On Mental Growth

Bion's Ideas that Transform Psychoanalytical Clinical Practice

Lia Pistiner de Cortinas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367325794
• eBook ISBN: 9780429916991
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book represents some of Wilfred Bion's basic concepts, which are reconsidered from the perspective of mental growth. It elucidates Bion's significant legacy of the differentiation between the psychotic and non-psychotic parts of the personality and its evolution in his writings.

CHAPTER ONE
Bion: the thinker and his work

To approach the ideas of an author as original and complex as Bion, it is worthwhile knowing what life experiences and influences contributed to the development of his personality and of his ideas.

Two autobiographies provide us with Bion’s personal perspective: A Long Week-End and All My Sins Remembered (Bion, 1982, 1985). Due to his death, the latter book remained unfinished and it was his widow, Francesca Bion, who added some letters that Bion wrote to her and to their children. She wanted to show another side of Bion, and she subtitled the book: The Other Side of Genius. She wanted to temper the impression of sombre sadness that she thought the autobiography showed and to display some aspects of Bion’s “other side”.

The beginning of Bion’s life was shaped by the contrast between two different worlds and cultures—those of India and England. He was born in 1897 in Muttra, India, where his father was a British engineer who specialised in irrigation matters. He had a sister who was three years younger. His early childhood experiences of living in India and Hindu culture remained engraved in his memory, impressions that he shows in different ways in his writings and in his quotations from the Bhagavad-Gita. When he was eight years old, he was sent to a boarding school in England, as was customary then in the British colonies, and never returned to India, a country he loved very much. He had planned a trip to Bombay, but died before this could be accomplished.

The years of public primary school encompassed much suffering. One can imagine how inexplicable and disastrous an eight-year-old child must have found the change of circumstances that deprived him of his parents, his home, and the warmth of the Indian sun, as he was left in a strange country with a climate that must have seemed awful, and surrounded by disagreeable children who were sometimes cruel. It was three long years before he saw his mother again. In his auto biography, there is a poignant image of their parting when she left him at the school in London: he watched her hat intermittently appearing over the top of the hedge and then disappearing as she walked away. These experiences, later transformed by analysis, helped him to develop a deep understanding of the primitive states of mind and the sufferings of the human being.

However, by the time he went to high school, he had adapted and he felt that he could learn from, and enjoy, the experience. In his autobiography, he speaks also about the friends he made then. He seems to have thought that his physical strength and his athletic prowess were of great help in overcoming those potentially catastrophic changes, a concept that we know he defined and developed later on. When he was up at Oxford, he was captain of both the rugby and the water polo teams.

In 1915, when he finished high school, the First World War had started and he wanted to enlist in the army. In his autobiography, he describes ironically how he was turned down because of his “round baby face” and how he had to make use of certain contacts in order to be accepted. He was assigned to the Royal Tank Regiment and sent to France, where he was on active service in the trenches and the dreadful battles there until the end of the war. The First World War was a cruel one, full of horror because of the very high number of deaths. From these experiences, Bion learnt much about life and about the primitive states of mind of the human being, which the stark facts of the war revealed to him. Although he often says that he saw himself as a coward, he also learnt that being afraid of dying means wanting to live. Recognising this allowed him, years later, when practising as a psychoanalyst, to go deeper in the understanding of catastrophic anxieties, which he called “nameless dread”. When, during the war, he received the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) medal and the L’ordre National de la Légion d’Honneur, he also learnt that he should not believe in what the medals stood for, because if he believed that he was a hero, he would act like one and that would be a death sentence.

The war experiences inspired in him a model for analytical work and, in Experiences in Groups (1961), he wrote that contact with reality requires a certain internal discipline, which also demands participation in an external discipline, which, in turn, depends on two factors: (a) the presence of an enemy (mental illness in the analytical situation) and (b) the presence of an “officer” (the analyst) who is aware of his own difficulties, respects the integrity of his men, and is not afraid either of being loved or of being hated.

When the war ended he was already twenty-six years old, and he felt that he and many of his companions who had been in the war had remained mentally disturbed and were in a very different condition to the youngsters who were now beginning university. He went up to Oxford to study History and the years he spent there gave him valuable impressions that stayed with him all his life. He felt enriched by the conversations he had with the philosopher Paton, and he was later able to integrate much of what he learnt in Oxford into his psychoanalytical experiences.

In his work, he uses in a very free way the ideas of different philosophers, which he transformed through his experience as a psychoanalyst. He says that a philosopher and an analyst investigate matters that are common to both of them, the difference being that an analyst has to meet a patient the following day. This fact allows the analyst to think about the contributions of philosophy to psychoanalysis as well as considering the resistance to it through psychoanalysts remaining at a theoretical level to avoid the disturbing experience of making contact with the patient.

When he came down from Oxford, he taught at his old school for two years. Already knowing that his main interest was psychoanalysis, he studied medicine at University College London. Since obtaining a position on the faculty was difficult at that time, he prudently avoided revealing that interest in the admission interview, and instead he mentioned his sporting achievements at Oxford. His ironic com ment about the “key” that opened up his access to the university shows his ideas about the difference between wisdom and shrewdness.

The impressions and experiences of those years, that is, from 1924 to 1930, were very vivid and lasting. He admired Wilfred Trotter, who was not only a remarkable surgeon, but was also the author of Instincts of the Herd in Peace and in War (1916), a book that Freud referred to in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921c). His ideas would have an important influence on Bion’s interest in the behaviour and mental functioning of groups. Trotter’s book was published during the First World War, when its horrors revealed to Trotter and to Bion himself the stupidity of the leaders of the nations and of the armies.

Bion develops a model for the relationship of the analyst and the patient: he makes the observation that Trotter knew how to listen to his patients, very different from the attitude of another surgeon who disdained what the patient could say and describe about his illness. Bion says that it was said of Trotter that when he did a skin graft it “took”, while those that the other surgeon did failed. This model speaks of the need for the analyst to listen to his patient, who is the only companion he has in the session and who is also the one who has lived with himself the most.

Trotter made observations that remind us very much of Bion’s later ideas. He speaks of the human being’s “resistance” to new ideas, the submission to tradition and the power of the “governing model”, the power of the same class whose members were insensible to experience, closed to new ideas, and obsessed with being satisfied with things as they are, and who did not want to run any risk by opening up to new ideas, resisting “courageously” against suffering the dreadful pains of “thought and thinking”. Many of these observations—and his own war experiences—influenced Bion’s psychoanalytical ideas about the danger for mental growth and maturity of “reverence” for leaders. Bion’s ideas about the primitive groupishness and the difficulties of keeping an open mind, a mind of his own, are inspired by those experiences.

After getting his medical degree, Bion worked at the Tavistock Clinic. Following an experience with a therapist whose method was to tell him to “look into the past” (whom he humorously called Dr Feel: “feel it in the past”), in 1938 Bion started analysis with John Rickman, an analyst he describes as having an independent mind. In that analysis, for the first time, he felt a true psychoanalytical contact. The contrast between these two experiences illustrates what Bion later wrote about the difference between speaking about psychoanalysis and doing psychoanalysis. The analysis with Rickman ended when both worked together as colleagues in hospitals during the Second World War.

During that war, Bion worked as a psychiatric officer in hospitals, in contact with soldiers that came back traumatised from the battlefront. Having had his own experiences during the First World War as a soldier, he could now relate to this with his professional experience as a psychoanalyst.

It was during that experience as a psychiatric officer that he began on his “experiences in groups”, which he continued after the war at the Tavistock Clinic. At that time, Bion developed his very original ideas and terminology. His observations of group phenomena led him to describe groupishness as something that becomes obvious in a group when it comes together, but is something that exists in all of us human beings because we are gregarious animals, or political animals, as Aristotle said.

Bion observed two kinds of functioning in the groups that coexisted: one level is that which he named the W group (working group), while the other level he called the BA (basic assumption) group. The functioning of BA is a kind of automatic relationship, in which the emotions of the group combine as valences, akin to the combining of chemical substances. He described three types of function at the level of primitive emotions: (1) the basic assumption of dependence that reveres a god–leader; (2) the basic assumption of fight or flight; (3) the basic assumption of pairing, which could be described as an emotional state of waiting for a Messiah, with the condition that he should never be born.

The functioning of the BA group is hostile to the passing of time and contact with reality and it cannot learn from experience. It is the task of the work group—besides the specific task for which they come together—to deal with and contain the BA, so that what is implied in BA is not transformed into action and does not prevent contact with reality and the realisation of the specific task. It is my opinion that the BA refers to primitive situations regarding the survival of our species, which might have been useful at some stage in the process of evolution, but, in the present day, are emotional states that lack contact with reality. Being automatic reactions, they do not require each member of the group to think, and do not involve the responsibility and solidarity that are needed for the functioning of a working group. The relationships at the level of BA lead to mental starvation of the leader and the group and, what is more, Bion says that, in his experience, he could see that when he refused to be the leader, the one usually selected was the most mentally ill member of the group. He warns that we should beware of the charismatic leader.

Here, I am describing these two levels of functioning, which coexist in different ways in all groups and, bearing in mind the ideas that Bion developed later about the container–contained relationship, what we need to observe is whether or not the work group can contain the BA, that is, how the container–contained relationship between these two levels of functioning can be seen.

Later on, we will see these ideas about two levels of functioning transformed, when Bion is working with psychotic patients and developing a theory about thinking and the development of thoughts.

After this brief consideration about Experiences in Groups, I come back to his experiences in life. At the beginning of the war, he married a well-known actress, Betty Jardine, who died giving birth to their daughter, Parthenope (Parthenope is the Greek name for Naples). So, at the end of the war, Bion was left in mourning, with a baby to take care of, little money, and no fixed income.

All My Sins Remembered, the title of the second part of his autobiography, refers to this loss: it is a quotation from Hamlet, in which he says to Ophelia: “Nymph, in your orisons / Be all my sins remembered”. Hamlet is speaking of his feelings of guilt, and Bion felt guilty because he could not be with his wife when she gave birth. The part of the autobiography that narrates that period of his life is very moving and contains, perhaps, the more sombre aspect mentioned by Francesca Bion; it also has some passages in which, with a certain irony, he describes how he was acquiring some moments of insight.

When the war came to an end, Bion returned to the Tavistock Clinic, where—making use of his experiences during the war—he worked with different kinds of groups and developed his observations on this matter. He also started his psychoanalytical training and his analysis with Melanie Klein.

In those years, influenced by Klein’s ideas on anxieties, defences, and early object relationships, some analysts began working with psychotic patients using a psychoanalytic setting. Among those analysts, the most well known are Herbert Rosenfeld and Hanna Segal. Bion also began to work with psychotic patients and, from 1950, the year in which he presented his paper “The imaginary twin” to become a member of the British Psychoanalytical Society, he began publishing papers on the language and thinking of schizophrenics in which were the seeds of the ideas he developed later on, in another seven papers, which gave birth to a psychoanalytical theory of the function of thinking and its disturbances. In 1967, these papers were published in a book titled Second Thoughts. Being faithful to his idea of offering more than one perspective, or vertex, as he called it later, Bion left his papers in their original version and, at the end of the book, he added a chapter with comments in which he detailed his current perspectives on what he had written before from the point of view of the theories he had been developing.

In 1951, he meets Francesca, who becomes his second wife, collaborates with him throughout the rest of his life, and with whom he had a son, Julian, and a daughter, Nicola. Absorbed as he was by his dedication to psychoanalysis and with the writing of the seven papers I have already mentioned between 1952 and 1957, his book, Experiences in Groups, was not published until 1961. It was his most successful book and interest in these papers on groups continues to the present day. In Klein’s opinion, working with groups was not compatible with psychoanalytical work. She had little faith in some of Bion’s psychoanalytic theories, although she finally recognised their validity. Bion, in turn, never considered the work with groups to be divorced from psychoanalysis. The evidence of his perspective is the subtitle to his book Attention and Interpretation (1970), A Scientific Approach to Insight in Psycho-Analysis and Groups, which refers to insight in individual and group analysis. In this book, he puts forward a new perspective: the relationship between the mystic (the new idea), the Establishment, and the group.

In the Introduction to Experiences in Groups, he wrote,

I am impressed, as a practising psychoanalyst, 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 rudimentary binocular vision.

(Bion, 1961, p. 8)

Something he says in that Introduction provides an answer to the frequently repeated question, “Why did you stop working with groups?” He was already absorbed by psychoanalytical practice while he continued working with groups, but, in the end, he realised that, at least for him, the work with two parallel methods would not benefit the group, the individual, or the analyst.

Bion was convinced of the fundamental importance of the Kleinian hypothesis of projective identification and the alternation between the paranoid –schizoid and the depressive positions. In some of the chapters of this book, we shall see what changes he made to those concepts, modifications that are new clinical instruments for psychoanalytical practice.

In 1967, Bion was invited to work for two weeks in Los Angeles, USA, where some analysts were interested in Klein’s theories and wanted to invite a Kleinian analyst to come to California to work with them. Moving to California offered Bion a free space in which to work and develop his ideas, a freedom that he felt he lacked in the Kleinian group. In a lecture she gave in Canada, Francesca Bion says that Bion had experienced for a long time the feeling of being “fenced in”. As he expressed it, he felt the risk of being “sunk by medals and honours”. He was already a famous psychoanalyst and he had been twice President of the British Psychoanalytical Society, as well as of other important institutions.

Introduction to Bion's ideas

In Second Thoughts, Bion wrote,

This view that psycho-analytical papers are to be treated as experiences which affect the development of the reader will not be subscribed to by all psycho-analysts. I do not contend that it is a matter of conscious choice determined by the rea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• Dedication
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• PREFACE
• FOREWORD
• INTRODUCTION The ultrasensorial and infrasensorial spectrum: the extension of the psychoanalytical map of the mind
• CHAPTER ONE Bion: the thinker and his work
• CHAPTER TWO Differentiation between the psychotic and the non-psychotic parts of the personality
• CHAPTER THREE Projective identification: realistic, communicative, and hypertrophic modalities
• CHAPTER FOUR An illustration of the ideas in Chapter Three used as clinical material through the film Pi
• CHAPTER FIVE The origin and nature of thinking
• CHAPTER SIX Illustration of the ideas about the origin and nature of thought using the film Twelve Angry Men
• CHAPTER SEVEN Learning from Experience: alpha function and reverie
• CHAPTER EIGHT The matrix functions of thinking: myths, dreams, and models
• CHAPTER NINE The function of dreams and myths as instruments with which to investigate mental life
• CHAPTER TEN A theory of knowing-dream ing-thinking: emotional links and the container-contained relationship
• CHAPTER ELEVEN Transformations
• CHAPTER TWELVE The difference between reparation and transformation
• CHAPTER THIRTEEN Tropisms and mental growth
• NOTE
• REFERENCES
• INDEX