Category: Psychoanalysis

man’s true profession is to become a human being

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I run a sanatorium which is visited by people who do not find help in other places. Sometimes I am lucky with these difficult cases, sometimes not. I am a pupil of Schweninger, who was, perhaps, the greatest doctor of the last century. Following in his footsteps I suddenly found myself, without knowing it, faced with the necessity of evaluating unconscious processes in the treatment of organic diseases. When a few years later I came upon Freud’s works I had to give up the idea that I was a discoverer myself, not without a struggle. For it became apparent that I had first read about these in a notice in the daily paper Rundschau. The only achievement I can claim for myself with some justification is the introduction of a knowledge of the unconscious into the treatment of all patients, and particularly those patients who suffer from organic illnesses, and that I am as aware as Freud that psychoanalysis is a world-wide affair and only partly a medical affair and that its tie-up with medicine is a disaster. I do not have a title, but there are people who love me and I have insights which make my life harmonious in so far as that is possible at all. I cannot send a prospectus of my small clinic — 15 rooms— where I am assisted by my wife, not only in the household. There is no prospectus. My charges are adjusted to the means of my patients, in the treatment I rely on my head and on my hands and on the view that every patient has his or her own illness and that the person who wants to help them has to practice the saying: nil humanum a me alienum esse puto (I believe that nothing human is strange to me) and also on the exhortation: Children, love one another! I have patients of all kinds; I am not a specialist, but a general practitioner with the knowledge and experience gathered in an active professional life. And I may perhaps be allowed to say that I have not forgotten during my life as a doctor that man’s true profession is to become a human being.

Georg Groddeck; Letter to Professor Hans Vaihinger, May 8, 1930, in Der Mensch und sein Es, pp. 125-6.

the one collaborator in analysis

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What I want to draw attention to is this idea that the human animal has a mind, or a character, or a personality. It seems to be quite a useful theory, and we behave as if we thought it was more than that. When it comes to being psychoanalysts and psychiatrists, this cannot be treated as if it were simply an entertaining theory. Nor do patients come to see us because they are suffering from an entertaining theory. We could say that there is one collaborator we have in analysis on whom we can rely, because he behaves as if he really had a mind and because he thought that somebody not himself could help. In short, the most important assistance that a psychoanalyst is ever likely to get is not from his analyst, or supervisor, or teacher, or the books that he can read, but from his patient. The patient—and only the patient—knows what it feels like to be him or her. The patient is also the only person who knows what it feels like to have ideas such as that particular man or woman has. That is why it is so important that we should be able to hear, see, smell, even feel what information the patient is trying to convey. He is the only one who knows the facts; therefore, those facts are going to be the main source of any interpretation, any observation, which we are likely to be able to make.

Wilfred Bion, Italian Seminars, Seminar 1 Rome, 8 July 1977 Copyright © 2005 The Estate of Wilfred R. Bion

the artistic or aesthetic capacity

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Q. Would you speak about the religious cult and the aesthetic impulse, and the relationship between them.

Bion. In psycho-analysis, and even in ordinary conversation, one is always talking about religion or art or business, all of which is very useful if you want to talk; it is another matter if you want to talk about the thing itself. You can easily feel from your own experience that these watertight compartments of categories have a lot to do with human thinking but very little to do with the universe in which we live. Nevertheless, however ignorant or mistaken we may be, we can feel that religion and art have often worked closely together. The same can be said for psycho-analysis insofar as it can be regarded as an attempt at a scientific approach. Sooner or later one will feel that one knows the interpretation but does not know what to say to the patient, or how to say it. At this point the psycho-analyst would gain if he could be an artist and express himself, as Freud could, in terms which are easily appreciated as being highly artistic. Even Plato, while critical of artists and poets as people who are always misleading their fellows by telling lies, nevertheless expressed things, in the Socratic Dialogues, in a way which no artist has since excelled—and yet he might be supposed to have been opposed to the artist. This kind of conflicting view is common; the artistic or aesthetic capacity seeps into the expressions of those who want to be purely scientific; and the artist, reciprocally, can discern the science in his art. [See p. 44. Sometimes he can even consciously aspire to a ‘golden number’, as with Leonardo da Vinci, Durer etc.]

Wilfred Bion, Sao Paulo Seminar 1973 (Brazilian Lectures, Karnac Books, Reprinted 2008, Copyright © 1990)

the psychoanalytic attitude of faith

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I am not a Kabbalah scholar, but aspects of its teachings have become part of me, as has psychoanalytic work. The two have many points of convergence. The main psychoanalytic writer I use in this work is Bion, partly because of his striking statement that he uses Kabbalah as a framework for psychoanalysis, but largely because it is hard to miss connections between the two. Both are preoccupied with catastrophe and faith. Bion calls faith the psychoanalytic attitude. Both are preoccupied with infinity and intensity of experience. Both are preoccupied with shatter and the possibility of bearing and growing the kind of psyche that can work with the dimensions sensitivity opens. Both are preoccupied with ontological implications of the Unknown and the importance of emotional life. Bion, too, writes penetratingly about an ongoing crises of faith, basic to Kabbalah concerns.

As in all of my work, D. W. Winnicott plays an important background role. His writings on vital sparks connect with Kabbalah’s buried divine sparks scattered everywhere. His incommunicado core connects with Kabbalah’s Ein Sof, the infinite beyond bounds and conception. For Winnicott, too, faith is important, what I call a paradoxical faith (Eigen, 1998) because it spans and opens diverse dimensions without reductively taking sides. Winnicott also writes of the importance of creative illusion, which adds to richness of living, even helps one feel alive. He locates illusion in transitional experiencing, which takes different forms as one grows. It might be that what we call self is, partly, a transitional state, which, like dolls, games, hobbies of childhood, lose meaning as one grows. We outgrow self-identities once treasured as new dimensions of experience open and take us forward. Yet, paradoxically, old self-states might deepen when we touch them with who we are now.

Eigen, Michael (2012-07-02). Kabbalah and Psychoanalysis (Kindle Locations 74-87). Karnac Books. Kindle Edition.

the aesthetic element of beauty

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“It is very important to be aware that you may never be satisfied with your analytic career if you feel that you are restricted to what is narrowly called a ‘scientific’ approach. You will have to be able to have a chance of feeling that the interpretation you give is a beautiful one, or that you get a beautiful response from the patient. This aesthetic element of beauty makes a very difficult situation tolerable. It is so important to dare to think or feel whatever you do think or feel, never mind how un-scientific it is.”

Wilfred Bion, Seminar in Paris; July 10th 1978

the totality of debris

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Q: Are you suggesting that the analytic experience can be a dehumanising once?

Bion: I think that there is a great danger of it. I come across a lot of what is thought to be scientific psychoanalysis, but it doesn’t remind me of anything except boredom.

The situation in the consulting room, the relationship between these two people, could be like the ashes of a fire. Is there any spark which could be blown into a flame? In this little bit I have described, we would have to examine, observe, devote care to mental debris – bits of what we have been taught, bits of what we have learnt, bit of what the patient has been taught. In analysis one is seeing the totality of debris. What has happened to the face of a man of forty-two? Why does he look twenty-five or sixty-two? Why does he say he is forty-two? It is all part of the debris. Do those pieces come together? Would you be able to put them together so that they make sense?

Q. (an inaudible reference, to ‘psychotic experience’)

Bion: The idea that it is a psychotic experience is very cerebral. In analysis we are concerned with something which might ultimately be expressible in cerebral terms, but that is not how it appears to us as practising analysts. That is one reason why we have to reconcile ourselves to the fact that patients do not come to us with little labels tied to them saying, ‘manic’, or ‘depressive’, or ‘manic-depressive’, or ‘schizophrenic’. If they do come with such labels we should regard them as more pieces of debris. I do not mean by calling it debris that it is not worthy of attention; I mean that it is something which has to be observed and scrutinized with very considerable care, otherwise you might throw away the necessary, vital spark. One cannot afford to cast aside imaginative conjectures on the grounds that they are not scientific – you might as well throw away the seed of a plant on the grounds that it is not an oak or a lily but just a piece of rubbish. This applies to all that goes on in your consulting room.

But I suggest that it would be worthwhile considering it not as your consulting room, but as your atelier. What sort of artist are you? Are you a potter? A painter? A musician? A writer? In my experience a great many analysts don’t really know what sort of artists they are.

Q. What if they are not artists?

Bion: Then they are in the wrong job. I don’t know what job is any good because even if they are not psychoanalysts they need to be artists in life itself. A mathematician can see that an algebraic formula is a beautiful one; a musician can hear a manuscript which is simply black marks on paper. Even using the language I know best, I cannot tell you what an ‘artist’ is; I prefer you to go beyond that word and see what I am trying to convey to you by this very inadequate word. It is certainly not somebody who is able to deceive your eyes, to make you think that there is a tree there when there isn’t one, but somebody who has made you able to see there really is a tree there and its roots even if they are underground.

I suggest that behind this forty-two-year-old man is hidden a person, and that person has roots, an unconscious which, Like the roots of a tree, is hidden from sight. There are not only branches which are ramified and have veins, but under the surface it has roots. So when this person comes into your room, what do you see? I am not asking simply what do you see with your eyes, but also what does your intuition enable you to see?

Wilfred Bion, Seminar in Paris; July 10th 1978

the primary of perception and attention

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Eigen (2005), whose thinking represents well the Romantic sensibility in psychoanalysis, sees the analyst as more of an agent who evokes new experience than an instrument for understanding what is. Similarly, Lacan has suggested that the purpose of interpretations is to “make waves” (Eisenstein , 2007). Openness to traveling the emerging pathway, what Casement (1985) calls “learning from the patient,” is a sine qua non of an analytic process that seeks to expand the patient’s ways of being (Summers, 2005a ; 2012). It follows that the analyst must adopt a technical stance of not knowing. The tempting desire for omniscience among those who sit in the analytic chair runs the underappreciated danger of suffocating the openness required for self formation (Eigen, 1993a). Interference with the analytic space can be subtle, but the consequences may impair the patient’s freedom to explore the unknown. It can be seductive for both parties to enact the roles of knower and known, but the more the analyst is able to sustain the openness of the analytic space, the greater is the opportunity for the analysand to uncover new possibilities.

Although Bion’s admonition to greet every analytic hour without desire or memory is fanciful on its face, one can appreciate the spirit of Bion’s interpretation of the analytic stance as openness to the unknown. Eigen (1993a) interprets Bion’s dictum as an injunction to “opt for the primary of perception and attention over memory and knowledge” (p. 125) and cautions that attempting to control where the truth goes risks imposing on the emerging truth of the patient’s experience. And here we come to a fundamental shift in the analytic stance. We have now reconceptualized the analytic task from knowing the patient to engaging her being, an analytic attitude suggestive of Heidegger’s (1968/ 1954) concept of openness to Being. When the analyst adopts this way of attending to the patient, he has shifted his top priority from discovering new knowledge to receiving the being of the other. This interpretation of the analytic task does not obviate the role of understanding; it sees the value of insight in its ability to make contact with and expand the patient’s experience. In this sense, contemporary analysis accords with the Romantic value system articulated by Fichte’s (1848) statement that Being is prior to knowledge. Knowledge, or self awareness, subserves the creation of new ways of being and relating.

Summers, Frank (2013-05-20). The Psychoanalytic Vision: The Experiencing Subject, Transcendence, and the Therapeutic Process (p. 53). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.

living human speech

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The analyst’s speech must be the creation of a person who is alive in that moment. Living human speech is as difficult to come by in the analyst’s spoken use of language as it is in written prose or verse.

Ogden, Thomas (1999-12-31). Reverie and Interpretation: Sensing Something Human (Kindle Locations 156-158). Karnac Books. Kindle Edition.

on the art of psychoanalysis

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Among the most astute comments concerning what it means for an analysis to be alive has come (as one might expect), not from an analyst, but from a novelist and essayist, speaking in 1884 about the art of fiction:

The good health of an art which undertakes to reproduce life must demand that it be perfectly free. It lives upon exercise and the very meaning of exercise is freedom. The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting. [Henry James 1884, p. 49]

James’ statement about the novel (and implicitly about the relationship of writer and reader) has important relevance to the art of psychoanalysis and to the understanding of the relationship of analyst and analysand. The idea that above all an analysis must be interesting is for me both self-evident and a revolutionary conception (cf. Phillips 1996). To be interesting, the analysis must be free to “exercise ,” to shape itself and be given shape in any way that the participants are able to invent. The freedom to “exercise” is the freedom to experiment : “Art lives upon discussion , upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt , upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints” (H. James 1884, pp. 4445). When the analysis is alive, it unselfconsciously manages for periods of time to be an experiment that has left the well charted waters of prescribed form; it is a discussion fueled by curiosity and by variety of attempt; it is an endeavor that depends upon genuine exchange of views and comparison of standpoints.

Ogden, Thomas (1999-12-31). Reverie and Interpretation: Sensing Something Human (pp. 7-8). Karnac Books. Kindle Edition.

the effort to become human

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…I believe that the analytic task most fundamentally involves the effort of the analytic pair to help the analysand become human in a fuller sense than he has been able to achieve to this point. This is no abstract, philosophical quest; it is a requirement of the species as basic as the need for food and air. The effort to become human is among the very few things in a person’s life that may over time come to feel more important to him than his personal survival.

Ogden, Thomas (1999-12-31). Reverie and Interpretation: Sensing Something Human (Kindle Locations 184-187). Karnac Books. Kindle Edition.