Brazilian Lectures

1973, Sao Paulo; 1974, Rio de Janeiro/Sao Paulo

Wilfred R. Bion

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780946439782
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429911552
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

These lectures, delivered in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro during 1973 and 1974, reveal Bion in his most vital and challenging mode both in respect of the material he presents, and in his responses to the questions from his audience.

1974
Rio de Janeiro

One

It is difficult for all of us who practise psycho-analysis to realize how obscure this subject is to people who are not used to attaching any importance to the problems of thought, or who are not used to thinking at all. In the psycho-analytic world we have our own divisions of time; we talk about periods like infancy, childhood, adolescence, middle age, old age, puberty, and so on. All that is so familiar to us that it is hard to realize that there are many people who are not familiar with those ways of marking the passage of time.

I want to consider periods of mental time which we can recognize, but which others who are not familiar with our world cannot recognize so easily. Although people are familiar with terms like 'puberty', even 'latency periods', they are not used to regarding them as actual experiences of the passage of time in the way in which we count 1 a.m., 2 a.m., 10 a.m., 23.00 hours, 24.00 hours. Some of these periods, like infancy, childhood, puberty, are times when human beings often undergo mental perturbation. Being unfamiliar with that world they are frightened at what is going on. These conditions are not diseases; nor are they illnesses. Puberty, old-age, youth, adolescence—none of them is an illness, although they often are periods in which dis-ease is experienced. Nevertheless, mental experiences are common-place during certain of those recognizable periods—recognizable, that is to say, to psycho-analysts and a few others. But they are none of them illnesses except by analogy. During those periods people will have an experience, say, of nightmares; they become frightened of nightmares. They may even speak of these experiences to their relatives—brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers—and make them frightened too. The fear is communicable. If the anxiety is sufficiently stirred up and communicated they will say they want to see a doctor, or a psychiatrist, or a psycho-analyst. This becomes significant if the nightmare is experienced by someone notably awake.

These times of upheaval are alarming to the patient, but they are not illnesses. To take a biological model: it is as if a tadpole became very upset because it was turning into a frog. There is nothing abnormal about it; it is not an illness but a change, and the tadpole would like someone to explain what is going on. The human being experiences changes to which there are no guides, and it is not recognized that that is exactly what those who are familiar with mental phenomena are concerned with. It is difficult to bring together those technically qualified people with those for whom the experience is the turbulence. It is true that sometimes the technically qualified person might say, 'This experience which I am being told about is not really ordinary; it lies outside the spectrum of what one would call normal development'. That is a matter about which he knows something and could help if he were given a chance to do so. But at the same time, we do not pay enough attention to the fact that these experiences require a wholesale medical approach, such as putting the person into a mental hospital, or prescribing a never-ending psycho-analysis. I am familiar with hearing psycho-analysts say that everybody could do with a psycho-analysis. I would like to be sure that it was psycho-analysis—that is why I devote so much time and attention to it—but I think this is a somewhat rash statement. I would want some evidence that the condition does not fall within the normal spectrum.

A potential analysand may be a fit, happy and well-adjusted child, liking that stage so much that he wants to prolong it. We are all of us familiar with patients who want to be cured, as it were, permanently, for ever—which is a very long time. That is like being a chicken's egg [Freud, footnote to 'Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning', 1911, S.E. vol. XII] and wanting to be permanently the shell. It is a nice shell; it has a nice appearance; why not be an egg-shell for ever? Suppose that in the course of development the chicken begins to hatch out; the more the person is identified with the shell, the more they feel that something terrible is happening, because the shell is cracking up and they do not know the chicken. It would be worth asking oneself: Why has this person come to me for analysis? Are they sent by their parents, their relatives, their husbands or their wives, or have they come independently, and, if so, what about? Why do they want me to agree to see them so many times a week, for so many weeks, for so many months, for so many years? What we do when that person comes to see us will depend on the answers to these questions. For example, you may think, after talking with the patient, that he is in danger (although he says he feels all right and does not want treatment). If so, you could make clear your own or some other analyst's availability. What appears to be a stable and satisfactory condition may be a state of turbulence. Conversely, a spectacular story may not be as alarming as the narrator thinks. Then the psycho-analyst has to decide from his experience if there is anything he can communicate. His answer to this question depends on his assessment of the capacity of his communicant to understand. In practice, the psycho-analyst has to fall back on his own judgement. This point is basic, simple and proportionately difficult to communicate to others.

The psycho-analyst is not a luxury but is essential, because he is familiar with this peculiar world of personality. In the physical world there are certain advantages. The patient can say, 'I have a pain' and, pointing out the place, 'It's here'. The physician can use his eyes and his finger tips; he can feel the patient's body and say, 'I feel a tumor—an enlarged spleen'. He can say to students, 'Feel that abdomen and tell me what you feel'. They are fortunate! What are we, who are concerned with the mental life, to say to people? What are the nearest things to physical signs that we are ever likely to get? My own experience suggests that the answer is probably 'feelings'. When a patient says he is terrified, or he sees things, or he can only wear white clothes, or he cannot stand hearing even the best symphony orchestra playing and has had to give up playing the violin, the analyst can say to himself, 'Yes, I think I know what this patient means. When he says he has that feeling, I can understand what sort of feeling it is'. Otherwise, most of the time we have no sensuous experience—that is, literally the kind of experience which is possible thanks to one's physical equipment and the central, sympathetic and para-sympathetic nervous systems. Character has no sensuous symptoms. One must, therefore, undergo a training which intensifies intuitive capacity. [Milton, Paradise Lost, Book III, ll. 51-55]. The psycho-analyst can then give patients help which they cannot get in any other way.

In practice the psycho-analyst needs to be able to question himself as often as, and as long as, he is unsatisfied, but should not spend too much time looking for the answer in books. The time we have is limited, so we must read people. We cannot do that if they will not come to the consulting room. The minimum we can ask is that the patient will come, or that somebody will bring him and take him away at the end of the session. We cannot do anything about the times when the patient is not in the room, but while he is in the room we can accept responsibility. For example, we can try to stop him from throwing himself out of the window—I do not say we would succeed, but we could try. If he needs more care than we can give him during the few hours we see him we must enlist the aid of psychiatrists who have the equipment of a mental hospital behind them.

Q. Could you explain how you would avoid a patient's throwing himself out of the window during a session?

B. My athletic equipment is not what it used to be and I cannot now promise to do much physically to stop the patient. But I would try to get between the patient and the window and would like, if possible, to go on interpreting while I had to do it, so that the patient would not feel that the only thing he could do was to throw himself out of the window; that is a form of communication which is very expensive. Could one give an interpretation early enough to make that unnecessary? I think that one must sometimes appreciate that the patient is apparently prepared to pay the cost of talking that kind of language, although we know that if he were successful he would be dead—another instance that the practice of psycho-analysis is more dangerous than talk about it.

Q. Could you expand your statement about reading people rather than books?

B. In order to read a book one learns the rules of written grammar and the aesthetic rules of written communication. Although somewhat complex, these rules can be taught to boys and girls; if they spell things in a certain way other people will understand what they mean. Even so, this is a limited statement because you cannot tell, say, James Joyce or Ezra Pound how to write English and what the rules are of writing it. Nor is it possible to say what the rules are of writing poetry. After a certain point it becomes something to do with the aesthetic capacity of the person concerned. Analysis poses an even greater problem; it is difficult indeed to say, if one is challenged, what better way the patient could communicate than by throwing himself out of the window. Nobody can tell us how to read people in the way they can say, 'This is how you learn to read; you learn your grammar; you learn your alphabet, and you put that together' and so on. All that we can say is, 'The best way we know is to go to an analyst and get analysed, and then you may know a bit more which will make it possible for you to read an actual personality in the way that you cannot at the moment'.

Q. How can we develop intuition?

B. Suppose a small boy or girl comes to you and says, 'Aren't I grown up?' because they are dressed up in their father's or mother's clothes. They say, 'Aren't I just like Mother or Daddy? I'm just like a grown-up'. As the parent, and the analyst, knows, they are not. But we could say, 'Yes, you are just like a doctor—look, you have a stethoscope', or 'just like Mummy, nursing your baby doll'. It is difficult to say, 'No, but you are becoming like a grown-up', because the child cannot understand.

The analytic training authorities may not be able to say why the candidate is not a psycho-analyst. They may say, 'Yes, you are just like a psycho-analyst', but that is very different from saying, 'You are becoming a psycho-analyst'. They sound alike, but there is a huge difference. One must be able to distinguish between 'just like' and 'becoming'. Many people say, 'Oh, yes. My husband and I have been married now for twenty years'. They have not. If you have experience you can look at them and see that they are just like a married couple, but they are not a married couple; they are a very good model of a married couple. But unless there is something seriously wrong with them the subject is not closured; being married is, in fact, a continuing, open-ended process. There is no future in being just like a married couple; they are probably becoming married, or becoming grown-up.

Similarly, the human being may be just like a sexual animal at the age of ten or thirteen. But if we respect the human personality, development does not stop at puberty or adolescence; if we believe in the existence of a human mind, there is no question of being just like a human personality; you can only be becoming a human.

Q. If intuition is so important, why, in the training and education of an analyst, do they not include artistic activities—poetry in particular?

B. Probably because of lack of time; certainly not because of lack of importance. One hopes that aesthetic experience has been acquired before embarking on analytic training.

Q. Do you consider identification as a basic mechanism for the apprehension of mental phenomena?

B. The question is posed in sophisticated terms. Making use of the Grid I would say, 'This question belongs to F, G, H—that class of statement'. If I ask myself, 'What does this question mean?', I do not think I could tell you, because it depends what language I must use. It is no good answering that question in the sophisticated terms with which all of us here are familiar. For example, if someone says, 'You see that tiger and that kitten—they are both cats'—a biologist might understand, but a layman might say, 'But look—can't you see the difference? That is a tiger! That is a kitten! They are not the same'. To a sophisticated, biological scientist, they are both cats. So, when asked a question like this, one needs to know: What is this question? Am I being asked for a sophisticated answer?

My reply in the same kind of language would be 'Yes'. In more pictorial language you would have to imagine yourself asking the question and imagining the answer you would comprehend. To sympathize with the questioner is fundamental; in technical language, 'sympathizing with' is known as 'identification'. In Grid terms I would say it depends on your kind of vertex, or, in more ordinary language, your point of view. In the practice of analysis whatever terms are used should remain constant throughout the same universe of discussion. To alter the definitory hypothesis without notice makes nonsense of the whole discussion, just as a change of key without corresponding change in key signature makes nonsense of a piece of music.

A psycho-analyst might say, 'This is a psychotic patient; when he says he is terrified it does not mean what is meant by this other patient who is a neurotic. They both say that they are terrified, but I know that patient A is talking about a different thing from patient B'; an apparent quantitative change becomes a change in quality. For example, a patient says, 'I am suffering agonies because I am blushing so badly'. He is pale and there is no visible sign of a blush. But the analyst should know that the patient who shows no apparent capillary action is, nevertheless, capable of having that intense experience. I would regard that patient as being not at all ordinary; the language that patient is talking is not the same as the language used by this other patient who says he has terrible difficulty with blushing and can be seen to be doing so.

I could ask, 'Could you tell me a bit more what you mean by 'identification' and give me an example. What do you call a patient who is identified with another patient?' After a time some pattern might emerge which would enable you to say in your language what his language was meaning. One might say, 'Yes, I agree with you. I use that sort of language myself, or, 'No, I wouldn't use that kind of language myself; that's not what I would say'. This is one of the difficulties about scientific meetings amongst ourselves; we often talk in a way which sounds exactly as if we talked the same language. It is very doubtful.

Q. What kind of help can the experienced analyst give to a patient whose problem he does not consider as severe as the patient does, and who does not really need treatment?

B. You are in your consulting room; you say that you are a psycho-analyst; you have your name on the door; for some reason a person has come to see you. You are at his disposal, you are free for fifty minutes, and during that time, if he will tell you what he wants, you will answer it if you can. I do not know why that patient thinks it worth his time and his money to come and see me, and I would not like to say that I know that he is spending all that time and trouble without some reason until I have heard more of what he has to say for himself. Suppose he says he is terrified that he might kill his children, or his mother or father. One would like to know how the patient comes to know that. I would say, 'You have known yourself for a long time so you must have some kind of evidence which has led you to suppose that that is what you would do. You have evidence which I have not—that doesn't mean that you are wrong, but you haven't made it clear to me.' One is not saying the patient cannot or will not do it, because he can do what he likes. I might continue, 'Although you haven't made me frightened by what you have told me, there must be some reason why you have frightened yourself; you have frightened you—so much so that you have even come here today. You must have some evidence which has frightened you, although you haven't made it clear to me what that evidence is—so far.'

Take a different case: the patient says, 'I told my wife that I was going to commit suicide and she got very frightened. I know I won't do anything of the sort.' As the analyst, I can say he may know that he will not do anything of the sort, but I do not. And he may know that it is perfectly safe to threaten suicide, but I do not. How does he come to know so much about people that he knows it is only an empty threat? I, as a psycho-analyst do not know that. If he said this to me, instead of to his wife, I would take that statement seriously; or, putting it in other terms, I would have respect for his statement even though he was inviting me to have no respect for it, to pay no attention to it. He may think that he need not bother about his threats to commit suicide, but I do not know that and, what is more, I do not believe he does either. Neither do I believe that that patient is such a good psychiatrist that he can really promise me that he will not commit suicide. I can well believe that he can promise, because promises are nothing new to me—I am quite used to them—but I do not believe I am going to have that promise fulfilled. So, although the patient does not take his own statements seriously, the analyst has to. He, at least, knows that people do fantastic things like killing themselves. He cannot say, 'Oh, this is all nonsense', because he knows that patients will and can do these things; they are old enough; they are strong enough; they understand gas taps, knives, strangulation, hanging. So there is no reason why that patient, who might not be able to commit suicide if he was an infant, cannot do so now he is grownup. He may feel that it is all just fun to frighten the analyst or his wife in that way, but what he does not know is that he might do it. What is the psycho-analyst to do when the patient will not take his own threat seriously and invites the analyst not to take it seriously also? You will not find the answer in a book. The only thing that can give you that answer is your experience and trust in your flare and intuition; you could say that an empty threat is transformed not into a substitute for action, but into a prelude to taking that action.

The psycho-analyst is in a very lonely job; he may have nobody to whom he can tell that. He cannot tell the patient; he cannot tell the patient's relatives, because they would probably be more upset than informed or illuminated. So he has to put up with knowing something about which he can do nothing. This is where the practice of psycho-analysis is absolutely diff...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• 1973 São Paulo
• 1974 Rio de Janeiro
• 1974 São Paulo