remember the name of the man. The tiger who was very well known to be the fiercest of animals was driven off its kill by a bear. But the bear had its nose bitten off. It made him shudder to think of it. (Here he screwed up his face and shuddered.) He could not think of any more. He went on after a pause: the girl he was once engaged to for a year had broken off the engagement because she wanted to be free to flirt with other men. It still made his blood boil. (Bion, 1965, p. 16) “I have chosen this illustration”, Bion goes on, “because it lends itself easily to interpretation. The reader can see that the stimulus of the week-end break might be the trigger for the dream and its associations” (ibid.). Bion acknowledges that he had arrived at this conclusion “by making deductions”. But that is not all. “Analytically trained intuition”, he adds, “makes it possible to say the patient is talking about the primal scene” (p. 18). Bion considers “the state of mind in the patient which makes him see the week-end break . . . as an object of fear”, and he assumes that “the transferences plays a predominant role and further that the end-product, T (patient) β, is what an analyst would call a transference neurosis. The aspect of transference important in transformation is that which Freud described as a tendency ‘to repeat as a current experience what is repressed’ instead of recollecting it as a fragment of the past. He goes on to say, ‘[T]his reproduction appearing with an unwelcome fidelity always contains a fragment of the infantile sex life, therefore of the Oedipus complex . . . and is played regularly in the sphere of transference’ ” (Freud, 1920b, p. 18). It is this “unwelcome fidelity”, Bion adds, “that helps to make the term ‘transference’ so appropriate and [seems] to suggest that what the patient says about someone else applies almost unchanged to what he thinks and feels about the analyst. . . . The feelings and ideas appropriate to infantile sexuality and the Oedipus complex and its off-shoots are transferred . . . to the relationship with the analyst” (Bion, 1965, pp. 18–19, Bion’s emphasis). As this transformation involves little deformation, Bion proposes to call this set of transformations “rigid motions”. It resembles what in geometry is called a “change of marker through translation”. The invariance of rigid motion must be contrasted with the invariance specific to other transformations observed by Bion, among which are “projective transformations”, “transformations in hallucinocis”, and “transformations in O”. I have cited an example of projective transformation concerning the patient who began his session by telling the analyst that “the milkman had called” (see Chapter 6, p. 109 of the present book). Another example will give me an opportunity to put forward further remarks, in particular concerning the projective transformations that may appear in the course of analysis. The patient, Bion writes, in whom psychotic mechanisms and bizarre behaviour are predominant, could be defined as a “borderline psychotic”. The analysis seems to proceed slowly. The material brings to light a form of violence which, he adds, “is

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confined to phenomena experienced by psycho-analytical insight” and lends itself to “appropriate” interpretations. It is, as Bion says, theoretical violence (Bion’s emphasis). Hypochondriacal symptoms regularly emerge. He writes: The patient talks as if his behaviour, outwardly amenable, was causing great destruction because of its violence. The analyst gives interpretations, when they appear to be appropriate to the material, drawing attention to the features that are supposed by the patient to be violent. (1965, p. 8) He emphasises, for example, that the patient’s tendency towards reparation seems to him to be the consequence of his guilt linked to the divorce of his parents (destructiveness of the wished-for separation). The patient accepts the analyst’s interpretations but “there is little evidence . . . that his behaviour is any different from what it has been” (ibid., p. 7). Then a change occurs: the patient begins to behave strangely. The analyst learns that he spends hours seated morosely on a chair; he appears to be hearing voices and seeing things. In the consulting room it is difficult to say if the patient is describing a delusion or indulging his fancy. Bion writes, The patient came in, but, though he had been attending for years, seemed uncertain what to do. “Good morning, good morning, good morning. It must mean afternoon really. I don’t expect anything can be expected today: this morning, I mean. This afternoon. It must be a joke of some kind. This girl left about her knickers.4 Well, what do you say to that? It’s probably quite wrong, of course, but, well, I mean, what do you think?” He walked to the couch and lay down, bumping his shoulders down hard on the couch. “I’m slightly anxious . . . I think. The pain has come back in my knee. You’ll probably say it was the girl. After all. This picture is probably not very good as I told him but I should not have said anything about it. Mrs X . . . thought I ought to go to Durham to see about, but then”, and so on. (1965, pp. 19–20) Bion acknowledges that he had only retained a “general impression” of this episode linked to “changes of tone expressing depression, fear, anxiety, confidentiality, etc.” He comments that “the violence is patent, but the ideational counterpart, previously evident, appears to be lacking. . . . Hypochondriacal elements are less obtrusive” (pp. 8–9). “I knew envy and intolerance of frustration”, he writes, “to be powerful factors in the analytic situation and that violence was a prominent function in the patient’s personality; he feared violence, his own and other people’s; his emotions were violent, his ambitions violently pursued and obstructed, his course of action violently maintained” (p. 52). Faced with this change which Bion describes as “catastrophic”, it is clear that the analyst must indulge in a “very high proportion of speculation” (p. 21). For example: (1) it was not really the patient

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who said: “Good morning, good morning”; (2) it could have been the analyst from whom “nothing could be expected” that day; (3) the “joke” had nothing funny about it; (4) the analyst was supposed to know who “this” girl was, even though he confesses he was unable to understand, due to the ingenuity of the way the patient had formulated his sentence “whether she had left her knickers lying about or given notice on account of some episode connected with her knickers” (p. 20). And yet the analyst is convinced that certain apparently external emotionally-charged events are in fact the same events as those which appeared in the pre-catastrophic stage under the names, bestowed by the patient, of pains in the knee, legs, abdomen, ears, etc., and, by the analyst, of internal objects. In brief, what present themselves to the outward sense of analyst and patient as anxious relatives, impending law-suits, mental hospitals, certification, and other contingencies apparently appropriate to the change of circumstances, are really hypochondriacal pains and other evidences of internal objects in a guise appropriate to their new status as external objects. (Bion, 1965, p. 9) The patient, Bion adds, who “had knowledge of my analytic theories” and in particular “the theory of internal objects”, and who was “confused with me and yet detached from both of us”, explained to his analyst: “The pain in my knee, which I now experience, is what you as analyst think is really the girl inside me” (ibid., p. 21). The change brought to light violent elements. “Violent feelings”, Bion writes, “are violently expressed” and it is evident to him that the patient’s violence triggers in the analyst a wide externalization of internal objects” (ibid., p. 9). In any case, through this change which required an increased number of sessions, it also appears that the patient had taken possession not only of the analyst but also of the couch “because he [was] determined no one should [occupy it]” (ibid., p. 118) – this idea expresses perfectly an aspect of his history in which “this” girl might be involved. “His aim”, he adds, is to “saturate” the session so that I cannot work and no one can take his place. He employs terms (words, etc.) which are occupied by the meaning that they used to have but the meaning has been destroyed (or the term has been denuded of its meaning) so that the terms mark the place where the meaning used to be. This absent meaning (that is nevertheless present) will not permit any meaning to take place. (ibid.) The internal objects have been transformed into external objects. One might say that the analyst must be “confused with” his patient while also being “detached from both of us” in order to come to such conclusions. This is an evolution, it can be said, that appears more and more clearly in Bion’s thought.

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After the “Grid”, and with Transformations, he showed increasing interest in the relationship between the patient and the analyst and the dynamics of the treatment, dynamics that push the analysand and analyst alike towards respective potential reorganisations that involve, for both of them, risks of destabilisation, of “turbulence”. He was more attentive to the changes that occur, or are likely to occur, just as he had taken into consideration, in his elaborations on the K link, the mixed feelings that analyst and patient could experience in the face of this kind of possibility. It is worth recalling that xCy means that x is engaged in a process of knowledge vis-à-vis y, knowledge that modifies, obviously, the knowledge that x has of y, but which also modifies y, and also x because x is modified by the knowledge of y. Indeed, it is to this process of amplification that the subtitle of Transformations, “Change from Learning to Growth”, refers. The aim of analysis, for Bion, is clearly that it should produce changes in the patient and in the analyst.

Effects of turbulence on statements In order for such changes to occur, the analyst, Bion says, must accept “not knowing to make room for a pre-conception that will illuminate a problem that excites [his] curiosity” (1965, p. 47). And to make this position clearer, he offers the following illustration: A lake in calm bright weather reflects trees upon the bank on the shore opposite the observer. The image presented by the trees is transformed in the reflection: a whole series of transformations is effected by atmospheric changes. Suppose the observer could see only the reflection; he would be able to deduce the nature of O from what he saw. Provided conditions were not too disturbed, the demands on the observer’s deductive powers would be relatively simple if he were expected only to recognize that he observed the reflection of the trees, more difficult if he were called upon to pronounce on the species of tree and impossible if he were to state the nature of microscopical features of leaf structure. The change in atmosphere from light to darkness or from calm to turbulence would influence the transformation sometimes slightly, at others so deeply that the observer would have to exercise all his perceptiveness to deduce the nature of O. Just as the demands on him could be impossibly exacting, so those atmosphere conditions could be impossibly distorting. (Bion, 1965, p. 47) In this illustration, O refers to “the trees on the bank of the lake”, that is, a reality to which the observer will never have access, since he is supposed “only to see their reflection”. Bion is only interested in the transformations that affect reality and, from this “point of view”, the analyst is no better off than the observer of this illustration, because the only reality of which he is aware is that which has been communicated to him by the patient. And he cannot determine the degree of

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deformation (transformation) that the patient has imposed on this reality, even if it concerns the reality of a dream or of a fantasy. Hence his question: “What is the nature of the counterpart of O in analysis?” (ibid., p. 48). This question rekindles the debate already opened by the determination with which Freud (1918), in connection with the “Wolf Man”, had upheld the reality of the primal scene which the little Sergei Pankejeff had witnessed at the age of eighteen months. And, concerning Freud’s firmness on this point, it is worth noting the personal and institutional importance that he accorded to the reality of this scene in order to attest to the value of psychoanalysis with a view to completing the history truncated by the patient’s omissions. With great caution, Bion states: “I shall ignore disturbance produced by the analyst’s personality or aspects of it. The existence of such disturbance is well known and its recognition is the basis for analytic acceptance of the need for analysts to be analysed and the many studies of counter-transference” (1965, p. 48). And further on, he adds: “Transformation . . . is influenced by L, H, and K. The analyst is assumed to allow for or exclude L or H from his link with the patient and Ta α and Ta β are assumed . . . to be free from distortion by L, H (i.e. by counter-transference)” (ibid., p. 49). It remains the case, however, that the analyst and the patient are linked by a relationship which, let us recall, represents a “constant conjunction”, and that Bion is concerned about the effects of this link on the material that is the object of the exchanges between the two protagonists. If, in addition, we take account of the effects due to the part played by projective identification in this form of communication, we are in the presence of all the ingredients required for disturbing maximally the statements that are the “stuff ” of analytic work. Thus, Bion writes: “It follows from the theory of transformations that whenever I see one element of the equation O, Tp α, Tp β + L, or H or K, the others must be present” (ibid., p. 69, my emphasis) It is up to the analyst to identify them! “But”, he continues, “I shall not assume that one causes the other, though for convenience I may . . . employ a theory of causation to express myself ” (ibid., Bion’s emphasis).

Logicality or illogicality If, once again, Bion returns here to this theory that he constantly criticised, it is, as may be surmised, owing to the logic of transformations, for instance, when a statement is defined as proceeding from a fact that has been transformed by various transference elements. In order to make himself understood, he refers to the categories of the Grid and points out that it is difficult to imagine “a transformation . . . affected by L being correctly placed [in D1, for instance], that is, placed in a manner that increases meaning, if it is placed in the same category as a transformation affected by K” (1965, p. 71). Up to this point, it has not been (too) difficult to follow the reasoning that he is trying to share. All statements are affected, he says, by the interferences stemming

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from the transference and counter-transference. But Bion would not be Bion if he did not follow this observation up with considerations that abolish any kind of limitation, especially when it must be attributed to logical arguments. Thus he writes: Though I am speaking of “transformations affected by . . .” and so implying causation, I do not wish the reader to infer my belief in the implied theory, except as a convenience in verbal communication. At this juncture a theory of causation is a hindrance to understanding the theory I wish to advance, namely, that any element in a transformation can appear to the analyst to affect any other element and vice versa. It appears to affect other elements in the transformation (on the analogy of atmospheric change but other elements can be regarded, indifferently, as affecting L. Using the model to show its inadequacy to represent my meaning: the atmospheric change disturbs the reflection, but (it would be necessary to say), the disturbed reflection affects (or “causes”) the atmospheric change. Such a theory would not commend itself as a useful theory about reflection in lakes but it is the theory of transformation that I wish to put forward. The transformation represents a constant conjunction and the idea that it has a cause, or that one element causes another . . . is not necessary to the constant conjunction. In short, the idea that the constant conjunction has a meaning may be logically (meaning psychologically) necessary but it is not necessary to the constant conjunction. (Bion, 1965, p. 71)

From trans-formation to de-formation We have just seen that the meaning of a constant conjunction “is not logically, but psycho-logically necessary”, that is, necessary for someone. “The observer”, Bion writes, “feels that it is a necessity for him that the conjunction should have a meaning for him” (ibid., p. 73). “It must then be found”, he continues, “− as a matter of ” psychic necessity – to have a meaning” and when this psycho-logically necessary meaning has been achieved, then the psycho-logically necessary meaning can be transformed into “a logically necessary meaning”.5 Moreover, the idea that a universe – irrespective of the greatness or smallness of this universe” – can be denuded of meaning “derives from the fear that the lack of meaning is the sign that meaning has been destroyed”. And when Bion speaks of a “lack of meaning”, he is referring, in fact, to “the place where meaning used to be” for an individual but where it is no longer! “If ”, Bion continues, “any given universe cannot yield a meaning for the individual, his narcissism demands the existence of a god, or some ultimate object, for which it has a meaning” (ibid., Bion’s emphasis). The place where x used to be is henceforth the place where x is no longer and the disappearance of x must be attributed to a cause – ultimately, any cause – so that, in Bion’s terms, the “no-breast” is matched by a “breast”. “In short”, he writes, “the word ‘breast’ is not recognized as a word representing a breast, but is thought to be the outward

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manifestation of a ‘no-breast’, one of the characteristic qualities, so to speak, of the ‘no-breast’ itself ” (ibid., p. 76).

The narcissistic conditions of meaning A little earlier, after learning from Bion that his patient was “confused with me and yet detached from both of us”, we had arrived at the point of thinking that the analyst must also be “confused with” his patient while being “detached from both of us” so that the analytic work, starting from the same O, from the same reality, can be carried out on the respective transformations that the patient and analyst make, each on his own account. This work, which is a work of transformation, is comparable to the work of transformation which occurs between the breast and the infant during exchanges produced by the mechanism of projective identification. This mechanism provided an opportunity for recalling that there is no emotional experience in isolation from a relationship. At this juncture, Bion takes advantage of the theme of transformations to look for the most probable sources of the disturbances in a personality in the intertwining of transformation, constant conjunction, meaning, narcissism, and social-ism – the hyphen added by the author being designed to stress the social rather than the political sense of the term. “The importance for the psycho-analyst”, he writes, “of the range narcissism ↔ social-ism can be grasped by considering the close relationship of meaning and narcissism” (ibid., p. 81). A little further on, he continues: The function of the breast in supplying meaning is important for the development of the capacity to learn. In an extreme instance, namely the fear of the total destruction of the breast, not only does this involve fears that he has ceased to exist (since without the breast he is not viable) but fears that meaning itself, as if it were matter, had ceased to exist. In some contingencies the breast is not regarded as the source of meaning so much as meaning itself. This anxiety is often screened by the fact that the analyst gives interpretations and thus seems to provide evidence that meaning exists. If this is not observed the patient’s intolerance of meaninglessness is not interpreted: he will pour out a flood of words so that he can evoke a response indicating that meaning exists either in his own behaviour or in that of the analyst. Since the first requisite for the discovery of the meaning of any conjunction depends on the ability to admit that the phenomena may have no meaning, an inability to admit that they have no meaning stifles the possibility of curiosity at the outset. The same is true of love and hate. The need to manipulate the session to evoke evidence of the existence of meaning extends to a need to evoke evidence of the existence of love and hate. Anyone with experience of the psychotic personality will be familiar with the probing, incessantly active, designed to tap sources of counter-transference. The patient’s associations are directed to obtaining evidence of meaning and emotion (here broadly divided into two

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all-embracing categories of love and hate). Since the patient’s attention is directed to finding evidence of meaning, but not to finding what the meaning is, interpretations have little effect in producing change until the patient sees that he is tapping a source of reassurance to provide an antidote to his problem and not a solution to it. (1965, pp. 81–82, Bion’s emphasis) It is a strange formulation, but nonetheless only too true! Earlier, concerning the difficulties the psychotic has in working in analysis on objects “without the actual presence of these objects”, Bion suggested that this kind of patient has a “tendency to produce problem situations instead of solving problems” (ibid., p. 40, footnote 1).

Hallucinosis If we turn our attention now to the type of transformation that Bion calls “transformation in hallucinosis”, we discover that he considers the “state of hallucinosis”, which utilises hallucinatory productions (I will come back to these), as a type of transformation that is encountered frequently not “as an exaggeration of a pathological condition” but “as a state always present but overlaid by other phenomena which screen it” (1970, p. 36). Elsewhere he states: “Transformations may be scientific, aesthetic, religious, mystical, psycho-analytical. They may be described as psychotic or neurotic also” (1965, p. 140) – and this is the point I am interested in. It is not uncommon, even in patients who appear to be neurotic, that “a mental event” is “transformed into a sensory impression” – visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile, or gustatory – which, like every sensory impression, has no meaning by itself. I can recall, for instance, a patient who, after a first analysis with me – a first analysis that was brought to an end by mutual agreement – had asked me for a second period of analysis, some fifteen years later. He came to the appointment we had arranged, reoccupied the place on the couch that he had been used to fifteen years before, and began by stating that he was happy to rediscover the “good smell of cigars” that perfumed my consulting room at that time. It was this absent olfactory hallucination that alerted my attention, for though I had certainly smoked at the time of his first analysis, I had stopped doing so for at least twelve years and, in my view, the patient was using this “smell” to talk about something other than one of the elements of the analytic setting proposed. Bion writes: The unsense-able mental phenomenon is transformed into a beta-element which can be evacuated and reintroduced so that the act yields, not a meaning, but pleasure or pain. . . . [The analysand] tends therefore to demand, and provide, more hallucination to compensate for the missing gratification. He feels the pleasure and pain to be inadequate; the “meaning” is likewise inadequate. The less gratification he achieves, the more greedy he becomes; the more greedy the more hallucinated. (1970, p. 37)

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To evaluate this kind of hallucination, he adds, “the analyst must participate in the state of hallucinosis” (ibid., p. 36). And indeed, after long periods of “reverie” during which I let my mind wander in accordance with the associations and visions aroused by what the patient said, all sorts of sexual visions forced themselves upon me, visions that he recognised were present in him throughout the sessions and which he soon converted into a sexual link between him and me. But, above all, it was necessary to uncover the meaning of these ungraspable olfactory hallucinations in that they appeared to be a barrier set up against any appreciation of the realities of the session. In other words, one of the problems that the patient tries to resolve through a transformation in hallucinosis lies in the conflict – passed over in silence – between the method employed by the analyst and the method employed by the patient. “The conflict”, Bion writes, can be described as a disagreement on the respective virtues of a transformation in hallucinosis and a transformation in psycho-analysis. This disagreement is coloured by the patient’s feeling that the disagreement between patient and analyst is a disagreement between rivals and that it concerns rival methods of approach. (1965, p. 142) It is true that the analytic relationship as experienced by the patient – who rehashes scenes in such a way as to try to find meaning in them – aims to prove the superiority of the patient and of hallucinosis over the analyst and psychoanalysis. Every reorganisation procured by the analytic work is therefore equivalent to a “failure” of the patient. If the analyst offers interpretations, they become, from the patient’s point of view, as Bion puts it, “A6 elements evacuated” inasmuch as the analyst “resorts to the patient’s methods and employment of transformation in hallucinosis” (ibid., p. 143).

“Without memory, desire, or understanding” These different approaches pushed Bion towards a sort of “radicalisation” of the analytic position of the analyst who is required, in the session, to be in a state of “at-one-ment” with the patient. The English word atonement means union, unison, and the fact-of-being-one with someone (or something), and Bion liked to write it in such a way that the “one” appears at the centre of the word. For Bion, this amounts to saying that it is not a matter of identifying, for example, with the patient, for identifying is not being. . . . And, moreover, what would an identification “consciously” chosen, desired and selected, be? No! It is a matter of achieving a “state of mind” (Bion, 1970, p. 43)6 in which the analyst becomes completely receptive to the analytic experience. It is a matter of “being O” or of “becoming O”,7 two forms of what Bion calls a “transformation in O”. To achieve this Bion advocates eschewing memory and desire because they

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“derive from experience gained through the senses” (ibid., p. 31). Certainly, memories and desires “are inevitable features that [the analyst] encounters in himself as he works” (p. 32). Bion does not revile memory – an inevitable feature, he has just pointed out – but, after insisting at length on the fact that “the prototype of memory appears to reside in one of the aspects of projective identification” (ibid., p. 28), he now considers it as “a container for the ‘evacuations’ of projective identification” (ibid., p. 29), and so it is “no equipment for an analyst” (ibid.). Furthermore, when one considers it from the vertex of the “relation ♀ ♂”, one notices that ♂ “evacuates unpleasure in order to get rid of it, to have it transformed into something that is, or feels, pleasurable, for the pleasure of evacuation, for the pleasure of being contained. ♀ takes in the evacuations for the same motives . . . ♀, which may evacuate or retain is the prototype of a forgetful or retentive memory” (ibid.). It is restricted by the subordination of the senses to the pleasure/unpleasure principle. As for desire(s), Bion proposes to consider it (them) in relation to “thoughts which are formulations of desire, and probably, but not certainly, objects we represent by the term ‘desire’. They are thus not merely verbal formulations” (ibid., p. 30). Among the desires “that can be represented verbally” may be mentioned, for example, the fact of “desiring the end of a session, or week, or term” (ibid., p. 56), or “the idea that one would like to go abroad for the annual holiday”, etc. (p. 31). The point they have in common lies in the fact that “they are ready formulated and require no formulation” (ibid). Thus, Bion writes, “[I]f the mind is preoccupied with elements perceptible to sense, it will be that much less able to perceive elements that cannot be sensed” (ibid., p. 41). Memory and desire share, then, many points in common. For example, “the problem of differentiating desire from memory lies in the fact that it is ‘located’ in a ‘place’ which cannot be determined any more than can the ‘place’ where parallel lines of a railway-track meet” (ibid., p. 45). “Where” and “when” – for a memory and a desire – are difficult terms to locate and, Bion even asks, “[W]hat of a ‘memory’ of a gratification that was missed? – an unsatisfied desire must be classed as desire” (ibid., p. 44, Bion’s emphasis). To simplify, it may be said that “one is the ‘past’ tense and the other the ‘future’ ” (ibid., p. 45) and, in this respect, they represent a “realization related to another realization represented by the terms ‘internal’ and ‘external’, [since] the past is something contained ‘within’ the memory and the ‘future’ something that cannot be so contained” (ibid., p. 42). Desires, however, which are just as much “in” the mind as memories and are thus equally “possessions”, are considered as if they possessed the mind. I once knew a woman, one of Bion’s patient’s, who, in the context of her studies at the time, and while she was in analysis with him, sat for an important end of year examination. A large number of consecutive sessions had been devoted to speaking about this examination, the anxieties that it caused, the importance that the patient attributed to it, and so on. Once she had taken it, and with great success, she told Bion, at the beginning of the session: “I’ve passed!” “Passed what?” Bion asked, very seriously!8 If, at this point, we add that “understanding” all these mechanisms requires an intellectual understanding, including logical thought, theories of causation, and

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reflections of a philosophical order, we can understand that Bion summons us to “eschew memory, understanding and desire” because they are designed to “prevent the psychological upheaval inseparable from mental growth” (ibid., p. 34). For Bion, the analyst must “become infinite” (ibid., p. 46, Bion’s emphasis), must be the “the irreducible ultimate man” (ibid., p. 58)9 because “he is seeking something that differs from what is normally known as reality” (ibid., p. 43). He also asserts that “the nearer the analyst comes to achieving suppression of desire, memory, and understanding, the more likely he is to slip into sleep akin to stupor” (ibid., p. 47), a disposition in which “the sharpening of contact with O” produces “an increase in perception” (ibid.). But it may be, Bion adds, that analysts who submit themselves to this discipline will find that the intuitions achieved by it cause them to feel the need for further analysis. “Advances in insight”, he writes, “have to be matched by further analysis. Such a contingency imposes revision of training and maintenance of capacity for a psycho-analytic career” (ibid., p. 67). Finally, I would add that, on this point as well, Bion and Lacan seem close to each other, the first with the notion of the analyst “becoming O”, the second with the notion of “unbeing” (désêtre). And both of them are close to Freud, when he admitted that he had to “blind himself artificially in order to focus all the light on one dark spot” (Letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé dated 25 May 1916 in E.L. Freud (1960)). As Bion says, he had to project “a beam of intense darkness” in order to be able to observe something so dark that only such a “light” could illuminate it, so that “the piercing shaft of darkness [could] be directed on the dark features of the analytic situation” (ibid., p. 57).

Tiresias This leads me to bring this chapter devoted to transformations to a close by evoking – a further common point between Bion and Lacan – the figure of Tiresias. The name of Tiresias can be found in many Greek myths and seems, in a generic way, to have referred to seers who actually existed in Ancient Greece. According to one of the versions of his legend, Tiresias, as an adolescent, stumbled upon Athena bathing naked, and so the goddess blinded him by covering his eyes with her hands. In response to the pleas by Tiresias’s mother to Athena begging her to restore his sight, she contented herself with alleviating his suffering by purifying his ears and giving him a staff that would enable him to walk like a man who can see. According to another version, Tiresias used his staff to separate two mating snakes and was immediately transformed into a woman. After seven years, he saw the same snakes mating again (he was thus not blind at that point), and said: “If, when you are wounded, your power is so great as to be able to change the nature of your enemy, then I am going to strike you a second time” and in this way he came a man again. And it was this double transformation that turned Tiresias into a seer. One day when Zeus was quarrelling with his wife Hera about the theme of whether a woman or a man derived the most pleasure from the sexual act, each of them asserting that it was the other sex, the couple sought the opinion of Tiresias

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who, having experienced both sexes, sided with Zeus. Hera, who was “more grieved than was justified”, writes Ovid (8 A.D.) in the Metamorphoses (3: 333–335), “condemned the eyes of her judge to eternal darkness”. Not being able to reverse Hera’s decision, Zeus then offered Tiresias, by way of compensation for his blindness, the gift of divination and a long life of seven generations. When Thebes was stricken by the plague, Creon, Oedipus’s brother-in-law, returned with the answer of the oracle of Delphi announcing that the country had to be cleansed of the pollution caused by the murder of Laius. Tiresias was then summoned by the king and required to denounce the murderer. But the seer systematically refused to answer the pressing demands of the king. A violent dispute followed which drove Tiresias to reveal, in a veiled manner, the origins of the pollution of Thebes, as well as the heavy threats that weighed upon Oedipus. He thus proclaimed: “You yourself are the murderer you seek.” Tiresias’s role did not end there. Once Oedipus had been dethroned, Eteocles and Polynices, his sons, decided to share power by reigning over Thebes, each for one year alternately. But when Eteocles refused to step down after one year, Polynices aligned himself with the seven leaders of the surrounding cities in order to besiege the city of Thebes. Thanks to the prophecies of Tiresias, who had revealed the necessity of offering as a sacrifice the son of Creon, Menoeceus, the Thebans won the war but the final victory was only acquired at the price of a fratricidal duel between the two sons of Oedipus, who both died. As Polynices had turned against his brother and against his city, Creon, who was now King, offered a solemn funeral for Eteocles but prohibited the burial of the traitor Polynices in keeping with the orders given by Eteocles before he died. It was in these circumstances that Antigone, out of respect for the sacred honours due to the dead, defied the prohibition by covering the body with earth and performing funeral rites. When Tiresias comes on the stage once again, it is to make Creon respect the immutable divine laws. In this way he fully assumes his role as a political advisor, second to the head of State, but Creon responds by insulting him. So the seer withdraws. It was in this sense that Lacan considered Tiresias as the “patron saint of analysts”, as he described him in one of his Seminars. He has the role of seer – a quality evoked with the aim of recalling Freud’s (1905c) statement that “the transference has to be detected (in French: deviné, author’s emphasis) almost without assistance” (p. 116), for there is no other way of identifying it. He limits himself to making statements, even if it means attracting anger or rejection due to what is revealed, and keeps himself in the background. Moreover, having been the only person to have lived alternately in the body of a woman and of a man, it is certain that he was in a position teach a great deal to a good many.

Notes 1 Special mention may be made here of Roger Money-Kyrle, an English psychoanalyst who is little known today but who was a considerable source of inspiration for Bion and to whom the latter paid tribute as much as possible. See Money-Kyrle (1961). 2 See the last image in North by Northwest, the 1959 film by Alfred Hitchcock.

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3 A 1948 French operetta by Vincent Scotto. 4 French translator’s note: “This girl has left about her knickers” could also be understood to mean, “This girl has left . . . on account of her knickers.” 5 Once again a parallel may be made here between Wilfred R. Bion and Jacques Lacan who, in “The place, end and origin of my teaching” (Lacan, 1967b, a paper read in Lyon in the Autumn of 1967, writes that “the break should not be between the physical and the psychical but between the psychical and the logical” (p. 37). 6 The term “state of mind” (disposition d’esprit) resonates, among other things, with the same term employed by François Roustang (1994) in Qu’est-ce que l’hypnose? 7 A Chinese painter once said: “I paint the mountain when I have become the mountain.” 8 Meg Harris Williams. Personal communication. 9  “In fact, this cannot be” he adds (p. 58).

8 GROUP AND PSYCHOANALYSIS, SURVIVAL OR DESTRUCTION?

Bion’s idea that the analyst must “increase his perceptions” in order to “become one (at-one-ment) with the patient”, “become infinite”, “ultimate”, “irreducible”, and to be “as close as possible to the O of the patient” tends to make One, unity, emerge and to reveal the system of thought that makes it possible to approach O, “the potentiality of all distinctions as yet undeveloped”,1 the “ultimate object from which the individual originates”, and so on. This ultimate object is the group! “One”, writes Bion, “true to the negative quality of the definitory hypothesis (col. I) is a denial of the group”! (1965, p. 150). Moreover, he adds, “all other numbers are likewise attempts, first to bind, then to understand, the group” (ibid.). The problem, he continues, “commences with the impingement on the individual” of the group, with the conjunction and necessity of binding the “groupality” of the group with a name. “It may at first seem strange”, he goes on, “to suggest that groups or the infinite should be regarded as epistemologically prior to all else” (p. 152). But at the same time it is evident that man is first and foremost a “gregarious animal”. The individual is an integral part of a group – it is within such a group that he comes into the world and it is within it that he individualises himself after a fashion. Every group creates its identity thanks to the establishment and maintenance of its coherence. It does so by creating conventions, laws, a culture, and a language, characteristics that are not restrictive. It was on this ground, already explored by other scientists – explorers, ethnologists, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and psychoanalysts – that Bion honed his first instruments of thought acquired in the course of his medical and psychoanalytic training.2 We know that he was led by the circumstances of life to begin his medical career by conducting therapeutic and organisational practice in groups.3 The experience left its mark on him in such a way that he turned all his attention to groups. Moreover, this experience took place during a sort of

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partnership formed with John Rickman, his first analyst, during the whole period of the Second World War. This partnership was sufficiently uncommon to merit giving further attention to it for, in my view, it provides the model of a collaboration between analysts that is very likely to result in methods of research devoid of any preconceptions, in innovations – results that themselves become the premises of new research, stimulating endlessly the process of reflection. This notion of experience appears in particular in the English title of the book, Experiences in Groups (1961) which brings together a number of articles devoted to the work that Bion, as a military psychiatrist at the beginning of the Second World War, carried out in order to create a training unit for the rehabilitation of soldiers who were suffering from neurosis and who had to be cured from their “neurotic despair” so that they could rediscover a “capacity to adjust to a disciplined community”. Such a mission could only be accomplished, Bion says, by virtue of “the presence of an officer who, due to his experience, knows some of his failings” (1961, p. 13). Furthermore, at a certain point in his career, Bion became interested in two kinds of different groups whose strange, and even mysterious, behaviour raises a number of questions. His curiosity led him to take interest in all the phenomena that seemed to require particular psychoanalytic attention, especially as they had already been painstakingly described without touching on their deep psychological motives. What lay behind these equally curious statements was related to his interest in a contemporary publication of his research, a publication devoted to the cemetery of the Sumerian city of Ur, the city from which Abraham came. Its pertinence convinced me – if that were necessary – that from the outset he had been concerned about the “analytic position” of psychoanalysts. The recourse to this episode and, in particular, to the two events at the cemetery at Ur seems to me, therefore, to be an excellent basis for presenting an important idea concerning the mental disposition that a good many psychoanalysts possess, while leaving each reader to make use of it as he sees fit. Of course, making use of the story was, above all, the means by which Bion himself raised and thought about the question. And examining the presentation of the facts themselves is a way for us, in turn, to make the journey that is nothing less than a veritable exploration – an exploration of the unconscious, of course!

The interest of the cemetery at Ur In his article “The Grid”, and in one of his seminars held in Brazil, Bion refers to the archaeological research of Sir Leonard Woolley in connection with the Sumerian city of Ur. In the King’s tomb sacred utensils and objects were found indicating that on the King’s death many acquaintances and courtiers had followed the sovereign into his tomb. The courtiers, “clothed in the splendour of their jewels and finery, took a potion of a narcotic drug, conjectured to be hashish, to the accompaniment of music; the pit, with its occupants in position, was then filled in with earth” (1989, p. 8).

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Bion compared this event, which took place in about 3500 B.C., with another event that occurred five centuries later, and established a close relationship between them (a constant conjunction?). “Some five hundred years later”, he writes, “a different kind of procession took place at the same site” (ibid.). “The tombs were robbed. . . . The robbers were the patrons of the scientific method: the first who dared to break through the ghostly sentinels of the dead and their priestly attendants” (1973–1974, p. 3). Bion clearly distinguishes these two episodes: “For convenience I transform burial to A; plunder to B.” A and B represent “the entire domain in which it is usual for psycho-analysts to operate” (1989, p. 9), but the images that correspond to these two events “impose a degree of rigidity on the elements” composing them. But, he adds, “if we disarticulate the images . . . one can impose a pattern which makes order appear where none existed before. . . . The fact that I have introduced is an idea dividing the elements into two” (ibid.). Two series of questions arise: “What was in the hearts and minds of those courtiers of Ur, Abraham’s city, when they walked into that death pit, took their potion and died?” Which mental forces and which conventions drove them to this fate? Would it be correct to assume that it was “ignorance”? And if we accept the idea of ignorance, was it only a matter of that or “of something unknown and more dynamic than ignorance?” (ibid., p. 10) What ties linked them to the sovereign such that they followed him into death? One can also see this funeral procession as demonstrating “the power of Magic, Ritual, Religion and Drugs” (ibid., p. 9), but what would that correspond to psychologically? The second series of questions concerns “the group of plunderers”: “What was the drug taken at B? Was it curiosity? Cupidity? How did the robbers come by the knowledge that enabled them . . . to sink the shafts into the earth with such accuracy as to find the Queen’s tomb?” (ibid. p. 10). The account in two acts of the episode at the cemetery of Ur illustrates, for Bion, the bipartite structure of the life of every group: the emotional component, linked to basic assumptions, is represented by the collective death of the dignitaries; the rational component, linked to the work group, is represented by the plunderers who, without being intimidated by the sacred atmosphere of the site, went ahead with their “scientific investigations”. We should, moreover, he adds, perhaps accord the plunderers “a high position in the Pantheon of Scientific Fame as the forerunners of Science” (ibid., p. 9). “Should we erect monuments to the plunderers of the Royal Tombs as Pioneers of Science. . . . Or should we consider today’s scientists as deserving of obloquy for their cupidity?” (ibid.) Furthermore, this division emphasises the link between superstition and scientificity, between emotion and rationality, between basic assumption and work group. The period of 500 years separating the two episodes represents the time necessary for the state of mind of the zealots of a basic assumption group to change into that of the members of a work group. We, too, are capable of behaving like plunderers or, more simply, of satisfying our curiosity by taking cognizance of the clinical treasures contained in Experiences in Groups.

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A psychoanalytic approach to group phenomena Just as Bion divided, for the sake of clarity and ease of understanding, the episode of the cemetery at Ur into two elements, two periods, two mentalities, etc., which enabled him to “introduce order into this complexity” (1971, p. 9), so Experiences in Groups distinguishes schematically two ways of developing a psychoanalytic approach to group phenomena. The first (the most usual) makes use of elements derived from the dual analytic field and relates them to the group situation. Certain elements (for example, the concept of “transference”) are taken from analytic theory, elaborated with reference to the situation of a couple, and displaced to the group. The second approach, on the other hand, makes use of analytic elements drawn directly from group situations in order to highlight their specificities. But, at a higher level of abstraction – the dimension considered in Attention and Interpretation (1970) – it is, on the contrary, not worthwhile dividing psychic life into individual, couple, and group psychic life. In his preface, Bion appeals to the Oedipus myth: I am impressed, as a practising psycho-analyst, by the fact that the psychoanalytic approach, through the individual, and the approach these papers describe, through the group, are dealing with different facets of the same phenomena. The two methods provide the practitioner with a rudimentary binocular vision. The observations tend to fall into two categories, whose affinity is shown by phenomena which, when examined by one method, centre on the Oedipal situation, related to the pairing group, and, when examined by the other, centre on the Sphinx, related to problems of knowledge and scientific method. (Bion, 1961, p. 8) Finally, Bion, who was constantly in search of “facts” – the guarantee, for him, of a certain capacity for perceiving the elements of reality as closely as possible – wanted to record faithfully the meetings that took place with the groups of soldiers who were in his charge. He writes, for example: Most members have been told that I would “take” the group; some say that I have a reputation for knowing a lot about groups; some feel that I ought to explain what we are going to do; some thought it was to be a kind of seminar, or perhaps a lecture. When I draw attention to the fact that these ideas seem to me to be based on hearsay, there seems to be a feeling that I am attempting to deny my eminence as a “taker” of groups. (1961, p. 30) Or again: “It would be very useful if we could feel that when we made observations of this kind they corresponded to facts” (ibid., p. 32). Bion is constantly concerned to establish a clear difference between belief in hearsay and observation of facts.

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The individual faced with groups Experiences in Groups was published in 1961, but the articles that make up the book had been written and already published in specialised journals between 1943 and 1952. The first article, “Intra-group tensions in therapy: Their study as the task of the group” (Bion & Rickman, 1943), is co-signed by Wilfred R. Bion and John Rickman and deals with the conflicts that systematically emerge when an individual who is part of a group is pulled between concern for himself and the interest that he/she must show in the group to which he/she belongs. It is the fruit of an experiment carried out during the Second World War. His task consisted in treating soldiers suffering from shock or traumatised in combat, with a view to reintegrating them as quickly as possible in the army. As soon as he had taken up his functions, Bion noticed that the “patients” in his care were at grips with individual problems to the point that they did not have the slightest insight into the tasks of the group to which they belonged and on which they were supposed to reflect. He writes: No sooner was I seated before desk and papers than I was beset with urgent problems posed by importunate patients and others. Would I see the NCO’s in charge of the training wing and explain to them what their duties were? Would I see Private A who had an urgent need for 48 hours’ leave to see an old friend just back from the Middle East? Private B, on the other hand, would seek advice because an unfortunate delay on the railway had laid him open to misunderstanding as one who had overstayed his leave. (ibid., p. 12) “What common danger”, he asks, a little further on, “is shared by the men in the rehabilitation wing? What aim could unite them?” “The common danger”, he says, “in the rehabilitation room was the existence of neurosis as a disability of the community. I was now back at my starting-point – the need, in the treatment of a group, for displaying neurosis as a problem of the group” (ibid., p. 13). Better still, it was necessary to show how neurotic behaviour adds to the difficulties of common life, ultimately destroying happiness and efficiency. Since Freud, he continues further on, we know that the neurotic does not always want treatment, and when at last his distress drives him to it he does not want it wholeheartedly. This reluctance has been recognized in the discussion of resistance and allied phenomena; but the existence of comparable phenomena in societies has not been recognized. (ibid., p. 14) It was from this precise point on that Bion began to chart his future course, one that he was to maintain all his life: both the group and the individual suffer from neuroses – not necessarily the same ones, but neither are they so different that there

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are no points of contact between them – and the traditional tools of psychoanalysis are at once adapted and incomplete for “treating” them. The descriptions of groups that he tries to give would be almost hilarious if they did not concern soldiers who had fallen ill and/or were suffering from shock due to the brutality of the fighting in which they had been involved from the beginning of the war. Bion gave instructions that groups should be formed according to the wishes and affinities of each of the hospitalised subjects, without any limitations on the projects: manual work, correspondence courses, carpentry, cartography, modelmaking, etc. There was even “a programme group to chart out working hours of groups and their location” (ibid., p. 14)! These first initiatives seemed to be successful, but subsequent events showed that this was not so! In fact, although there were many groups and almost entire freedom to each man to follow the bent of his own inclinations, provided he could make a practical proposal, yet very little was happening. The carpenter’s shop might have one or two men at most; car maintenance the same; in short, I suggested, it almost looked as if the training wing was a façade with nothing behind it. . . . This announcement left the audience looking as if they felt they were being “got at”. I turned the discussion over at that point as a matter of communal responsibility, and not something that concerned myself, as an officer, alone. (ibid., pp. 17–18) The results were not long in coming: Men began to complain to me that patients were taking advantage of the laxity of the organization. “Only 20 percent”, they said, “are taking part and really working hard; the other 80 per cent are just a lot of shirkers.” . . . To this I replied that no doubt the complainants themselves had neurotic symptoms, or they would not be in hospital; why should their disabilities be treated in one way and the disabilities of the 80 per cent be treated in another? After all, the problem of the 80 per cent was not new; in civil life magistrates, probation officers, social workers, the Church and statesmen had all attempted to deal with it, some of them by discipline and punishment. The 80 per cent, however, were still with us. (ibid., pp. 18–19) This experience was not, strictly speaking, either entirely satisfactory or convincing. Bion apologises, but says that it was abandoned – he does not say by whom – after a period of six weeks. He nonetheless points out that “one critic”, who had formulated severe reservations concerning such a system of patient observation which would be very slow in producing results (if it would be possible to identify any at all!) “had spontaneously remarked that in barely a month” the state of the patients,

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in terms of the results expected of them in this particular situation – the return to active service in the army – had improved out of all recognition! If, as he writes, “serious doubts [may be raised] about the suitability of a hospital milieu for psychotherapy”, Bion convinces us in any case that “the whole concept of the ‘occupation’ of the training wing as a study of, and a training in, the management of interpersonal relationships within a group seemed to be amply justified as a therapeutic approach” (ibid., pp. 21–22), even if it must not be forgotten that, society, like the individual, may not want to deal with its distresses by psychological means until driven to do so by a realization that some at least of these distresses are psychological in origin. The community represented by the training wing had to learn this fact before the full force of its energy could be released in self-cure. What applied to the small community of the training wing may well apply to the community at large. (ibid.)

The experience of the Tavistock Clinic The second article, whose English title “Experiences in Groups” (1961) is also the title of the book, shows the full measure of his talents. He is an “observer”, a “scrutinizer”, a “visuel” – to use the French word with which Freud had described Charcot and which Bion took over in his own name. He was caring and showed a capacity to remain stable irrespective of changes that occurred unexpectedly, to be reassuring, particularly when faced with the risk of appearing as a disturbing element “for those who, in the group, had begun to find their place”, and to stay in contact with the patients even after changes in their attitude had been made possible. This long article – seventy pages over the space of seven chapters – gives an account of experiences that took place between 1948 and 1951. By the end of the war, Bion had acquired an unparalleled reputation as a group therapist, and so it was that “early in 1948 the Professional Committee of the Tavistock Clinic asked me to take therapeutic groups employing my own technique” (p. 29). It is true that Bion “had already had the experience of trying to persuade groups of patients to make the study of their tensions a group task” (ibid). Here the aims were different: the therapeutic groups were intended to offer the individuals who took part in them “solutions”, ultimately individual solutions, thanks to the revelation of their individual problems stemming from conflicts that appeared as a result of being included in a group. Previously, Bion had already noticed that groups, of whatever kind, had little inclination to study their own tensions and expected him “to do something”. A certain hostility was soon manifested when the group in question considered that they were not “getting from me what they feel they are entitled to expect” (ibid., p. 30). It is not difficult in all that to identify the ingredients of what is usually referred to under the term “transference”, even if, up until now, the use of this

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term has been reserved for the relationship that a single person establishes with his or her therapist. “It is evident”, he writes, “that the group had certain good expectations and beliefs about myself. . . . I wonder what these expectations are and what has aroused them” – for it is not sufficient simply to notice that a transference has been established; it is also necessary to examine its specific modalities and to ask oneself if they perhaps have something to do with the therapist’s person. As he points out, “[H]owever irrelevant it may appear to be to the purpose of the meeting, the preoccupation with my personality certainly seemed to me to obtrude itself. . . . Of course it might be argued that I had provoked the situation, and it has to be admitted that this is quite possible” (ibid., pp. 30–31). Although Bion offered the group some “explanations”, he adds that “it would be tempting, by analogy with psycho-analysis, to call them interpretations of group transference” (ibid., p. 31).

Oscillations and reversals of perspective But it is not a matter, in “group therapy” of analysing the group. The conditions that prevail in the state of war are no longer the same once peace has returned. The aims of therapeutic groups are no longer the same either. Bion never forgets that a therapeutic group is composed of individuals and that the therapeutic groups of the Tavistock Clinic are designed for individuals. “We are constantly affected”, he writes, “by what we feel to be the attitude of a group to ourselves, and are consciously or unconsciously swayed by our idea of it” (ibid., p. 32). Thus, beyond the group, it is each individual who has the tendency, within the group, to feel ­persecuted – attacked, depressed, ignored, badly perceived, etc. – by the position that the therapist has come to occupy in it, and, Bion writes, there is always someone (often a very likeable person) who will try to “repair the deplorable situation created by myself ” (ibid.) This does not prevent, he adds, the members of the group from “believing that a group taken by me can bring them something”. The sessions of group therapy are characterised by rapid movements and – ­apparently – are devoid of direction. Multiple oscillations “both rapid in time and large in excursion” (1961 p. 125), and many reversals of perspective constantly occur.4 In fact, all the movements concern, directly or indirectly, the therapist. Although the group had manifested “some irritation with Mr. X for taking the lead” (ibid., p. 33), it appeared very quickly, Bion points out, that “I was again the focus of discontent” and that, in spite of his remarks and suggestions, it was clear that “my interpretation [was] not well welcome”. It seems to me either to be ignored or to be taken as evidence of a warped outlook in myself. . . . To me it is clear that whatever the group may think about Mr. X, it has much more serious misgivings about myself. In particular, I suspect that my personality, and especially my capacity for social relationships, and, therefore, my fitness for the role I am expected to fill, is in question. (p. 34)

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A little further on, he evokes the recent memory of a group “in which my exclusion had been openly advocated”, adding that it is quite common that a group simply ignores my presence and excludes me from the discussion quite as effectively as if I were not there. On some occasions of this kind of crisis, the reaction has taken the milder form of suggestions that I have already excluded myself from the group and that I make things difficult by not participating. (ibid., pp. 34–35) With hindsight, what is striking, first and foremost, is that the same remarks can be found in the books published much later on, in the 1960s, concerning patients – psychotic or non-psychotic – in relation to whom Bion relates individual fragments of analysis. I am thinking here of the accounts of treatments that literally pepper books such as Learning from Experience (1962a), Transformations (1965), and Second Thoughts (1967). In the latter, Bion writes, for instance, “He intended to split me by making me give two opposite interpretations at once” (1953[1967, p. 25]); one of the “essential features of schizophrenic personality” consists in “a precipitate and premature formation of object-relations” (1956[1967, p. 45]): “mental activities . . . are at once subjected to mutilation”; “the patient [makes use of] projective identification reversed” (ibid, p. 40); “the relationship with the analyst is premature, precipitate, and . . . two concurrent streams of phenomena become manifest” (1957b[1967, p. 44]); “the development of the barrier contact is replaced by its destruction. This is effected by the reversal of alpha-function” (1962a, p. 25); and, above all, “a belief that a bad object exists is being expressed as an expression of envious disparagement of a good object” (ibid., p. 39). It is worth noting also that he draws our attention untiringly to “the emotional aspects of the situation” (author’s emphasis). He writes, for example: “[T]he emotional forces underlying this situation described are extremely powerful” and, further on: “I am certain that the group is quite unable to face the emotional tensions within it” (1961, p. 38). Thus Bion attaches particular importance to the “emotions” (or “affects”) inherent to each situation, even and especially if this situation is a “psychoanalytic situation”, according to the term he would use later to indicate that, from his point of view, all the ingredients of this situation are composed of all the psychoanalytic “elements” as defined by Freud (frame, setting, free association, transference, and so on). Bion describes these affective aspects, these “emotional” elements, as follows: I was able to point out that individuals who produced difficulties of their own for help were ignored or sat upon, that attempts to be constructive were similarly dealt with, that there appeared to be subtle understanding between all members of the group, and that we worked together as a team in all that we did. I was able to show the various members of the group, for example,

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Mr. M, were communicating by a system of gestures, often of great subtlety, with the rest of the group. I added that there might be still other means of communication not yet recognized, perhaps because our powers of observation were still very limited.5 It is not quite correct to say my interpretations were being ignored. There was something going on which made me feel that some of what I said was being taken in, but as far as outward appearance was concerned I might have been cut off from the rest of the group by a sheet of sound-proof plate glass. Certainly my interpretations did not make a scrap of difference to the behaviour of the group, which continued unresponsive. . . . As the reader will imagine, I had to ask myself why there was no response. The theories might again be at fault, or, alternatively, my interpretations incorrect? In fact, I felt that I was dealing with a situation similar to that which obtains in a psychoanalysis when the patient’s lack of response is revealed at a subsequent session to have been very partial. (1961, pp. 70–71) And earlier he had written: “Whatever it may appear to be on the surface, that situation is charged with emotions which exert a powerful, and frequently unobserved influence on the individual. As a result, his emotions are stirred to the detriment of his judgement” (ibid., pp. 39–40). But if he describes these aspects so carefully, it is in order to be able to think about them “psychoanalytically”, that is, with the help of the concepts of psychoanalysis as Freud and Melanie Klein defined a certain number of them. Thus, he concludes a “situation” in the following way: At this point a man began a conversation with myself. . . . He was followed by a woman doing much the same thing. . . . Each of them in turn repeated the procedure with two other members of the group. At this point others attempted to converse in much the same way. Had I seen this behaviour in a psycho-analysis I should have been inclined to think that the patient wished to obtain reassurance by establishing what he could feel to be a friendly contact with myself, without in any way divulging the nature of the anxiety against which he wished to be reassured. (1961, p. 72) This shows how, for him, transferences – of groups or individuals – do not differ fundamentally from each other and draw on the same indissociable motive forces of interpersonal relationships. While, in 1948, Bion wrote, “My interpretations seemed to disturb the group”, in 1957, he wrote, without any real difference: “My employment of verbal communication was felt by the patient to be a mutilating on his methods of communication” (1957a, p. 91). While, in 1948, he wrote, “The group interprets my interpretations as a revelation of my true personality”, in 1950,

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he wrote: “Any interpretation which had in it the least tincture which my patient could interpret as an incursion into the realms of diagnosis and treatment was resented” (1950, p. 14); and in 1962, with little change, that the patient considered the interpretation communicated by the analyst as “a response . . . heavily charged with counter-transference” (1962a, p. 23).

The basic assumptions As we have seen, the group sessions that he organised at the behest of the Tavistock Clinic all had a therapeutic aim, and there is no doubt that such an objective, fixed and accepted rationally by all the participants, was sought after consciously by each of them. They were groups formed with the aim of doing “therapeutic work” – I wish to emphasise the word “work”, for a therapeutic outcome requires work and that is why all therapeutic groups are, first and foremost, “work groups”; but it is not the actual mode according to which they function. This preliminary remark is called for on account of the fact that, inevitably, the so-called “work” group is prevented from reaching the objective fixed and accepted by all its members due to the appearance of irrational, and above all unconscious, elements that disturb the cohesion, equilibrium, and functioning of the group as soon as its members have come together. Bion was the first to be astonished to see “how easily and spontaneously it structures itself ” in a manner that is suitable to acting irrationally, “unless steps are taken to prevent it” (1961, p. 77). To this he adds an important remark: “It is important that the group should come together so that the characteristics of the group and the individual in it should be demonstrable” (1961, p. 132). And later in the book he states that the study of all these phenomena may give “the erroneous impression that a thing must necessarily commence when its existence becomes demonstrable” (p. 132).6 What is interesting to note at this point is what Bion sees emerging from within the group as the sessions of therapy unfold. “Nothing could be clearer to me”, he writes, concerning a group from which two members are absent, “than the determination of the individuals to make the session what they would consider to be a success” (which seems not to have been the case!). “If only it were not for the two absentees”, he goes on, “I believe this group would be going very well” (1961, p. 47). This was not the first time that he had made this remark: the last two or three sessions had already been spoilt because one or two members had been absent, and the others began to look at him in a hopeless sort of way “as much as to say that they [had] done all they [could] – it [was] up to me now” (ibid.). Suddenly, he continues, “it occurs to me that the feelings which I am experiencing myself . . . are precisely those which the others present seem to have. A group whose members cannot attend regularly must be apathetic and indifferent to the sufferings of the individual patient” (p. 48). “A group”, he concludes, “consists of these same people that I see struggling hard to do the work, but, as far as I am concerned at any rate, it also includes the two absentees” (ibid.) who, by being absent, clearly show their feelings of hostility.

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“The picture of hard-working individuals”, he writes, striving to solve their psychological problems is displaced by a picture of a group mobilized to express its hostility and contempt for neurotic patients and for all who may wish to approach neurotic problems seriously. This group at the moment seems to me to be led by the two absentees, who are indicating that there are better ways of spending their time than by engaging in the sort of experience with which the group is familiar when I am a member of it. At a previous session this group was led by one of the members now absent. As I say, I am inclined to think that the present leaders of this group are not in the room; they are the two absentees, who are felt not only to be contemptuous of the group, but also to be expressing that contempt in action. (ibid., pp. 48–49) Drawing on what he saw through what he called his “mental microscope”, Bion soon noticed that one of the male members of the group was asking questions in a particularly supercilious tone, that a woman then followed suit and displayed incredulity concerning the aims of the group, that another woman “[was examining] her fingernails with an air of faint distaste”, and so on. “If ”, he continues, “a group offers splendid opportunities for evasion and denial”, it affords equally “splendid opportunities for observation of the way in which these evasions and denials are effected”, for “what the individual says or does in a group illumines both his own personality and his view of the group” (ibid., pp. 49–50). The group thus enables each of its members to manifest his or her personal feelings while remaining anonymous “because the hostility of the individuals was being contributed to the group anonymously” – which henceforth characterised the “group mentality”: “The group mentality”, he writes, [is] “opposed to the avowed aims of the individual members of the group” (ibid.). It is certainly true that in the group mentality “the individual finds a means of expressing contributions which he wishes to make anonymously” but, at the same time it is “his greatest obstacle to the fulfilment of the aims he wishes to achieve by membership of the group” (ibid., pp. 52–53.) In other words, it is “the unanimous expression of the will of the group, contributed to by the individual in ways of which he is unaware, influencing him disagreeably whenever he thinks or behaves in a manner at variance” (p. 65) with the unconscious impulses of the group. These are obviously considerations that every analyst is led to have at one moment or another in his or her practice; indeed, Bion acknowledges this when he writes: “I am led to ask myself what else I expected from my experience as an individual therapist. I have always been quite familiar with the idea of a patient as a person whose capacity for co-operation is very slight” (ibid., p. 52). By putting forward the concept of “group mentality”, Bion was describing the individual as being, so to speak, in opposition to the group mentality to which he nonetheless contributes. True, man is a political animal, as Aristotle said, and the group of which he is a part represents an essential element that contributes to the

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development of his mental life. “I consider”, he writes, “that group mental life is essential to the full life of the individual” (ibid., p. 54). “Now”, he continues, “the point that emerges in all the groups from which I have been drawing examples is that the most prominent feeling which the group experiences is a feeling of frustration” (ibid.). If, indeed, it is in the nature of a group to deny some desires, while satisfying others, “the resentment [felt by the individual] is caused through the expression in a group of impulses which individuals wish to satisfy anonymously, and the frustration produced in the individual by the consequences to himself that follow from satisfaction” (ibid.). In other words, the power that the group has to satisfy the individual’s needs is challenged by the “group mentality” – a challenge the group meets by developing a characteristic group culture. “Something” of what Didier Anzieu was later to call the “group unconscious” thus has a tendency to develop itself within a group as soon as it is formed, and this something becomes predominant as soon as the individuals of the group seek to have their own desires satisfied in it. Bion acknowledges the priceless contribution that the environment makes to each individual, providing him, above all, with what he needs for his “growth”, as we have seen in the previous chapters. He writes: In the group the individual becomes aware of capacities that are only potential so long as he is in comparative isolation. The group, therefore, is more than the aggregate of individuals, because an individual in a group is more than an individual in isolation. Furthermore, the individual in a group is aware that the additional potentialities that then become activated by membership of the group are, many of them, best adapted for function in the basic group. (Bion, 1961, p. 90) Like Freud, who drew attention to the inevitable “discontent” that man experiences in “civilization”, Bion observes the paradox that man is faced with, in the depths of his being, where his own personal interests and his membership of a group enter into violent conflict. He writes: It is this feature of group membership that gives rise to a feeling in the individual that he can never catch up with a course of events to which he is always, at any given moment, already committed. There is a matrix of thought which lies within the confines of the basic group, but not within the confines of the individual. There is also the individual’s desire to feel that he is master of his fate, and to concentrate upon those aspects of his mental life which he can feel are most truly his own and originate within him. (ibid., p. 91) Ever attentive, Bion soon observed that “some patterns of behaviour were recurring” and, in particular, the manner in which two members of the group would become

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involved in a discussion. “It would be evident”, he writes, “that they were involved with each other and that the group as a whole thought so too.” And he adds: Whenever two people begin to have this kind of relationship in the group – whether these two are man and woman, man and man, or woman and woman – it seems to be a basic assumption held both by the group and the pair concerned, that the relationship is a sexual one. It is as if there could be no possible reason for two people’s coming together except sex. The group tolerates this situation, and, although knowing smiles are interchanged, the group seems prepared to allow the pair to continue their exchange indefinitely. (ibid., pp. 61–62) But, he adds, account must also be taken of the fact that there is necessarily “a considerable conflict between the desire of the pair to pursue the aim they have consciously in mind, and the emotions derived from the basic assumption that two people can be met together for only one purpose, and that is a sexual one” (ibid., p. 62). It is quite clear from this that [a]nyone who has employed a technique of investigation that depends on the presence of two people, and psycho-analysis is such a technique, can be regarded, not only as taking part in the investigation of one mind by another, but also as investigating the mentality not of a group but of a pair. If my observation of the basic assumption of the group is correct, it is not surprising that such an investigation seems to demonstrate sex as occupying a central position with other emotions as more or less secondary. (ibid., pp. 62–63) Bion, who was the first to be surprised by this observation, calls it a “basic assumption”, a term he reserves for observations, he has noticed, that underlie situations and influence them in such a way that they diversify in different ways. This “basic assumption of pairing” fulfils, moreover, certain functions which also remain unconscious and, in particular, that of enabling the group to preserve the expectation that a birth, arising from the “sexual situation of the pair”, will provide a solution to the difficulties of the group’s functioning. It is nothing less than the arrival of a “Messiah” or a “genius” that is expected; in any case an exceptional being, who, much better than the therapist, will be able to provide a solution that is “acceptable” for the rest of the group. An acceptable solution, but also a “lasting” one! For it is quite clear that a future event, one that has not already occurred, a “happy event”, continues to be a source of hope only as long as it has not been realized.7 From this point of view, any temporal promise is imbued with sexuality and every sexual promise is filled with temporality.8 To the “basic assumption of pairing”, Bion was soon to add another, the day he noticed that, apart from choosing a pair for the purposes of existing permanently,

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“the group seems to know only two techniques of self-preservation, fight or flight” (ibid., p. 63). “The frequency”, he adds, “with which a group, when it is working as a group, resorts to one or other of these two procedures, and these two procedures only, for dealing with all its problems, made me first suspect the possibility that a basic assumption exists about becoming a group” (ibid.). The group uses these procedures to ensure, under all circumstances, its cohesion, preservation, and maintenance. This perhaps explains why “the group, which shows itself intolerant of activities that are not forms of fight-flight, will nevertheless tolerate the formation of pairs. Reproduction is recognized as equal with fight-flight in the preservation of the group” (ibid., p. 64). From these considerations it is clear that, in every group, at one moment or another, the question arises of the leader who will take up a position at the head of the group. Depending on the situations mentioned above, he will assume the role, either of the sought after “partner” or of the “rival” to be surpassed, when the basic assumption is one of pairing; or, alternatively, he will have the function of leading the “fight” or of organising the “flight”, in the case of a group organised according to the basic assumption fight-flight. The question of the leader thus leads Bion to wonder about the possibility of a third basic assumption, perhaps the most “visible”, the most “apparent”, and the most widely “known” and “encountered”, namely, “that the group has met together to obtain security from one individual on whom they depend” (ibid., p. 66). This configuration is the “basic assumption of dependence”. On several occasions, Bion described group situations in which, having expected him to “lead” the group towards its objectives, and having noticed that this was neither his intention nor his role, someone, among the members of the group, attempted to take over the “reins” of the situation until he was called into question and rejected, and that the participants then turned once again towards “Dr Bion”. . ., towards whom the group continued nevertheless to show a certain mistrust! “I had already observed”, he adds, “that the group required a leader to fulfil a function for which there was no scope, or at least a function for which I had not observed any scope” (p. 66). In this respect, he writes a bit further on, the group, when it has come together becomes something, “as much a part of human life as a family; [however,] the leader of such a group is far removed from being the father of a family; . . . he has none of the status, obligations, or privileges usually associated with a father” (ibid., p. 69). This kind of group thus has various particular characteristics: “The characteristics of this group”, Bion writes, “are immaturity in individual relationships and inefficiency . . . in group relationships.” In the dependent group, he continues, “there is a marked inability on the part of the individuals . . . to believe that they can possibly learn anything of value from each other . . . leaving the analyst to experience, if he will, what it means to address himself to the problems from which the group is running away” (ibid., pp. 81–82). We are thus led to assume that in this kind of group “power is believed to flow not from science but from magic. One of the characteristics of the leader of the group, then, is that he should either be a

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magician or behave like one” (ibid., p. 84). A little further on we can read that “he is investigating ‘on the spot’ an emotionally vital ‘religion’, whose devotees surround him and are waiting to fall upon him.” One might well think that one was reading what Freud wrote in connection with Moses! Step by step, Bion is thus led to realise that “they do not have much belief in their capacity for learning by experience – ‘What we learn from history, he adds between inverted commas, is that we do not learn from history’. . . . All this represents the hatred of learning by experience. . . . There is hatred of having to learn by experience at all” (p. 89).

The Freudian heritage Bion considered that Freud had shown a certain “weakness” in his discussion of “group psychology” from the moment he attempted to describe the problem in terms of “procuring for the group ‘precisely those features which were characteristic of the individual and which are extinguished in him by the formation of the group’ ” (ibid., p. 135). “Freud was handicapped”, he writes, a little further on, “by having to deduce group situations from his study of the transference”. Bion is being kind! He never takes the risk of asserting that Freud was mistaken. Each time he is embarrassed by the theses put forward by Freud, he demonstrates their “weak” aspects, that is, those aspects that do not make it possible to pursue the line of reflection beyond the point Freud had reached. This is how he proceeds, for example with the problematic notion of “group libido”. As a result, he is led to argue that when a transference situation – in the context of an individual analysis – has come to a standstill, it is because in psychoanalysis there really exists a “situation of pairing”, a situation that is comparable to that which is met within groups and in which the “sexual element” predominates. It is even on account of this “ ‘sexual’ nature” that psychoanalysis is attacked. But Bion feels the need to make a supplementary remark when, in his view, the “libidinal component” evoked by Freud does not suffice to account for all the choices made within a group. In each group, he says, there is a capacity that belongs to each individual to combine himself instantaneously and involuntarily with other individuals, and Bion calls this capacity “valency” (a term borrowed from physics, where it refers to the faculty for combining atoms). And then, above all, Bion is unable to persuade himself that, in the group, the mechanisms of introjective identification are sufficient to explain the reason why all the individuals put the leader in the place of their ego ideal (see Freud, 1921). The notion that “the leader is one on whom the group depends, and from whose personality it derives its qualities” (ibid., p. 177) suggests that it is the leader that engenders the group by virtue of a fanatical adhesion to an idea. By contrast, Bion considers that in the group mechanisms of projective identification function fully and that consequently “the leader is the creature of the basic assumption” (ibid.) – in other words, that it is the group that chooses the leader that suits it inasmuch as he possesses the qualities that allow him to express the group’s expectations.

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The protomental system and psychosomatic illness From the Freudian perspective, learning is an (intellectual) activity that can only take place if a process of mental evolution has developed sufficiently until, as Freud (1925) wrote in his article on “Negation”, “the intellectual function is separated from the affective process” (p. 236). In his own register, Bion evokes a somewhat similar situation when he emphasises the lack of primary differentiation between affective and sophisticated rational elements. However, he considers things from another point of view. He observes that, when a group functions according to the pattern of a basic assumption, “the overt activities of the other two basic assumptions” are suppressed and become inoperative (Bion, 1961, p. 100). “Inoperative” does not mean “absent” but simply “unexpressed”. It is a way of saying that a basic assumption is always preceded by an affective state which itself is preceded by “protomental phenomena”, to use his terminology. With Bion (but not only with him), in these circumstances we go back ever further towards a supposed original state that is the beginning point of evolution, and particularly growth. Bion thus invites us to consider the protomental system as one in which physical and psychological or mental are undifferentiated. It is a matrix from which spring the phenomena which at first appear – on a psychological level and in the light of psychological investigation – to be discrete feelings only loosely associated with one another. It is from this matrix that the emotions . . . flow (1961, p. 102) that will enable the individuals of a group to organise themselves and structure their group according to the basic assumptions defined previously. Thus Bion explains that the basic assumptions coexist in the “protomental system” and that, when one of them manifests itself within the group, the two others remain “potential” until the situation within the group has evolved and they find, in turn, a possibility of expression. “They are the victims”, he writes, “of a conspiracy between the sophisticated group and the operating basic assumption” (ibid., p. 102). Bion also explains – not without surprising us, for these lines date back to the end of the 1940s – that the protomental system (or stage) in which, let us remember, “the physical and the psychological are as yet undifferentiated” is “the matrix in which, under certain circumstances, group diseases with physical and psychological components have their origin” (ibid., p. 103).9 He even adds that “when disease manifests itself physically . . ., there is a psychological counterpart or reciprocal”! (ibid., p. 106). Moreover, Bion follows up these considerations relating to “diseases” in general with other arguments in which, from this period onwards, he questions the notions of cause and effect concerning the appearance of a disease. Indeed, reasoning in terms of cause and effect “individualises” the ill subject-object and encourages one to look within him for the reasons (causes) of “his” illness. But,

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from the moment one allows oneself to think that the origin of illness, in its psychosomatic dimension, is to be found in the group indistinction of the protomental state, one also allows oneself to consider that the illness, deposited in an individual, has taken in him the form of a “fixation abscess”.10

The work group As we have seen, every work group which meets together regularly devotes its meetings or sessions to a rational activity aimed at accomplishing a task or performing an activity, but this aim is rarely achieved spontaneously because disturbances occur in the structuring of the group in relation to the “basic assumptions” described above. Consequently, a conflict of interest appears between the “sophisticated group” and the “basic-assumption group”. We can even say that each individual who enrols in a group as a participant is subject to two levels of thought simultaneously because, as Bion suggests, “individuals behave as if they were conscious, as individuals, of the basic assumption, but unconscious of it as members of the group. This is how it should be: the group has not a conscious; and it is not articulate; it is left to the individual to be both” (ibid., p. 94). Further, as he has already said, “[T]here is no direct conflict between basic assumptions, but only changes from one state to another, . . . They do not conflict, they alternate” (ibid., p. 96). The conflicts arise then only from the encounter between the basic group and the sophisticated group. From all these possible variations, it is clear that the work group emerges, appears at certain moments of the session or of a meeting, every time, Bion writes, there is “a recognition for the need to develop rather than to rely upon the efficacy of magic” (ibid., p. 97). Thus the term “work group” is reserved for a precise situation, a situation governed by something rational – and not passionate – a situation which, as he insists, embraces “only mental activity of a particular kind, not the people who indulge in it” (ibid., p. 144). But to achieve this, the group that wants to direct its aims towards some sort of “work” must first deal with an arduous task: “I said earlier”, Bion writes, that the group from the first struggled hard to maintain a sophisticated structure, and that the effort put into this indicated the strength of the emotions associated with basic assumptions. I still think this is so, but also believe that fears for the structure of the work group are expressions of ignorance of the forces with which the work group has to contend. The therapeutic group should have its attention constantly drawn to the fear of the basic-assumption group, and be shown that the object of the fear depends a great deal on the state of mind that is uppermost in the group. (ibid., p. 99) Thus the “dependent” basic-assumption group, for example, which is focused entirely on its “devotion” towards an individual is strongly resistant towards the work group,

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which normally requires the rational contribution of everyone. “The dependent group soon shows”, he writes, that an integral part of its structure is a belief in the omniscience and omnipotence of some one member of the group. Any investigation of the nature of this belief arouses reactions which are reminiscent, to put it no higher, of the controversies of religion versus science. (ibid.) Thus when a group takes on the role of accomplishing a task, it must first deal with the phenomena of the basic assumptions that alter its functioning.

A question of dynamics There is no question, and this is already quite clear in Experiences in Groups, that Bion was animated by a dynamic sense of how therapies should be conducted. There is a good reason for this. Due to his training, to his deep integration of the Kleinian theory from which he benefited (or on which he depended, depending on the point of view one adopts), he was deeply concerned by the question of constant, continuous analysis of the counter-transference, as I have pointed out on several occasions. In any case, one does not often find in his work such vigorous warnings as those that may be found in the following lines, which I shall reproduce in full: It can be justly argued that interpretations for which the strongest evidence lies not in the observed facts but in the subjective reactions of the analyst, are more likely to find their explanation in the psychopathology of the analyst than in the dynamics of the group. It is a just criticism, and one which will have to be met by years of careful work by more than one analyst, but for that very reason I shall leave it on one side and pass on to state now a contention that I shall support throughout this paper. It is that in group treatment many interpretations, and amongst them the most important, have to be made on the strength of the analyst’s own emotional reactions. It is my belief that these reactions are dependent on the fact that the analyst in the group is at the receiving end of what Melanie Klein (1946) has called projective identification, and that this mechanism plays a very important role in groups. (1961, pp. 148–149)

The leader, the group, and psychoanalysis It is no doubt in the nature of psychoanalysis to be attacked! Indeed, it “reveals” elements that are likely to nourish a certain sense of bitterness regarding the nature of the relationships formed on the basis of the unconscious formations established during the first years of the individual’s life. Likewise, as we have seen, human “social

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constructions” depend on organised trends to preserve a society coherently, with what this implies in terms of setting up authorities to ensure this preservation. It is nonetheless true that these structures do not, by a long stretch, always procure the expected results, and sometimes even result in the contrary; it is then that psychoanalysts need to ask themselves if they have reflected sufficiently on the means for ensuring the future of psychoanalysis. At the present time, “psychoanalytic groups” represent the answer that we have given to this question. But what is it worth? From what has already been said, it is clear that the group seems to feel a real need for a member to guide it who, if he does not take on this task, risks being supplanted by another member who will emerge within the group – which, in psychologising language, could be called “supplanting the father”! At the same time, this member must be recognised by this same group as being incompetent to fulfil the functions, either of pairing, according to the basic assumption that bears this name, or of a leader to attack his rival or organise the flight of all the participants, according to the basic assumption fight/flight. But this may also not happen. “In my experience most groups”, he writes, “not only patient groups, find a substitute that satisfies them very well. It is usually a man or a woman with marked paranoid trends” (1961, p. 67). The basic assumption of dependence, Bion writes, consists in believing that an external object exists whose function is to provide security11 for the immature organism. This means that one person is always felt to be in a position to supply the needs of the group, and the rest in a position in which their needs are supplied. (ibid., p. 74) This hypothesis suggests – and I want to insist on this point – that “a being exist who is there to see that no untoward events will follow the irresponsibilities of individuals” (1961, p. 75). The leader, the “lider maximo”, the boss, the general, the president, the “father of the nation”, the “little father of the people”, the “Messiah”, “Our Father”, “God”, etc., are all terms that come within this category whose characteristics are not psychiatric. At the same time, the group appears to be an organism that needs to be nourished or “fecundated” by innovative ideas that only an exceptional individual can supply. It therefore needs a “genius”, a “providential man”, a “Messiah”, etc. – in short, an out of the ordinary character (in the strict sense of the expression), that is, a character who has risen above the ordinary in order to serve it. It may be a boss, a superior, an officer, a professional, or a teacher, depending on whether the domain in question is religious, scientific, military or, more “mundanely”, political, social, or familial. But, once again, this leader is “bifacial”, if I may put it like that, because he is both the strong man from whom all the solutions are expected, and even “the” answer, and someone who, on account of the psychiatric characteristics described above, needs to be handled carefully; he is both someone who has the answers and who

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derives the greatest benefit from the experiences in which the group takes part. There is therefore nothing surprising in the fact that Dr Bion was frequently considered, by the members of the groups that he led as the one who was both the most competent and the most incompetent, the healthiest and the most “sick”, the doctor and the patient, and who thus had to be replaced as quickly as possible. He writes: Perhaps I typify the patient who is obtaining more than his fair share and it is some such belief that makes the group pick on another member as leader. Be that as it may, the new leader is, in my experience without exception, a thoroughgoing psychiatric case. He is extolled for keeping the group going; for talking freely; for being, in short, a great improvement on myself in a variety of ways. Though there is always substance in these appreciative comments, there has never been any question that the man or woman thrown up by the group is a “case”. (ibid., p. 119) Ultimately, “the group is engaged in sustaining, placating, soothing, flattering, and deferring to its most ill member, who is now the leader” (ibid).12 He even adds, it is “as if members of a group with baD [dependent basic-assumption group] in the ascendant felt that if they were not led by a madman, then they ought to be” (ibid., p. 121)! And further on, he writes, “in the baD it is as necessary to have someone who is dependent as it is to have someone on whom to depend” (ibid., p. 122). The ideal situation, as may be supposed, occurs when a group, however large it is, manages to “avoid the concrete embodiment of leadership in an individual of the group”. He writes: The group that has the most experience of dealing with baD, namely the religious group or priesthood, always deals with this problem of the leader in baD as if it were handling dynamite. The attempt is constantly and increasingly made to ensure that the leader in baD is not a concrete person – the commonest way in which this is done is of course by making a god the leader; and when that, for a variety of reasons, turns out still to be not sufficiently immaterial, by striving to make him God, a spirit. (ibid., p. 122) Behind this proposition there is no difficulty in finding the answers offered by the religions (God, the Messiah, the Trinity, etc.), “while at the same time making a concession to the group’s requirement for a concrete individual”, hence the incarnated figures such as that of the Buddha, the pope, and so on. Moreover, Bion adds, concerning the danger against which the priesthood strives to protect the group, “it is not, I submit, merely the danger inherent in incompetent leadership; for one thing, leadership by the mentally disordered is by no means always incompetent – far from it” (ibid., p. 123).

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To illustrate and summarise the respective attributions of the different basicassumption groups, Bion considers that “the aristocracy may constitute the specialized work group that fulfils for the pairing group functions similar to those which Church or Army fulfil for the dependent and fight/flight groups respectively” (ibid., p. 158). beyond inspiring Messianic hope, as we have seen, the aristocracy, he adds, must inspire “confidence that the pairing-group leader, if he materializes, will be born in a palace but be just like ourselves – ‘democratic’ is probably the modern cant term for the desired quality” (ibid.). In this configuration, where the aristocracy represents the authority that is likely to ensure the coherence of the group and the preservation of its identity, we sometimes find the scenario where the leader does not emerge from the group and where a “caste” must make up for it by providing a substitute. “The term ‘Establishment’ ”, Bion writes, “seems to refer to . . . the characteristics of a ruling caste in a group (such as psycho-analytical institute)” (1970, p. 73). This caste is constituted of “a body of persons . . . who may be expected usually to exercise power and responsibility. . . . One of its more controversial activities is to promulgate rules . . . for the benefit of those who are not by nature fitted to have direct experience of being psycho-analytic” (ibid., Bion’s emphasis) so that (1) they cannot feel “for ever excluded”, and (2) so that it can fulfil the conditions for potentially “producing a genius”. One can say of the Establishment that it is the product of its primary proximity with the “man of exception”, the “Messiah”, the “genius” or the “mystic”13 − a term Bion proposes to use as a tool of designation – and that it has the task of maintaining his message, formulated in such a way that it appears to be both creative and destructive. “The Establishment”, he writes, “cannot be dispensed with . . . because the institutionalized group, the Work Group, is as essential to the development of the individual, including the mystic, as he is to it” (ibid., p. 75). “The institutionalization of psycho-analysis”, he continues a few lines further on, “requires a psycho-analytic group which has ‘Establishment’ as one of its functions”, and the latter has the task of “[making] the individual aware of the gap between himself (his idealized, super-egoized self ) and himself (his unregenerate, un-psycho-analysed self )” (ibid.). “One result”, he adds, “of separation is no direct access of the individual to the [mystery] with [which] he used formerly to be on familiar terms. But the [mystery] has undergone a change as a part of the process of discrimination. The [mystery] with [which] he was familiar was finite; the [mystery] from [which] he is now separated is transcendent and infinite” (ibid., pp. 75–76). Unfortunately this distinction appears to be “inseparable from idealization”, idealization that is as much present within the individual as it is within the group, “idealization as an embodiment of the omnipotence of the individuals who compose it” (ibid., p. 76). The state of mind of the individual is transferred to the group (by means of projective identification). However, “when the function of the group is to establish the separation, there is no question of reunion” (ibid., p. 77, Bion’s emphasis) and the individuals of the group – psychoanalytic, for example – “cannot reconcile themselves to a

162  Group and analysis, survival or destruction?

discrimination that means conscious separation of themselves from a belief in their Freud-like qualities and recognition that Freud, a genius (mystic), no longer exists. Another Freud cannot be created no matter how essential he may be” (ibid.). This is why “the group and mystic are essential to each other, even though “the group can destroy the mystic on whom its future depends”, just as “the mystic may destroy the group” (ibid.) – this would be the kind of relationship that Bion describes as “parasitic” – insofar as “the group-individual setting [is] dominated by envy”, he writes. “Envy cannot be satisfactorily ascribed to one or other party”, he insists; “in fact it is a function of the relationship” (ibid., p. 78) – it is therefore not a consequence! Consequently, if the individual-group relationship cannot give rise to mutual growth, we can see that the group promotes the individual to a position in the Establishment where his energies are deflected from his creative-destructive role and absorbed in administrative functions” (ibid.).14 “I suspect”, he adds, “that applied psycho-analysis,15 even if ‘applied’ to curing people, is a method of bringing psycho-analysis under control and rendering it harmless to the Establishment” (p. 79). The Establishment tries to prevent the group from breaking up, and it does so in two ways: either by “incorporating” the mystic within itself or by destroying him and recasting his ideas for the benefit of everyone. In other words, “the function of the group is to produce a genius; the function of the Establishment is to take up and absorb the consequences so that the group is not destroyed” (ibid., p. 82).16 All things considered, “membership of a group” confers on each person a “status in itself ”; then the “status” which legitimizes accomplishing tasks “in Your name” or “in the name of ” counts as a “therapeutic agent”; consequently, the “therapeutic result” then serves as a “criterion for group membership”. This is what in logic is called a “circular argument”.

Notes 1 See Jacques Lacan “Y’a de l’Un”. Translated as “There is such a thing as one” in Encore (Lacan, 1975b[1998, p. 5, see, in Chapter 2, note 7, p. 48 of the present book]). 2 It is worth recalling here Wilfred Trotter and his book (1916) Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War, as well as John Rickman, both of whom are mentioned in Chapter Two (pp. 40 and 41) of the present book. 3 See, in Chapter Two (p. 42 of the present book), the descriptions of the experiments conducted at the Tavistock Clinic and at the Northfield Military Hospital. 4 “There may be two or three changes in an hour or the same basic assumption may be dominant for months on end” (p. 154). 5 Remarks such as, “[O]ur powers of observation were still very limited” are sprinkled through the entire work of Bion who constantly attempted to increase their range, to push back their limits. 6 As we have seen, one of the insistent questions of Bion concerns “the existence of the objects studied”, a question that concerns the relations that psychotic patients maintain with their objects of study, whether absent or present, in the same manner as mathematicians with theirs.

Group and analysis, survival or destruction?  163

7 The unborn genius or Messiah “must remain unborn if it, or he, is to fulfil the pairinggroup function” (ibid., p. 155). 8 This is somewhat reminiscent of the ingredients of the theory of causation discussed previously. 9 Bion’s demonstration according to which all illness, whether physical or mental, has its source in the undifferentiated matrix of the protomental system tends to represent “the protomental as belonging to the individual”. But, he adds: “In my opinion the sphere of protomental events cannot be understood by reference to the individual alone. . . . The protomental stage in the individual is only a part of the protomental system, for proto-mental phenomena are a function of the group and must therefore be studied in the group” (ibid., p. 103). And, drawing on the studies of the time relating to tuberculosis, he emphasises “the affiliations of one physical disease with another, which are functions, not of anatomy, physiology, and bacteriology – nor yet of psychopathology – but of the individual’s membership of a group” (ibid., p. 106). 10 Bion pushes his line of reasoning to the point of emphasising that if an idea or a thought cannot develop satisfactorily, it undergoes an initial split, then others, repeatedly, so that “each split [grows] and [has] to be split again”. Instead of development, “division and multiplication” occurs – cancerous not qualitative increase”. Thus cancerous growth is “not splitting of the object”, but “splitting of the envy, each ‘bit’ then growing independently of every other ‘bit’. Ostensibly, these ‘bits’ appear as ‘different’ ideas . . . as a proliferation of fragmented envy” (1970, p. 128). Recent studies in psycho-immunology have shown, within closed groups, whose ‘internal groupality’ Bion would have underlined, interesting correlations between psychic states and states of the immune system. 11 Compare this formulation with others, already studied at length, one of which concerns the infant’s “belief that an object exists that can satisfy his needs” (1962, p. 60), while another affirms that the infant has “an inborn pre-conception that a breast that satisfies its own incomplete nature exists” (ibid., p. 69). 12 On this subject Bion cites Arnold Toynbee’s studies on Pharaonic Egypt, showing how it “was exhausted by the building of pyramids under Kephron and his successors”, construction aimed solely at “[allaying] the anxiety state of the leader of the group” (ibid., p. 120). 13 From the Latin mysticus, from the Greek mystikos: related to mysteries (not necessarily religious). 14 I am convinced that Bion was familiar with this situation personally, for the reason he gave for moving to California is given in the following line, where he writes: “His epitaph might be ‘He was loaded with honours and sank without a trace’ ” (see Chapter Two, p. 47 of the present book). 15 That recommended by Kurt Eissler. 16 The most striking example of this mechanism is brilliantly depicted in Fyodor Dostoievsky’s novel, The Brothers Karamazov, at the moment of the meeting between the Grand Inquisitor and Jesus (Book V, Chapter V), during which the Grand Inquisitor has no difficulty in convincing Jesus not to come back, for his return would destroy the huge mission of the Church.

CONCLUSION

Once the last patient of the day has been accompanied to the door, and once the padded door of his consultation room has been closed again, the analyst settles back into his chair and reviews the different sessions to which he has devoted his day’s activity. He then notices that he has not always been able on this particular day – but once is not necessary the norm – to fulfil his function as an analyst and to maintain his “desire for analysis” without losing his identity in the process (without even having tried to “be” the mother of this or that patient or the father of another), to “maintain his equilibrium” in spite of “the stresses associated with the introjection of another person’s projective identifications” (1967, p. 88), according to the terms used by Bion to describe this function. He may then recall having read something similar in one of Jacques Lacan’s Seminars, looks up the passage, and rereads it: We do indeed have to take within us the a at issue, like a foreign body, like an incorporation of which we are the patient because the object, in so far as it is the cause of his lack, is utterly foreign to the subject who is speaking to us. . . . When this not having comes back at us there is most certainly regression and at the same time a revelation of the way in which we left him wanting, so as to represent this lack. (Lacan, 2014, pp. 139–141) Is it not curious, the analyst asks himself, to find in Lacan’s writings expressions such as “take within us”, “what comes back at us”, or “there is regression”? Perhaps not, after all! Lacan was a clinician of quality and, in his Seminar, he made the effort to speak from his place as an analysand – like Bion, moreover. And then, is it not true that, as Maurice Blanchot wrote, “[T]he answer is the misfortune of the question”? (Blanchot, 1969, p. 15).

Conclusion  165

We have been fortunate, as Wladimir Granoff said and wrote, to have had the opportunity of knowing the work of Lacan and Bion, both of whom ploughed their furrow in the Freudian field and sowed seeds there that they left for the following generations to harvest, if they so wish. In other words, they wove links of love, hate, and knowledge that are similar in every way to those that we all establish through the various encounters that we have. It is links that count, links without which neither the subject nor the object are understandable. The K link, for example, is only established by going beyond other links, the L and H links (Love and Hate) that we may experience towards what is self or not-self, and which, when they are brought into relationship with each other, can lead to a link of knowledge. It is only going beyond the links of love and hate established in relation to an object that a link of knowledge in relation to this object can potentially emerge. But the K link does not only depend on the links of love and hate; it is also dependent on the pleasure and pain that can be felt in relation to the object – an object that may, for example, be the analytic work. One can, indeed, feel pleasure or pain when one is a patient or when one is an analyst owing to the work in which one is involved. The K link depends, moreover, on projective identification, an unconscious mechanism that consists in evacuating intolerable parts of the self; they are intolerable because they cannot be elaborated and are projected into the other (the mother, the analyst, etc.), becoming lodged in this container, and can then potentially be transformed there and reintrojected after their transformation. The K link is also marked by another aspect, inherited from Kleinian theory which Bion takes up in his own way: the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions. Certainly, he writes, dispersed, fragmented, persecuting elements represent a threat for the emerging ego (which is in danger of internal fragmentation and dispersion), but the linked elements can themselves become a fragmented part of a larger whole. Thus an alternation between paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions is always at work in the mechanisms of thought. We also need to take into account the container/contained relationship in which elements that are initially scattered are then assembled into content that is lodged within a container. This container also finds itself in the situation of being content in search of a new container or other elements with which it can be assembled in such a way as to form a more complete ensemble. For Bion, these mechanisms are all constitutive elements of thought which contribute to establishing the link of knowledge, oriented towards the growth of the thinking apparatus. There is no reason to suppose that these successive elaborations can reach a state of completion. They serve continually to develop the thinking apparatus and the thoughts that it processes. They are supposed to fight against ignorance and make up for incomprehension and misunderstanding. They are constantly combined in the analytic work, as are the patient and the analyst who, each in their own way, seek to derive benefit from this growth.

166 Conclusion

There is thus an articulation, a “bringing into play” of the container/contained relationship, a swinging back-and-forth between the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, all under the aegis of the tolerance or intolerance of frustration – that is, depending on the mechanisms of flight or modification due to pleasure or to pain. This tolerance or intolerance is itself dependent on alpha-function, permitted only by the links L, H, and K. The analyst may once again open A Memory of the Future (1991), the last book written by Bion in the form of a literary trilogy that represents “a form of writing without precedent in the field of psychoanalysis”.1 Bion exposes himself in an unusual way, bringing into dialogue, like on a theatre stage – moreover, there is no lack of scenic indications – various characters, some real (Bion, MYSELF, P.A. = Psychoanalyst, Doctor, Seven-Month Embryo, Schoolboy, Eighteen Years, Twenty-Five Years, Forty Years, Priest, etc., and some imaginary (Schreber, Alice, Sherlock, Watson, Roland, Robin, and so on), often venturing to make incursions “from the other side of the mirror”, as in the astonishing exchanges between Pre-Natal, the not yet born, and Post-Natal. We discover that the real characters must learn to coexist intelligently with the fictional characters and the imaginary creatures they have invented, for they are all required to share juxtaposed worlds,2 and, as Gérard Bléandonu (1993) writes, all of them are called upon to play a role that is similar to that of the negative numbers that have “broken the tyranny of real numbers” (p. 216, translated for this edition). In this trilogy, each volume has a significant title: The Dream, The Past Presented, The Dawn of Oblivion. As the French translator notes, “Bion wanted to render the mental habits of continuity in his reader unusable”. An “emotional turbulence” wells up from the depths of the book, similar to “the impressive caesura of birth” described by Freud (1925, p. 138) as if it were the sign of a process of growth that has already begun in utero. Bion insisted on the progressive slipping from one mental life to another. His interest in the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci mixing the hair and the beard of an old man with eddies of swirling water is exemplary from this point of view. In these drawings there is continuity and discontinuity. Similarly, Bion was keen on the image of the spiral – “We keep on coming back to the same point” only on different levels of the helix, (Bion, 1973–1974, p. 83) – which imprinted a helicoidal movement on the mental progression of the human species. And even if, in A Memory of the Future, “the style of writing . . . deploys for the first time openly his immersion in the entire cultural patrimony of the language in which he feels, thinks, speaks and writes” (Poulain-Colombier, p. xv), there is an enactment of the principles of non-continuity and non-linearity representative of Bion’s way of thinking, so much does the author “try to put the reader . . . in the situation of being the new reader of a book written in a new way at the level of its form” (ibid., p. xiv, author’s emphasis). And I hope the reader has been able to get a measure of this principle of non-continuity and non-linearity throughout the pages of the present book. Bion always upheld the idea that the human being keeps himself alive by preserving his aptitude for growth, a process which continues – except in the case

Conclusion  167

of an obstacle or major accident – until death, which is omnipresent in Bion’s work. Both physical death: countless young men died in combat during the wars in which Bion took part; the death that he closely escaped himself; the death of Betty Jardine as a result of giving birth to Parthenope . . .; and psychic death: the death he experienced in Flanders, at Ypres, and at Amiens, on August 8, 1918, and again on August 11; the ghosts of dead men that haunted him constantly; “the past presented” being that of a man spared from death: “I died at English Farm and I’ve been working through Purgatory ever since” (Bion, 1991, p. 442), and elsewhere in the book he writes, “I would not go near the Amiens-Roye road for fear I should meet my ghost – I died there” (p. 257). In The Dawn of Oblivion (Bion, 1979 [1991]) the war, which had already provided the context for The Dream (1975[1991]), the first volume of the trilogy, continues, this time between Mind and Body. They will never manage to understand each other sufficiently to engender Psyche-Soma or Soma-Psyche. Another war is going on, namely, the war that has always taken place between the sexes and against sex. Finally, Boy and Girl have difficulty in moving on from the period of latency to adolescence because they hate learning and growth. “The task of the psychoanalyst consists in facilitating psychic growth”, the analyst tells himself again. But “why is this profession so tiring?”, he asks himself. He is then reminded of the theory about the baby being able to evacuate his psychic problems into the breast or into the mother, just as he evacuates urine and faeces. The baby gets well, but the breast or mother gets ill and dies. “That’s all right”, Bion writes, “if it is Melanie Klein’s theory of projective identification” (1994, p. 172). But my patient isn’t a baby, the analyst tells himself, and even if I am reminded of this theory, it doesn’t really fit this story in which everybody does so well except the analyst! For, Bion adds, “You will never know what this patient’s troubles are, but you will certainly know what yours are” (p. 173, author’s emphasis). These reflections are also an opportunity for the analyst to query the pertinence of the Kleinian concept of projective identification and its intensive use in analysis, for some take the view that this concept provides Kleinian and post-Kleinian analysts with an alibi for bolstering their feelings of omnipotence with regard to patients. “If I am thinking that about you”, the thinking goes, “it is because you have evacuated this idea into me in the hope that I will be able to say something to you about it; my interpretation will therefore necessarily be the right one.” But Bion freed himself from Melanie Klein when his experience led him to think that the mechanism in question is not a fantasy but a reality. This idea was confirmed by the observations of early relations between mothers and babies, observations during which it was shown that a mother’s inability to take care of her baby could have catastrophic consequences for him, plunging him into annihilation-anxieties and nameless dread, which destroy the link that has scarcely been formed. Of course, it also depends on whether the baby has a breakdown or not and, nonetheless, through good times and bad, he will continue to grow. But perhaps, a few decades later, he will ask me for an appointment to begin an analysis. If I consider, after a certain number of meetings, that he is capable of undertaking this work, will I succeed, in

168 Conclusion

the long term, in helping him escape the syndrome of, in turn, “becoming an analyst” (“devenir analyste”) that stalks every patient? As I see it, it is not just a question of identification with the analyst. Clearly, the patient in question has been suffering, since he was a baby, from not having been able to cure his mother, and if he is unable, during his analysis, to elaborate this question sufficiently, he may leave the path he is on in order to “take his vows” and embark on an analytic vocation. This evolution has more to do with religious vocational aspirations than with a scientific vocational aspirations – and it is a pity both for the subject and for psychoanalysis. We are once again, today, at the dawn of a battle, underpinned by the catastrophic anxieties linked to any possibility of change, between an impulse for immediate action, which is inevitably destructive – “shoot-out”, as Bion says – and a creative form of “disciplined debate”. To use his own terms, it is “the struggle for the expansion rather than explosion of the psyche” (translated for this edition).3

Notes 1 See the “Présentation” written by Jacquelyne Poulain-Colombier in Un mémoire du temps à venir (Bion, 2010, pp. xi–xv). 2 This is an opportunity for me to pay tribute to the recent book by Pierre Bayard (2014), Il existe d’autres mondes, in which the author, by demonstrating, like the physicists, the coexistence of several parallel worlds, resolves “many enigmas of daily life”. 3 On this subject, see, at the end of Un mémoire du temps à venir (Bion, 2010, pp. 609–616) the illuminating postface written by Parthenope Bion-Talamo and titled “Sur la portée clinique d’Un mémoire du temps à venir”.

REFERENCES

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INDEX

abandonment 21, 51, 67, 71, 99; see also hate, abandonment of the Abraham 13, 141, 142 Abraham, Karl 7, 30 absence 43, 65, 66, 70, 71, 82, 107, 122; see also presence abstraction 16, 28, 29, 30, 50, 54, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 143; see also realization(s) achievement 57, 71, 93; see also language, of achievement activity 3, 17, 33, 46, 52, 56, 69, 81, 82, 83, 84, 88, 92, 117, 156, 157, 164; thought111, 112 Aeneas 14 affects 56, 132, 148; affective 148, 156 aggressiveness 61 agreement 9, 43, 72, 134; see also disagreement Alice 166, 170 alimentary canal 28, 29, 74, 95 alimentation 28, 96 alpha-element(s) 27, 28, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 63, 64, 76, 83, 90, 102, 126 alpha-function i, ii, 5, 26, 28, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 63, 64, 65, 66, 73, 75, 83, 85, 89, 90, 102, 148, 166; of the analyst 73; infant’s 55, 57, 58; maternal 55, 59, 60, 83 Americas 47 Amiens 38, 167 analysis vii, 9, 12, 17, 18, 21, 23, 26, 28, 29, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 49, 51, 62, 65, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 76, 80, 83, 87, 89, 91, 95,

96, 99, 100, 101, 102, 108, 114, 115, 118, 119, 120, 123, 124, 127, 130, 131, 134, 135, 136, 137, 147, 148, 155, 158, 162, 164, 167, 168, 170, 171, 173; accounts of 8; aims of the 29, 130, 151; conduct of 72, 102, 130; framework of the 45; see also psychoanalysis (or psycho-analysis) analytic ii, 8, 9, 26, 29, 44, 70, 72, 73, 78, 92, 99, 115, 116, 117, 119, 120, 121, 122, 129, 131, 133, 135, 137, 141, 143, 165, 168; setting 10, 134; situation 72, 87, 128, 137; training 16 analytic position 141; of the analyst 135 anatomy 30, 163 Andreas-Salomé, Lou 137 animate 14, 88, 102; and inanimate 14, 19, 88, 96 anonymous 23, 151, 152 anticipation 105, 106, 115, 116 Antigone 138 anxiety(ies) 4, 49, 100, 104, 111, 128, 133, 149, 163, 172; of annihilation 70; -neurosis 104 Anzieu, Didier 7, 42, 152, 169 apparatus 27, 28, 33, 60, 65, 75, 81, 84, 93, 94, 95, 96, 113, 114, 115; alpha-function of 55; digestive 27, 56; protomental 22; psychic, ψ (psy) 28, 51, 53, 56, 60, 67, 69, 95, 100, 110, 126; of representation 30; for thinking 21, 23, 25, 82, 85, 86, 95, 96, 105, 165; ♀♂, 55 après-coup 62 Ardennes 15

Index  175

Arf Arfer 34, 35, 48 Argentina 47 Aristarchus of Samos 89 aristocracy 161 Aristotle 19, 22, 31, 39, 62, 102, 106, 123, 151 army 10, 15, 16, 25, 35, 42, 144, 146, 161 arrogance 5, 27, 169 arts (disciplines) 125 Athena 137 atonement (at-one-ment) 125, 135 attacks 23, 32, 35, 38, 46, 61, 113, 114, 115, 117, 121, 159; on linking 70, 73, 114, 169 attention 1, 4, 18, 20, 46, 52, 53, 64, 65, 77, 85, 91, 97, 100, 111, 120, 123, 128, 134, 140, 141, 143, 148, 152, 157; floating 100 Attention and Interpretation 46, 143, 169 autism 118 axis (vertical, horizontal) 78, 82, 98, 117, 125; see also grid Ayah 34 baby 16, 17, 24, 43, 44, 53, 55, 59, 60, 61, 62, 65, 68, 76, 77, 88, 91, 96, 106, 114, 119, 167, 168 bacteriology 163 Baranès, Jean-José 82, 169 Bartleby 69, 172 basic assumption 142, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 163; dependence 4, 154, 159, 160; fight-flight 4, 154, 159; pairing 4, 153 Bayard, Pierre 168, 169 Beckett, Samuel 31, 41, 42, 169 belief(s) 13, 25, 28, 44, 73, 89, 100, 106, 132, 143, 147, 148, 155, 158, 160, 162, 163 beta-element(s) 19, 27, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 63, 64, 65, 66, 73, 75, 76, 83, 85, 90, 95, 96, 102, 112, 114, 117, 126, 134 beta-screen 63, 73 Bianchedi 54, 171 binocular 18, 95, 143; see also vision Bion: Betty Jardine 43, 167; Francesca 34, 35, 45, 46, 48, 170; Julian 46; life 15; Nicola 46; Parthenope 43, 46, 167, 168; his qualities of mind and character 18; his sister 34; work 15 Blanchot, Maurice i, 164, 170 Bléandonu, Gérard 45, 166, 170 body 15, 16, 28, 35, 60, 66, 74, 117, 138, 161, 164, 167; vestigial bodily parts 22 Bonsey 37 borderline 23, 127 Bourlon, Wood (Ardennes) 38

Boy 34, 39, 40, 117, 167 Braithwaite 31 Brazil 47, 124, 141; Sao Paulo 47 breakdown 167; in alpha-function 90; mental 39 breast 24, 27, 30, 31, 53, 55, 59, 60, 61, 63, 65, 66, 73, 74, 75, 76, 85, 88, 91, 92, 101, 102, 107, 114, 120, 132, 133, 167; bad (desired because absent) 22, 58, 59, 66, 75, 76, 85, 88; “collapsed” form of the 107; expectation of the 83, 84, 98; good (present) 59, 66, 75, 85, 88; need for 58, 75, 76; objective and/or subjective 88; qualities of the 28; real 4, 53; realization of the 53; see also no-breast breastfeeding 59, 62 Breuer, Joseph 67, 104, 170 British Institute of Psychoanalysis 41, 42 British Psychoanalytic Society 20, 41, 44, 46 Buckingham, Palace 38 Budapest 41 Buddha 160 California 15, 34, 47, 163 Cambrai 35 Cambridge 35, 171, 172, 173 cancer 31 caste 161 castration 79 catastrophe (and catastrophic) 65 cathexis 67, 82; objects 54 causal 57, 93, 104, 106, 108, 109; connection 105, 106 causality 91, 120; formal causation 106; multiple 108; psychic 22, 172; theory of 22 cause 46, 105, 106, 109, 110, 115, 132, 137, 164; and effect 105, 106, 107, 156 Champollion, Jean-François 93 change 28, 39, 45, 72, 75, 106, 110, 120, 127, 128, 129, 130, 132, 134, 137, 142, 150, 161, 168; catastrophic 77, 100; of perspective 24 canal, alimentary 28, 29, 74, 95 Charcot 146 children 7, 35, 41, 46, 48 Church 145, 161, 163 circular argument 4, 109, 162 civilisations (lost) 14 clinical: experience 6, 7, 20, 22, 23, 53, 64, 75; practice i, 6, 8, 23, 31, 53, 70, 81, 86 communication 26, 84, 87, 108, 109, 113, 115, 131, 132, 149

176 Index

component 59, 117; emotional 142; libidinal 155; moral 112; rational 142; sexual 111, 115 concept(s) 1, 16, 17, 19, 24, 26, 27, 30, 65, 67, 68, 70, 71, 74, 83, 91, 92, 97, 100, 106, 124, 126, 143, 146, 149, 151, 167 (and conceptualisation) 10 conception 24, 30, 51, 53, 54, 64, 65, 67, 77, 80, 83, 84, 91, 93, 97, 98, 110, 111, 112, 115, 117, 119, 121, 126 concern 118 concretization 31, 89 condensation 126 Condillac 39 conflict(s) 45, 135, 152, 153, 157; œdipal 30 conjecture 20, 50 conjunction 26, 83, 105, 108, 112, 132, 133, 140; constant 17, 90, 106, 107, 112, 131, 132, 133, 142 consciousness (= Bewußtsein) 26, 27, 52, 53, 56, 58, 75, 104 contact-barrier 54, 56 contained (♂) 13, 14, 21, 65, 136, 142 container (♀) 21, 29, 55, 69, 82, 119, 126, 136, 165 container/contained (♀♂) 21, 55, 165, 166 continuity 36, 82, 118, 158, 166; and discontinuity 166 Copernicus 89 counter-transference 26, 60, 63, 69, 70, 73, 100, 131, 132, 133, 150, 158, 171 couple 43, 46, 115, 137, 143; parental 114 Cracow 79 creativity 46; creative possibilities 24, 25 Creon 138 cruelty 44, 122 Cs. (= consciousness) see consciousness culture 19, 140, 152, 171 cupidity 142 curiosity 13, 19, 27, 111, 116, 130, 133, 141, 142 David-Ménard, Monique 16, 170 death 12, 13, 14, 27, 35, 37, 38, 39, 43, 46, 54, 61, 105, 141, 142, 167; drive 69, 70; of the personality 167 Deity 11 Delphi 138 delusion 15, 72, 128; of the psychotic 15, 109 denial 69, 101, 140, 151 depersonalisation 39, 70 depression 37, 50, 61, 99, 108, 117, 128 depressive position 79, 117, 119, 165, 166

deprivation 28, 68; atmosphere of 99; of food 28; of truth 28 Descartes 100 desire ii, 14, 18, 51, 100, 135, 136, 137, 152, 153, 172; of analysis 164; unconscious 26 destruction vii, 22, 82, 128, 133, 140, 148; of alpha-function 59, 63, 65, 69, 73, 89, 102; of the analyst’s capacity 73; of the apparatus for thinking 23, 30, 105; of the breast 133; of the capacity for abstraction 89; of contact with reality 109; of the ego 114; of language 13; of link 69, 73, 167; of meaning 105, 112, 129, 132; of parental couple 114; of personality 15, 16 destructiveness 61, 117, 128 Dethiville, Laura viii, 48, 61, 170 development ii, 5, 23, 27, 41, 62, 63, 77, 81, 83, 92, 96, 106, 114, 117, 118, 133, 152, 163, 172; of apparatus for thinking ii, 21, 82, 83, 85, 95; of contact-barrier 148; of personality 23, 54, 72, 100, 161; of thought vii, 13, 21, 22, 46, 58, 81, 82, 85, 93, 95, 96, 102, 111, 126, 169 disagreement 26; see also agreement disaster 15, 54 disavowal 69 disintegration 70, 112, 113; psychotic 70 displacement 126 disposition 46, 70, 137, 139, 141; creative 46; inborn 83 disturbance 53, 78, 131; of thought 57, 81 Doctor Feel It in the Past, Dr F.I.P 40; see also Hadfield, J.-R. dogma 6 Dora 32, 79, 124 Dordogne 34 Dostoievsky, Fyodor M. 163 dread 126 – 127; nameless 74, 119, 167 dream 9, 23, 30, 38, 64, 83, 95, 96, 97, 98, 100, 101, 126, 131, 166, 169, 170, 171; latent content of the 50, 83, 98, 106, 127; meaning of the 106; narrative of the 32, 98, 106 – 107; thought 1, 26, 51, 55, 56, 57, 64, 77, 83, 84, 96, 97, 126, 160 drive 27, 31, 54, 61, 71; death 69, 70; part61, 66; sexual 116; sources and aims of the 54, 61, 65, 71 Dupontel, Albert 103 ego 7, 48, 61, 65, 67, 68, 69, 73, 82, 104, 113, 114, 115, 118, 165, 171; and notego 68, 71; reconstitution of the 115; unconscious part of the 104 ego ideal 155

Index  177

Egypt 14, 92, 163 Eighteen Years 166 Eissler, Kurt 163 elaboration 6, 9, 26, 54, 60, 62, 71, 96, 97 element(s) 17, 21, 27, 60, 72, 74, 80, 89, 92, 96, 99, 102, 107, 111, 112, 116, 126, 131, 132, 151; animate 88; constitutive of thought 165; emotional 31; persecution 146; psychoanalytic 92; saturated 71, 79, 98; sexual 27, 111, 116, 155; unsaturated 91, 98; see also alpha-element(s); betaelement(s) Embryo of Seven Weeks 166 emotion 17, 61, 65, 116, 133, 142; hatred for 27 emotional vii, 3, 8, 21, 29, 40, 51, 53, 60, 61, 63, 71, 73, 74, 142, 148, 158, 166; content 49; experience (see experience, emotional); opposed to rational 142 England 15, 34, 35, 41, 42, 47 Enthoven, Jean-Paul 14, 170 environment 5, 16, 42, 54, 60, 84, 92, 114, 119, 152 envy 52, 61, 62, 74, 114, 128, 162, 172; fragmented 163 epistemology 13, 25 establishment 35, 161, 162 Eteocles 138 Europe 7, 47 evacuation 58, 75, 76, 84, 85, 114, 126, 136 evidence, negative see negative evidence experience: clinical 6, 7, 20, 22, 23, 53, 64, 75; emotional 16, 26, 28, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 64, 65, 66, 76, 83, 84, 86, 87, 88, 90, 91, 92, 96, 99, 102, 133, 172; learning from 25, 52, 56, 72, 91, 112, 155; non sensuous 49; of satisfaction 83 fact(s) 6, 8, 38, 59, 61, 68, 71, 90, 101, 142; interpretation of 24; selected (see selected fact); undigested 28, 58, 95 factor 17, 23, 28, 63, 90, 110; of the personality 54, 76 faeces 28, 59, 167 family 34, 39, 46, 47, 115, 154, 170 fantasy 13, 16, 20, 62, 103, 131, 167 father 12, 15, 34, 35, 43 – 44, 103, 154, 159, 164 fear 9, 36, 37, 60, 61, 64, 77, 94, 120, 127, 128, 132, 133, 157; of dying 36, 38, 39, 74, 76, 77, 167 feed 88 Ferenczi, Sándor 6 – 7, 32, 41, 58, 170, 171

fight-flight see basic assumption finite 82, 110, 161 fixation 118 Flanders 35, 167 Fliess, Wilhelm 13, 57, 93, 104, 172 floating attention see attention, floating form 3, 16, 31, 33, 55, 104, 113, 115, 166, 168; “collapsed” of the breast 107 formation 21, 96, 132, 148, 154, 155; analytical 6 (see also analytic, training); of symbols 65 Forty Years 43, 166 fragmentation 61, 73, 165; object 61 France 4, 7, 14, 34, 47; Paris 4, 31, 48; Poitiers 34; see also Périgord noir, Maroutal free association see association Freud, Anna 7 Freud, Sigmund i, 6, 7, 8, 12, 13, 15, 22, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 39, 41, 47, 48, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 57, 58, 60, 62, 64, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 73, 79, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 93, 95, 100, 103, 104, 107, 109, 110, 111, 117, 118, 120, 122, 123, 124, 126, 127, 131, 137, 144, 146, 148, 149, 152, 155, 156, 162, 166, 170 – 171, 172 frustration 3, 24, 29, 50, 55, 60, 71, 79, 83, 85, 93, 94, 107, 108, 112, 114, 128, 166; evasion of the 51, 71, 84, 85, 86, 112; feeling of 75, 85, 152; modification of the 51, 84, 86 function(s) 7, 17, 19, 22, 27, 30, 43, 52, 54, 55, 60, 63, 64, 65, 82, 91, 107, 111, 112, 113, 144, 153, 154, 156, 159, 161, 162, 163; of the analyst 116, 164; of linking 30, 73; of the personality 52, 55, 128; of the relationship 62, 99; see also alphafunction future iii, 24, 38, 42, 47, 48, 88, 106, 107, 118, 119, 120, 121, 136, 159, 162, 166, 170 Galicia 79 Garden of Eden 12, 13 generalisation 112; see also particularisation generations (difference of the) 115, 169 genius 18, 34, 45, 48, 153, 159, 161, 162, 163, 170 geometry 92, 124, 127 George V 40 Girl 167 God 13, 125, 132, 159, 160 Grand Inquisitor 163 Granoff, Wladimir 79, 165, 171 gratitude 45, 73, 172

178 Index

Greece 10, 14, 34, 93, 111, 137, 163 greed 61, 62, 134 Green, André i, 7, 68, 70, 79, 106, 171 grid vii, 1, 77, 80, 96, 98, 101, 102, 117, 130, 131, 141, 169, 170; horizontal lines 76, 78, 96, 100, 101, 117, 126; negative 3, 77, 78; vertical columns 76, 98, 99, 111, 114, 117 Grinberg, León 54, 63, 171 Grotstein, James S. 17, 18, 34, 171, 173 group i, ii, 4, 10, 16, 25, 32, 40, 42 – 45, 48, 69, 116, 140 – 173; basic assumption (or basic group) 142, 152, 153, 156, 157, 160, 161; communication within the 146; conservation 161; dependence 154, 155, 158, 160; dynamics 41, 155, 158, 172; fight-flight 154, 161; functioning 44, 147, 150, 153, 162; indistinction 157; and individual 10, 113, 140, 144, 151, 152, 160, 162; libido of 155; membership 5, 147, 148, 151, 152, 157, 160, 162, 163; mentality 151, 152; pairing 5, 143, 149, 152, 155, 161, 163; psychoanalytic 10, 41, 159, 161; of psychotherapy 25, 41, 42, 140, 145, 146, 147, 150, 157; rational 156, 157, 158; sexual motivations of the 153; without leader 4, 42, 151; work 4, 142, 150, 157, 161 growth i, 5, 14, 16, 25, 44, 88, 92, 110, 130, 152, 156, 162, 163, 165, 166, 167; mental 137; mutual 162; negative, positive 92, 117; psychic 5, 110, 167 Guillaumin, Jean 79, 169, 171 guilt 13, 27, 37, 43, 61, 91, 105, 111, 112, 117, 121, 128 H (link) 21, 71, 72, 86, 87, 88, 125, 131, 165, 166; H (minus H) 21, 72, 86; see also hate Hadfield, J.-R. 40, 41; see also Doctor Feel It in the Past, Dr F.I.P hallucination 25, 51, 66, 67, 68, 134, 135; invisible visual 72; negative 25, 32, 68 hallucinosis 134; state of 134, 135; transformation in 135 Harris Williams, Meg 139 hate 21, 61, 62, 63, 68, 71, 74, 86, 109, 114, 116, 125, 133, 134, 165; abandonment of the 21 hatred 27, 155; of emotions 27; of life 27; of reality 109 Hawking, Stephen i, 121 healing 15, 40 Hegel 123

Heidegger, Martin 21, 171 Heisenberg, Werner 108, 121 helplessness 112 Hera 137 – 138 here and now 18, 49, 119, 120 homosexuality 171 hospital 40, 41, 42, 43, 48, 129, 145, 146, 162 hubris (or hybris) see pride (hubris) Hume, David i, 22, 39, 105, 106, 107, 110, 171 hypochondria 128, 129 hypothesis 21, 27, 31, 90, 91, 92, 95, 98, 113, 159; definitory 99, 100, 111, 122, 140 id 68, 104 idealization 162 identification 125, 135, 169; to O 136 – 137, 140; projective 24, 26, 27, 29, 55, 58, 60, 64, 65, 74, 84, 85, 86, 94, 102, 114, 126, 127, 131, 133, 136, 148, 155, 158, 162, 164, 165, 167, 171 ignorance 13, 142, 157, 165 illness(es) 5, 163; autoimmune 31; group 144 – 150; mental 163; psychosomatic 156 – 157 images (concrete) 30, 98 inanimate 14, 19, 88, 96 incest 30, 111 India 15, 47 – 48; childhood spent in 15, 34 – 35 induction 106; principle 106 infant 20, 24, 28, 30, 53, 55, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 66, 74, 75, 76, 79, 83, 84, 85, 86, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 101, 102, 113, 114, 115, 117, 118, 120, 122, 133, 163 infinite 82, 110, 137, 140, 161; see also finite innate (or inborn): dimension 91; disposition 83; expectation 83; preconception 24, 91, 92, 115, 122, 163; state of mind 139 insecurity (feeling of) 99 insight 17, 48, 72, 73, 118, 128, 137, 144 Institute for the Scientific Treatment of Delinquincy 41 integration (and non-integration) 58, 61, 70, 112, 113, 117, 158; integratable 55, 84 interpretation 4, 9, 18, 22, 23, 24, 26, 45, 46, 50, 63, 72, 73, 78, 87, 99, 100, 103, 107, 108, 109, 111, 115, 117, 126, 127, 128, 134, 135, 143, 147, 148, 149, 150, 158, 167, 169, 170; of facts 23; incorrect 45, 73, 149 introjection 64; process of 29

Index  179

intuition 17, 89, 115, 116, 127, 137 invariant(s) 123, 124, 126 investigation(s) 52, 54, 97, 113, 153, 156, 158; psychoanalytic 19, 95; scientific 142 Italy 14, 47 Iver, Heath 43, 46 Jardine, Betty see Bion Jesus 13, 163 Jocasta 111, 121 Jones, Ernest 40, 41, 87 Joyce, James 47 judgement 29, 64, 149; of existence 82 K (K link) 71, 72, 74, 86, 87, 88, 90, 125, 130, 131, 165, 166; K (minus K link) 72, 74, 86, 89, 92 Kafka, Franz 22, 69, 171 Kant, Emmanuel 21, 22, 39, 121, 123 Karamazov (The Brothers) 163 Keats, John 71, 101, 170, 171 Kephron 163 Kepler 89 Klein, Melanie 16, 22, 25, 27, 29, 30, 41, 44, 45, 46, 47, 53, 58, 61, 64, 70, 71, 84, 113, 117, 118, 119, 149, 158, 167, 172, 173; Melanie Klein Trust 46 knowledge (to know) 13, 14, 19, 21, 23, 24, 25, 29, 31, 51, 53, 71, 72, 77, 78, 83, 86, 88, 95, 101, 105, 106, 111, 112, 113, 115, 118, 122, 129, 130, 142, 143, 165, 172; negative 72; subject supposed to know 9, 129 Kohut, Heinz 7 Korff-Sausse, Simone 172 L (L link) 21, 71, 72, 86, 87, 88, 125, 131, 132, 165, 166; L (minus L link) 21, 71, 72, 86 La Borde 66, 172 Lacan, Jacques 1, 7, 14, 15, 27, 31, 43, 66, 71, 78, 79, 80, 106, 110, 114, 137, 138, 139, 162, 164, 165, 171, 172 lack 19, 39, 51, 54, 59, 61, 62, 69, 71, 79, 93, 95, 107, 117, 120, 132, 149, 156, 164, 166 Laius 9, 12, 111, 138 language 4, 13, 16, 19, 20, 24, 31, 34, 57, 63, 66, 80, 117, 140, 159, 166; of achievement 101; imperfection of the 19; and linguistics 7, 16, 98; tics 20 latency 167 leader 13, 25, 154, 155, 159, 160, 161, 163 Lemberg 79 Lévy, François 1, 10, 48, 114, 170, 172

Lewis Carroll 1, 80, 105 lie 78, 79, 87, 100, 101 linearity 118; non-linearity 166 link 3, 5, 17, 20, 21, 30, 32, 54, 63, 65, 69, 71, 72, 79, 87, 88, 89, 93, 107, 109, 112, 114, 120, 130, 131, 142, 165; causal 104; between patient and analyst 87, 88; sexual 135; see also H (H-link); K (K-link); L (L-link) linking 11, 21, 24, 30, 46, 69, 70, 73, 82, 110, 114, 169 logic i, 6, 20, 54, 55, 59, 83, 92, 95, 98, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 111, 116, 120, 131, 132, 136, 139, 162, 170, 172; causalist 106, 107, 109; of frustration 108; “psycho-”, 132 London 7, 35, 40, 41, 43, 46, 48; Harley Street 43; London Clinic of Psychoanalysis 46; University College Hospital 40 López-Corvo, Rafael 47, 172 Los Angeles 47 love 12, 21, 46, 52, 55, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 68, 71, 73, 75, 86, 101, 105, 116, 133, 134, 165, 172 Lyth, Olivier 20 magic 142, 154, 157 Mahabharata 34 Maida Vale Hospital for Nervous Diseases 41 mathematics 19, 31, 55, 102, 125; and mathematician 4, 16, 55, 163 Matte Blanco, Ignacio 7 McDougall, Joyce 31, 66 me 62, 109, 129, 133, 148; not-me 68 meaning 3, 4, 6, 9, 17, 19, 20, 23, 27, 30, 31, 50, 53, 55, 64, 65, 66, 68, 71, 74, 79, 82, 83, 84, 89, 91, 98, 99, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 111 – 112, 115, 116, 124, 125, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133 – 134, 135, 138, 154, 156, 159, 162; destruction of the 105, 108, 129, 131, 132 melancholia 7, 68 Meltzer, Donald 26, 27, 29, 30, 65, 172 memories 28, 136 Menoeceus 138 Mesopotamia 14 messiah 34, 153, 159, 160, 161, 163; messianic ideas 5 metaphor 15 milk 24, 59, 60, 75 Milton, John 1, 172 mind 2, 5, 7, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 25, 47, 51, 53, 56, 57, 58, 76, 81, 89, 104, 106,

180 Index

109, 110, 111, 117, 118, 119, 135, 135, 136, 153, 167; of my own 17; state of 8, 14, 58, 75, 98, 102, 127, 135, 139, 142, 157, 162; turn of 12 mis-understanding 72, 73 model 21, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 55, 70, 74, 75, 81, 83, 87, 90, 95, 99, 104, 110, 124, 132, 141 modification (or alteration) 51; of frustration 51, 84, 85 Monet, Claude 123 moral (morality) 13, 22, 29, 41, 74, 110, 111, 112; beyond 29, 111; superiority 29, 74 Moses 155 mother 12, 34, 39, 42, 43, 47, 55, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 83, 84, 86, 88, 90, 91, 92, 94, 114, 137, 164, 165, 167, 168; and maternal care 44, 86 motor discharge 84 Muttra 34 My-Self 37 – 38, 166 mystery 11, 68, 161 mystic 10, 11, 34, 161, 162 myth 12, 13, 27, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 117, 172; of the Garden of Eden 12; of Œdipus 12, 13, 27, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 143, 172; of the Tour of Babel 12, 13 name (and definition) 34, 35, 37, 45, 89, 90, 91, 119, 129, 140 narcissism (or narciss-ism) 70, 92, 132, 133 narration 14; see also narrative narrative 14, 91, 104, 105, 107; of the dream 98, 106 need 28, 31, 40, 51, 58, 59, 63, 66, 70, 72, 73, 75 – 76, 85, 86, 88, 89, 92, 124, 133, 137, 144, 152, 157, 159, 163 negative (negation) i, vii, 21, 22, 24, 25, 32, 66, 67, 68, 69, 72, 77, 78, 81, 82, 84, 85, 86, 91, 92, 99, 103, 112, 117, 125, 140, 156, 166, 171; capability 5, 71, 101; and differentiation 68, 69; evidence 25; grid 3; modality of the 68 neurosis 8, 67, 104, 141, 144, 171; transference 127 neurotic 23, 82, 86, 89, 109, 134, 141, 144, 145, 151; insane 15 no-breast 66, 75, 82, 83, 85, 107, 108, 132 – 133 nonsense 45 Normandy 43 Northfield Military Hospital, Northfield 42 – 43, 162

notation 1, 4, 77, 97, 100, 111 notes, of session 22, 49, 50 nothing 70 – 71, 100, 125; no-thing 70 noumenon 121, 123 number(s) 80, 98, 125, 140; negative 166; real 166; whole 21 “O” ii, 21, 124 – 125, 130, 131, 133, 135, 140; contact with 125, 137; evolution of 126; transformation in 127, 135 object 25, 29, 30, 51, 59, 61, 63, 65, 67, 68, 69, 71, 73, 75, 76, 79, 82, 88, 89, 92, 93, 95, 96, 99, 100, 102, 110, 112, 113, 118, 121, 127, 131, 132, 140, 148, 156, 157, 163, 164, 165; animate 102; bad 73, 85, 148; bizarre 3, 64, 66, 76; external 129; good 73, 148; inanimate 96; internal 74; maternal 82; mathematical 31, 102; part30; presence of the 68; psychoanalytic 91, 92, 95, 102; re-introjected 29, 74 observation 6, 10, 21, 24, 27, 52, 62, 66, 112, 132, 143, 145, 151, 153, 167; clinical 27, 101, 102; insufficiency of our power of 149, 163 œdipal ii, 30, 111, 113 – 115, 143 Oedipus 5, 9, 12, 13, 27, 111, 114 – 115, 121, 138; complex 12, 27, 30, 111, 113, 127; myth 12, 27, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 143 Ogden, Thomas 7 omnipotence 29, 73, 105, 112, 158, 162, 167 omniscience 29, 112, 158 one (oneness) 135, 140, 162; atonement (at-one-ment) 125, 135, 140 organs 26, 49, 50, 52, 53, 58, 75, 96; see also body; sense(s) other 9, 10, 11, 19, 27, 29, 61, 65, 66, 68, 165; maternal 29, 55, 165 Oury, Jean 66, 172 Ovid 138, 172 Oxford 35, 37, 38, 39, 48; Queen’s College 37 P.A. = Psycho-Analyst 166 pain 6, 29, 43, 52, 55, 59, 66, 72, 86, 98, 108, 116, 128, 129, 134, 165, 166 pairing 4, 143, 153, 154, 155, 159, 161 Palinurus 12, 14 Pankejeff, Sergei (Wolf Man) 131 paranoia 7, 159 paranoid schizoid position 79, 119, 165 – 166; see also position parasitic, relationship 79, 80, 162

Index  181

parents (parental) 8, 15, 34, 35, 37, 39, 113, 115, 128; couple 62, 113, 114; relationship 113, 115; sexual 62, 94, 103 Parthenope 43, 44 particularisation 112; see also generalisation parts 15, 31, 55, 74, 113, 140, 144, 165; of the ego 61, 104, 114; non psychotic 15, 23, 24; of the personality 15, 29, 48, 64, 73, 74, 92; psychotic 15, 23, 24, 42, 89 Pascal, Blaise 39 past 40, 67, 106, 107, 118, 119, 120 – 121, 127, 136, 166, 167, 169 patient(s) ii, 3, 6, 8, 12, 17, 20, 22, 23, 26, 27, 28, 29, 32, 40, 41, 49, 50, 51, 56, 57, 58, 63, 64, 69 – 70, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 78, 81, 85, 87, 94, 96, 97, 99, 100, 101, 103, 104, 105, 107, 108, 112, 113, 115, 116, 120, 122, 124, 126, 127, 128, 130, 131, 133, 135, 136, 144, 145, 146, 148, 149, 150, 151, 159, 160, 164, 167, 168; - analyst meeting 4, 9, 11, 18, 30, 45, 53, 60, 65, 71, 87 – 88, 98, 125, 126, 129 – 130, 131, 135, 140, 165; psychotic 22, 23, 53, 63, 64, 65, 102, 103, 109, 110 – 111, 114, 127 – 129, 134 – 135, 163; types of 10, 134 Paton, H.J. 39 penis 30; see also vagina penumbra of associations 5, 19, 20 perception(s) 18, 24, 26, 49, 52, 56, 57, 64, 67, 68, 75, 84, 105, 106, 121, 124; of the group 150 – 151; increase in 137, 140; indications of (Wz) 57, 93; objectless 68 Périgord Noir, Maroutal 34 persecution 79; feelings of 43, 108, 119 personality 6, 15, 19, 24, 28, 29, 33, 39, 45, 54, 65, 73, 74, 77, 84, 85, 86, 92, 96, 100, 109, 112, 113, 128, 131, 133, 147, 149, 151, 155; factors of the 52, 54 – 55, 76; improvisation of 64; psychotic 23, 65, 89, 133, 148; unified (integrated) 61 perspective 7, 17, 18, 115, 118, 119; change of vii 12 – 32; Freudian 41, 156; reversal of 3, 18, 115, 147; reversible 18, 72 perversion 67 phantasm (and phantasy) 29, 30, 48, 58, 94 phase 115, 118; depressive 117, 119; paranoid-schizoid 117, 119 phenomenon (phenomena) 3, 4, 24, 27, 29, 49, 51, 57, 59, 73, 85, 89, 92, 97, 98, 102, 106, 109, 110, 112, 121, 123, 125, 128, 133, 134, 141, 148; group 105, 143, 144, 150, 158; protomental 31, 156, 163 Philips, Frank 34, 47, 173

philosophy (and philosophers) i, 16, 19, 22, 25, 39, 55, 100, 104, 105, 121, 123, 137 Phorbas 14 physics i, 16, 19, 104, 105, 121, 155; and astrophysics i, 19; and physicists 16, 121, 168 physiology 30, 59, 163 Pines, Malcolm 41, 45, 173 Plato 22, 39, 123 pleasure 6, 12, 42, 51, 52, 103, 112, 134, 136, 137, 165, 166 pleasure-unpleasure principle 51, 67, 84, 93 – 94, 95, 100, 136, 171 plunderers (as precursors of the scientists) 14, 142 Poincaré, Henri 4, 5, 11, 19, 21, 31, 173 point of view 18, 22, 26, 27, 29, 58, 62, 63, 68, 69, 74, 85, 101, 110, 118, 124, 130, 135, 148, 153, 156, 158, 166; see also vertex Polynices 138 pope 160 position: depressive (see depressive position); paranoid-schizoid (see paranoid-schizoid position) positive 21, 22, 25, 68, 69, 70, 71, 80, 84, 86, 91, 92, 117, 118, 121, 125; see also negative (negation) Post-Natal 166 Poulain-Colombier, Jacquelyne 166, 168 practice, psychoanalytic i, iii, 3, 4, 8, 10, 23, 25, 31, 33, 41, 44, 49, 54, 58, 81, 96, 100, 119, 126, 140, 151; Freudian orthodox 16; groupal 10, 151 preconception(s) (or pre-conception) ii, 1, 3, 19, 24, 53, 77, 83, 84, 85, 97, 98, 103, 111, 112, 113, 116, 117, 126, 141; inborn (or innate) 24, 91 preconsciousness see Vb precursor 13, 108, 113, 116 premonition (or pre-motion) 19 Pre-Natal 166 pre-oedipal 115 presence 9, 10, 18, 28, 33, 48, 59, 68, 70, 82, 91, 109, 116, 120, 129, 131, 141, 148, 163; and non-presence 67, 70 – 71, 75, 82, 134; see also absence present (time) 78, 119, 120, 121, 159 pride (hubris) 27, 100, 121 Priest 166 primal scene 126, 127, 131 privacy (and private knowledge) 17, 41, 89, 113, 144

182 Index

progression (and progressivity) 22, 55, 62, 68, 90, 92, 110, 117, 118, 119, 166 projection(s) 29, 58, 117, 126 projective counter-identification 63 protomental 22, 31, 156 – 157, 163 Proust, Marcel 33, 48, 173 Ps ⇒ D 118, 119 Ps ⇔ D 118, 119 ψ (psy) 55, 67, 91 psyche 24, 26, 28, 50, 58, 59, 69, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 102, 112, 114, 126, 168; constitution of the 20, 59, 83 Psyche-Soma 167 psychiatrist 25, 42, 43, 48, 66, 141 psychic i, ii, 3, 8, 13, 16, 20, 21, 22, 24, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 38, 41, 43, 51, 52, 53, 56, 57, 60, 61, 62, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 71, 82, 88, 93, 95, 96, 102, 104, 105, 109, 110, 112, 117, 123, 126, 132, 139, 143, 163, 167, 170, 172; functioning 22, 62, 68, 69, 70; polarities of the functioning 22; quality 26, 52, 54, 57, 58, 75; space 24, 68, 69, 71, 82, 94 psychoanalysis (or psycho-analysis) i, ii, iii, vii, 6, 7, 9, 10, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19, 20, 25, 41, 42, 46, 49, 51, 53, 62, 67, 68, 69, 76, 87, 99, 100, 101, 102, 104, 108, 110, 114, 118, 119, 120, 125, 126, 131, 135, 137, 140, 145, 147, 149, 153, 155, 158, 159, 161, 166, 168, 169, 171; Bion’s contributions to the 20; future of the 159; institute of 41, 42; practice of the 7, 10, 25, 96, 102, 126; scientificity of the 16; see also analysis psychoanalyst(s) 6, 7, 10, 11, 12, 16, 19, 22, 25, 40, 55, 69, 85, 100, 102, 104, 106, 116, 123, 140, 141, 143, 159, 166, 167 psychoanalytic i, ii, 3, 4, 7, 8, 10, 19, 21, 22, 23, 25, 29, 33, 38, 42, 44, 47, 49, 50, 51, 56, 61, 62, 70, 71, 76, 91, 102, 104, 116, 117, 118, 120, 128, 140, 141, 143, 148, 149, 161, 162; act 110; environment 5; group 41, 159; situation 148; universe 17 psycho-immunology 163 psychology 169; group 1, 40, 43, 48, 155, 170; individual and group 43 psychopathology 163; of the analyst 158 psychosis 109, 112; infantile 118 psychosomatic 31, 157 psychotherapist(s) i, 40, 87 psychotherapy 41, 146, 169, 173 psychotic(s) ii, 10, 15, 22, 23, 24, 42, 46, 53, 63, 64, 70, 81, 82, 86, 89, 101, 102, 103, 107, 109, 127, 133, 134, 148, 163, 169;

delusion 15; deterioration 54; and non 2, 15, 22, 23, 24, 46, 73, 74, 148; period 10; sane 15 public 35, 89, 113 pupil 39 Queneau, Raymond 19, 173 rational 8, 20, 108, 142, 156, 157, 158; opposed to emotional 142 reaction 15, 63, 148; emotional (affective) of the analyst 158; negative therapeutic 68; subjective of the analyst 158 reality 8, 16, 21, 23, 28, 29, 35, 53, 54, 56, 59, 62, 64, 67, 69, 75, 84, 86, 91, 94, 95, 96, 102, 105, 109, 112, 113, 114, 117, 118, 121, 123, 124, 130, 131, 133, 137, 143, 167, 173; denial of 66; external 26, 52, 56, 86, 93, 96, 109, 114, 123; indication of 67; internal 109, 114; loss of contact with 3; primordial and/or ultimate 11, 21, 125; principle 26, 51, 82, 85, 86, 93, 94, 112; psychic 109, 123 realization(s) 21, 22, 24, 28, 31, 64, 80, 83, 83, 84, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 95, 96, 98, 100, 101, 107, 113, 115, 126, 136, 146; of the breast 53, 91; of K 3; negative 24, 84, 85, 91, 103, 112; parental 113; sexual 22; see also images (concrete) reassurance 134, 149 reconstruction 15 Redcourt 46 Rees, J.R. 42 regression 70, 164 rehabilitation 141, 144 rejection 35, 58, 69, 138 relationship(s) 7, 8, 11, 16, 21, 23, 30, 31, 39, 42, 54, 55, 60, 62, 66, 69, 70, 73, 74, 79, 80, 82, 86, 88, 91, 99, 100, 101, 105, 106, 107, 110, 111, 125, 131, 133, 135, 142, 147, 149, 154, 158, 165, 166; with the analyst 71, 127, 130, 148; to the breast 53; commensal 74, 80; container/ contained 21, 55, 165; of couple 10; enriching 30; in the group 146, 153, 154; intimate of the analysis 99; object 24, 30, 70; parasitic 79, 162; parental 113, 115; sexual 94, 153; talking 21; with wider circles 18 release 57, 111; see also unbinding religion 142, 155, 158; religious beliefs 13 renunciation 69 repair 147

Index  183

representation 19, 28, 79, 89, 90, 123, 124; absence of 69; apparatus of 30; verbal 124; word as 123 repression 24, 57, 82, 104; primal 69; repressed 12, 69, 127 research 6, 10, 14, 23, 33, 61, 71, 141; psychoanalytic 7 researcher(s) 6, 11; see also scientists resistance 23, 29, 93, 116, 144 Resnik, Salomon 47, 48, 173 reverie 59, 135; maternal 1, 55 reversal 42, 66, 68, 71, 72; of the alphafunction 64, 65, 148; of perspective 3, 18 Rickman, John 25, 41, 42, 43, 44, 141, 144, 162, 170, 172, 173 rivalry 61 robbers (as precursors of the scientists) 142; see also plunderers Robin 166 Roland 166, 172 Rosenfeld, Herbert 7 Rosetta, Stone 92 Roustang, François 139, 170, 173 Royal Air Force 41 Roye 167 Rümke, H. Cornelius 66 Russell, Bertrand 31 Russia 41 Sade, D.A.F. 66 sane (and insane) 15 saturation 71, 98 schizophrenia 7, 169 Schliemann, Heinrich 15 Schneider, Monique 122, 173 Schopenhauer 123 Schreber 166 Schrödinger, Erwin 121 science(s) 1, 11, 16, 101, 105, 110, 142, 154, 158, 173; social 105 scientific 1, 5, 8, 20, 29, 31, 77, 88, 90, 91, 92, 95, 97, 98, 110, 116, 119, 126, 134, 142, 159, 168, 171; aims 6; discovery 13, 24; interest 14; method 142, 143 scientists 78, 101, 102, 140, 142; see also plunderers; robbers security 39, 59, 60, 154, 159; feeling of 17 Segal, Hanna 7 selected fact 5, 17, 21 self-cure 109, 146 semantic 7 sensation(s) 16, 59, 76, 170 sense(s) 4, 9, 10, 15, 17, 18, 21, 34, 37, 39, 45, 54, 55, 57, 59, 60, 69, 71, 78, 83, 86,

89, 90, 91, 92, 96, 99, 111, 112, 116, 120, 124, 129, 133, 136, 158, 159; impressions 19, 28, 51, 52, 53, 54, 56, 57, 58, 64, 95, 96, 102; non sensuous 49; organs 49, 50, 52, 53, 58, 75; of reality 54, 86; sensory 26, 49, 50, 52, 62, 134 session 8, 9, 10, 13, 17, 18, 22, 23, 32, 40, 49, 50, 70, 76, 78, 85, 99, 101, 102, 119, 120, 126, 127, 129, 133, 135, 136, 147, 149, 150, 151, 157, 164 Sevestre, Claude 4, 5 sex(es) 111, 116, 127, 137, 138, 153, 167; difference between the 115, 117 sexual 22, 27, 94, 101, 103, 111, 112, 114, 115, 116, 126, 135, 137, 153, 155; link 135; motivations 153 sexuality 30, 116, 153, 170, 172; infantile 127 Shakespeare, William 71 Sherlock 166 signification (or significance) 5, 9, 52, 53, 70, 79, 89, 90, 96, 113, 119, 120, 125, 166, 172; absence of 125 signifier 91 situation 5, 9, 10, 12, 15, 18, 20, 35, 40, 51, 59, 60, 61, 71, 72, 85, 90, 91, 100, 107, 108, 113, 134, 146, 147, 148, 156, 165; dependence 154, 155; fight-flight 154; oedipal 111, 113 – 115, 117, 143; pairing 143, 153, 155, 160; psychoanalytic 6, 9, 65, 72, 73, 74, 76, 87, 88, 128, 137, 148, 149; sexual component of the Oedipal 111; sexual of the couple 115, 143, 153 sleep (and waking) 14, 37, 46, 48, 50, 53, 55, 56, 62, 64, 137 social-ism 10, 71, 92, 105, 113, 117, 133, 147, 158, 159 Société de psychanalyse freudienne (Paris, France) i, 4, 170, 172 Socrates 23, 39 solitude 5, 6, 14, 39 Soma-Psycho 167 somatic and emotional feelings 16, 41, 117 Sor, Dario 54, 171 speech, act of 103 sphinx 27, 30, 111, 121, 143 Spinoza, Baruch 68 split ii, 12, 29, 39, 58, 148, 163; enforced 3, 61; splitting 24, 26, 58, 61, 64, 69, 73, 74, 108, 114, 117, 126, 163 stages (oral, anal, genital) 61, 62, 84, 114, 117, 118, 119, 156, 163 statement 4, 19, 22, 28, 33, 50, 76, 77, 78, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 94, 95, 97, 98, 99,

184 Index

100, 103, 108, 110, 120, 122, 130, 131, 138, 141 Steenbeck 38, 39 stimulus barrier 54; see also contact-barrier Stortford, College 35, 37, 39 structure 19, 30, 42, 71, 82, 104, 130, 142, 157, 158, 159 stupor 137 subject 11, 22, 29, 30, 34, 51, 58, 64, 66, 68, 69, 70, 71, 82, 85, 86, 106, 120, 145, 156, 164, 165, 168, 172; animate 14 submission 9, 13, 25, 51 suffering 23, 31, 41, 43, 46, 54, 59, 68, 70, 72, 73, 75, 96, 101, 122, 137, 141, 144, 145, 150, 168, 171 suicide 116, 121; group 13, 141 – 142 superego 62, 65, 68, 104, 114, 117; ego destructive 114 supervision 3, 66 symbolisation 13, 65, 117; absence of 65, 117 system 62, 79, 90, 92, 106, 140, 145, 149, 163; alimentary 28, 29, 95, 96; perception-conscience 56; protomental 156, 163; respiratory 75, 76; scientific deductive 1, 5, 29, 77, 90, 91, 92, 95, 96, 97, 98, 126; theoretical 8, 28 Tabak de Bianchedi, Elizabeth 54, 171 tanks 35, 36, 37, 38 Tavistock Clinic 10, 25, 40, 41, 42, 44, 146, 147, 150, 162, 169, 170, 173 Tavistock Institute of Human Relations 45 temporality viii, 62, 93, 95, 107, 115, 116, 117, 118, 153; analytic 119, 120 Thebes 12, 121, 138 theorization 4 theory 6, 7, 8, 25, 51, 53, 55, 136; analytic 6, 7, 116, 117, 118, 143, 158; bionian of thought 110; of causality 22, 104, 111, 131, 132, 136, 163; critisism of the 8; freudian 6, 7, 155; of functions 55; kleinian 7, 117, 158; of knowledge 25, 51, 53; oedipal 115; of the transformation 131, 132 therapeutic 68, 74, 140, 146, 147, 150, 162 therapist i, 40, 87, 151; group 146, 147, 153 therapy 40, 41, 169, 173; group 42, 43, 144, 146, 147, 150, 170 thing 16, 17, 21, 28, 29, 31, 34, 39, 43, 51, 53, 54, 55, 64, 68, 73, 75, 76, 80, 82, 89, 96, 106, 108, 109, 111, 112, 117, 118, 121, 123, 125, 128, 137, 148, 149, 150, 156, 162; absence of the 70, 75, 82

thing-in-itself (or things-in-themselves) 19, 21, 57, 59, 60, 76, 85, 89, 102, 121, 123 thinker 11, 12, 16, 17, 33, 79, 81, 100 thinking i, ii, 3, 7, 9, 10, 12, 14, 16, 19, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 28, 29, 33, 42, 50, 56, 66, 68, 71, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 94, 95, 96, 101, 104, 105, 106, 108, 110, 112, 114, 115, 165, 166, 167, 169, 171; unconscious waking 55, 56 Thom, René 31 thought(s) i, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 13, 15, 16, 17, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 33, 34, 39, 46, 47, 50, 52, 56, 57, 59, 64, 71, 75, 76, 78, 79, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 91, 94, 95, 96, 97, 99, 100, 101, 102, 104, 106, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 115, 116, 117, 118, 120, 123, 126, 129, 132, 136, 140, 152, 153, 157, 163, 165, 169; absence of 65; activity 111, 112; capacity for 28, 51, 95; collapse of 65; conscious 6; disorder(s) of 23, 25, 62, 73, 95, 96, 101, 115; dream 1, 26, 51, 55, 56, 57, 64, 77, 83, 84, 96, 97, 126, 160; empty 83; formation of the 21; genesis of 24, 27, 81; growth and development of 13 – 14, 16, 21, 82, 93, 96, 102, 111, 126, 165; logical 136; moral 110; non psychotic ii 15, 24; origin 13, 24; process 10; psychoanalytic 7; psychotic 10; scientific 31, 110; second 148, 169; silent 4, 85; unconscious 6; verbal 30; without a thinker 81 Tiresias 9, 12, 111, 121, 137, 138 tolerance (and intolerance) 60, 70, 133, 166; of the frustration 3, 75, 85, 86, 93, 112, 128, 166 topography 104, 110 Tower of Babel 12, 13 Toynbee, Arnold 163 traces 47, 65, 88, 104, 118, 163; memory 57, 67, 93 transference(s) ii, 70, 82, 86, 127, 131, 132, 138, 143, 146, 147, 148, 149, 155; neurotic 127; psychotic 82, 86 transference/counter-transference 26, 60, 63, 69, 70, 73, 100, 131, 132, 133, 150, 158, 171 transformation(s) i, 3, 8, 9, 11, 16, 22, 26, 31, 46, 49, 53, 60, 79, 80, 82, 83, 90, 100, 110, 119, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 137, 148, 165, 169; in hallucinosis 127, 134, 135; in O 127; process of 125; “projective” 127; result of the 125; “rigid motion” 127 transitional space 66

Index  185

trauma 41, 54; caused by shell shock 53 trinity 11, 160 Trotter, Wilfrid 40, 48, 162, 173 Troy 15 truth ii, 11, 12, 27, 28, 29, 42, 74, 78, 79, 80, 98, 125; deprivation of 28 tuberculosis 163 turbulence 3, 51, 120, 130; emotional 166 Turkey 14 Tustin, Frances 17, 18, 20, 173 Twenty-Five Years 166 Ub (Unbewusst = unconsciousness) 57, 93 unbeing (désêtre) 137 unbinding 69, 70; see also release uncertainty 12 unconscious (and unconsciousness) 3, 5, 6, 7, 14, 15, 26, 30, 53, 55, 56, 57, 58, 60, 62, 67, 73, 79, 93, 95, 104, 110, 120, 126, 141, 150, 151, 153, 157, 158, 165, 170, 172; group 152; “insu” (Lacan) (= Unbewußt) 57, 93 understanding 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 15, 18, 23, 31, 42, 44, 47, 50, 55, 60, 63, 72, 73, 93, 105, 107, 113, 114, 115, 124, 132, 136, 137, 143, 148, 171 undifferentiation (and lack of differentiation) 61, 156 unification see integration universe 6, 17, 82, 109, 110, 132, 171

unknown 6, 11, 13, 14, 55, 78, 86, 88, 100, 110, 124, 142 unpleasure 51, 52, 66, 107, 126, 136; release of the 57 Ur 13, 142; royal cemetery of 12, 13, 141, 142, 143; sumerian city of 141 uses 14, 76, 78, 117; and axis of 98 vagina 30, 62; see also penis valency 17, 76, 80, 155 Vb (Vorbewußtsein = preconsciousness) 57, 93 vertex 5, 9, 10, 18, 26, 124, 136 Vienna 41; Circle 16 Vinci, Leonardo da 166 Virgil 14, 173 Waintrater, Régine 172 war 35, 37, 39, 41, 42, 43, 44, 48, 70, 138, 145, 146, 147, 162, 167, 170, 173; War Office Selection Board 42 War(s), World: First 10, 15, 35, 38, 41, 54; Second 10, 38, 41, 93, 141, 144 Winnicott, Donald W. 7, 22, 31, 48, 61, 69, 70, 170, 173 Woolley, Sir Leonard 13, 141, 173 world 11, 19, 20, 21, 71, 76, 86, 91, 94, 105, 106, 107, 113, 123, 140, 172; external 51, 52, 56, 67, 93, 96; internal 39, 53 W (Wahrnehmung = perception) see perception(s)