Category: Wilfred Bion

psychoanalysis is based on the negative

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Green was introduced to Lacan in 1958 and he very quickly became “seduced” by his brilliance, kindness, and ultimately, his perversity. He found himself caught in triangular relationships set up by Lacan, with Green often being the preferred object. However, he was able to extricate himself, finally rejecting Lacan by 1967. One of his biggest criticisms of Lacan is that he was intellectually dishonest in his claim to represent a return to Freud, “ [He] cheated everybody… the return to Freud was an excuse, it just meant going to Lacan” (p. 24). 

It was in the cauldron of French psychoanalytic thinking and politics and against a Lacanian backdrop, that Green laid the groundwork for his own enduring imprint on the changing map of psychoanalytic ideas. His independence of thought was demonstrated early on when, building on Diatkine, he boldly criticized Lacan for the damage done to psychoanalytic theory by insisting that the unconscious is structured as a language. Green’s interest in preserving the essential nature of the drives in human psychology led him to develop these ideas into a book, Le Discours vivant, enraging Lacan in the process. This book on affects was the beginning of Green’s growing and rich body of work in which he pushes the envelope of psychoanalytical critical thought. 

He believed that “something had to be done” given that psychoanalysis was heavily under the sway of American ego psychology with its emphasis on adaptation. Green offered a focused rebuttal, by replenishing our appreciation of the Freudian imperatives of drives, negation, sexuality, and object relationships. The “biological roots of the mind” are the underpinnings of Green’s work as he repeatedly confronts the restrictions of narrowing schools of thought, especially the destructive impact of Lacan’s psychoanalytic nihilism, which threaten to ignore these sina qua non of Freudian psychoanalysis. Yet all the while, Green responds to and capitalizes on emerging ideas as dialectical mechanisms for his own Freudian elaborations. Two English (rather than French!) analysts are essential mainstays of these developments—Bion and Winnicott. 

Green avers that psychoanalysis is based on the negative, that which is absent, that which is lost, and that which is always latent, much like the unconscious itself. Repression and representation are critical variables and in this way, Green enfolds Freud’s basic elements and actions of the mind to explain his own model. For Green, the negative is a normal, necessary aspect to development, likening his thinking to Winnicott’s interest in the absence of the mother in ordinary ways and Bion’s use of the representation of the maternal container to master separation. 

undisturbed friendly interest

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J. T. could not tolerate the response to his enquiry “What is your trouble?”, “It’s my kidneys doctor.” “Kidneys! What do you know about kidneys!” (or liver, or stomach, or whatever other anatomical structure or physiological function to which the patient chose to refer). It offended both his medical knowledge and his sense of propriety. The patient, frightened at having given offence to such an eminent authority, would close up and volunteer no further suggestions lest a further storm be evoked.

Trotter, on the other hand, listened with unassumed interest as if the patient’s contributions flowed from the fount of knowledge itself. It took me years of experience before I learned that this was in fact the case. When a patient co-operates so far as actually to present himself for inspection, the doctor from whom help is being sought is being given the chance of seeing and hearing for himself the origin of the pain. No need to ask, “Where does it hurt?”— though it would clearly be a comfort to have his query answered in a language that he understands. The anger that is so easily aroused is the ‘helper’s’ reaction to an awareness that he does not understand the language, or that the language that he does understand is not the relevant one or is being employed in a manner with which he is unfamiliar. Trotter’s undisturbed friendly interest had the effect of eliciting further evidence from the patient; the fount of knowledge did not dry up.

It was said that when Trotter did a skin graft it ‘took’; if Taylor did a skin graft— with equal or maybe even greater technical brilliance and accuracy— it did not take; the body rejected it; it was sloughed off. This I did not see, but that the story was told was itself significant of the impression that was created by the two men on their students.

Bion, Wilfred R. (1991-12-31). All My Sins Remembered: Another Part of a Life & The Other Side of Genius: Family Letters (Kindle Locations 562-576). Karnac Books. Kindle Edition.

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 defined value of ambiguity

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I then go on to look again at the subject of Bion’s ‘method’ from another angle of vision. Meltzer (1978) discerns in Bion’s style of writing a genuine search for ambiguity. His readers are certainly very familiar with this ambiguity, which they experience as a source of both delight and torment. Also the colleagues who attended his seminars had direct experience of it. But for Bion ambiguity has a defined value. It activates the psychoanalytic function of the mind. In his view, in fact, psychoanalysis can be seen as a special probe that explores the unknown of the psyche in an act of reconnaissance that continuously expands the field. Thus, Bion’s darkness, the black light of dream projects on to things, is nothing other than the desire to be ‘precisely obscure’ (Bion, 19975, p. 191), to achieve the ideal state of mind which he calls negative capability, and to free oneself as far as possible of preconceived ideas. To focus on knowledge you need to be able to tolerate the frustration that comes from not understanding, from paradox, from the aporias of reason, and what Freud called overdetermination, in other words, the plurality of possible meanings. 

Civitarese, Giuseppe. (2012). The Violence of Emotions: Bion and Post-Bionian Psychoanalysis. Routledge.

approaching the unconscious

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BION: In psychoanalysis, when approaching the unconscious— that is, what we do not know— we, patient and analyst alike, are certain to be disturbed. In every consulting-room, there ought to be two rather frightened people: the patient and the psychoanalyst. If they are not both frightened, one wonders why they are bothering to find out what everyone knows.

Bion, Wilfred R. (2005-06-09). The Tavistock Seminars (Kindle Locations 1706-1708). Karnac Books. Kindle Edition.

appreciating the reality of analysis

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It is truly dreadful the way in which psychoanalytic theory can become so learned, so prestigious, that I would certainly hate to try to understand it myself; in fact, I don’t waste my time trying to. I do occasionally get bombarded with it: while trying to say something to me, the patient is constantly interrupted by his own high-powered psychoanalytic knowledge. There is the same difficulty at the other pole, where there appears to be an inability to understand or to appreciate the reality of analysis.

Bion, Wilfred R. (2005-06-09). The Tavistock Seminars (Kindle Locations 1497-1501). Karnac Books. Kindle Edition.