Wild Thoughts Searching for a Thinker

A Clinical Application of W.R. Bion's Theories

Rafael E. Lopez-Corvo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781855754003
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429924057
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Freud, Klein and Bion have provided the most relevant and substantial contributions to psychoanalytical theory and praxis. Klein was very much Freudian and Bion was both. There is undoubtedly a progressive epistemological evolution in their creativity; it will be similar to observe the same phenomenon by changing the objective of a microscope from a lower to a higher resolution power. It will be of lesser advantage for the understanding of the mind, to disregard this analogy and to accept as true that psychoanalysis, like religion, represents different beliefs. There is only one mind, but different viewers. Wild Thoughts Searching for a Thinker is essentially a clinical book that explores the connections between some of Bion's novel theories and those from Classical Psychoanalysis, mainly contributions from Freud, Klein and Winnicott. It also represents a substantial endeavour to make Bion not only more accessible to readers, but also and very important, to see his theories at work, in direct practical use during the here and now interaction throughout the consulting hour.

Chapter One
Murdering the mind

From the perspective of Bion's container–contained theory

“Science . . . commits suicide when it adopts a creed”

(Huxley, 1907)

The need to diminish feelings of persecution contributes to the drive to abstraction in the formulation of scientific communications.

(Bion, 1967, p. 118)

Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses
And all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty
Together again.

(Nursery rhyme)

Introduction

There are “mental confusions” that interfere with and destroy the faculty to think rationally, that hinder the positive growth of the mind, and that obstruct the capacity to discriminate between reality and phantasy. Bion (1963) described Growth (represented as Y) as a “preconception in search of a realization”. For Bion the tendency of such realizations could be either negative (– Y) if directed towards narcissism, or positive (+Y) if aimed toward “social-ism”. For instance, a nice-looking, intelligent young woman who, as a child, had a surgical intervention to correct a genetic defect around her genital area, was very resentful towards both parents and herself, found her body ugly, and had difficulties in establishing lasting relationships with men. After a year of psychotherapy, she managed to resolve an important confusion between her early traumatic experience and her present situation as an accomplished young woman. As a consequence she now sustains a relationship with a man and feels very fond of him. At a critical moment she had a dream where she was playing Monopoly with her boyfriend’s relatives and was trying very hard to be attentive to the game. She concluded that perhaps she was trying to fit into her friend’s life, and I add that she seems to be seriously taking a chance. She was starting to shift from the vertex of a narcissistic involvement with herself to a more social form of linkage.

Growth could also be conceived from other vertices, such as progressive shift from dissociated states of the mind, as observed in the paranoid–schizoid position (–Y), to a more integrated state of mind in agreement with the depressive position (+Y). Another example is the continuous tendency of the psychotic part of the personality (–Y) to be contained by the non-psychotic part of the personality (+Y). However, there are circumstances that interfere with this normal process of evolution; usually such conditions are capable of inducing high levels of anxiety at a very early age.

However, I wish to discuss here more universal forms of confusions that impede growth in broader systems. Some are culturally related, such as confusions between medicine and psychoanalysis; some are the product of unresolved early fixations, like those confusions connecting animate and inanimate objects; some are circumstances imposed by a particular system or establishment, as for example a lack of discrimination between container and contained; and, finally, some confusions are related to a lack of methodological differentiation or discrimination between diachronic and synchronic dimensions. In a manner similar to the patient I have just mentioned and analogous to experiences most psychoanalysts are familiar with, resolution of such confusions will result in an enhancement of communication between psychoanalysts from different cultures, as well as in an increment in growth of psychoanalysis as an essential instrument to investigate the abstract side of the mind.

Confusion between inanimate (not-alive) and animated (alive) objects

Very frequently we are confronted with patients who present difficulties in discriminating between human beings and inanimate objects. These patients demonstrate a kind of projective identification and resistance with the purpose of denying important ties of dependency and feelings of persecutory anxiety. These patients believe they are going to be mended by the therapist, following the specifications of some kind of private and idealized model. The patient takes a rather passive role, acting as an inanimate object that will be repaired by the analyst, who will in turn be responsible for any kind of “wrongdoing”. If the analyst acts out (counteracts) due to his/her own narcissistic needs, and identifies with the patient’s idealized phantasy, he/she could then face the possible complication of a negative therapeutic reaction or of a self-envy mechanism (López-Corvo, 1995). In such situations the analyst could become the target of sadistic superego demands, similar to the reaction displayed by unsatisfied clients who take their car (inanimate object) to a mechanic. The patient feels the analyst should perform “the treatment” on them, while they remain as observers, as if it were a medical consultation. Patients can also feel they are coming to “see” the analyst, as in a social visit, something often reflected in the difficulty to free associate, and in the refusal to use the couch. They prefer to talk face to face instead. Such patients may also feel that the pursuit of the analysis is a matter of concern to somebody else, including the analyst, but not to themselves. Such attitudes, I believe, are often reflected in the preference of attending not more than once a week, as if the enthusiasm for an analytical setting, for a serious investigation of their mind, is mostly a concern of the analyst and not of the patients themselves. If the analyst’s mind lacks the serious conviction of an analytical culture and goal, psychotherapy will be the modality of preference, even if indication for psychoanalytic therapy is the best choice.

Bion (1962) established that an overvaluation of the inanimate over the animate could be the consequence of enforced splitting associated with a disturbed relationship with the breast. He stated that when envy obstructs the relationship with the good breast, provider of love, understanding, solace, knowledge (Klein, 1946) during the schizoid–aranoid position, the persecutory anxiety present could obstruct the physical need for sucking and thereby jeopardize the infant’s life. “Fear of death through starvation of essentials”, said Bion, “compels resumption of sucking. A split between material and psychical satisfaction develops” (1962, p. 10). This situation leads to an enforced splitting between the physical need for survival on the one hand, and psychic satisfactions on the other. Such a condition, according to Bion, will be achieved by destruction of alpha functions:

This makes breast and infant appear inanimate with consequent guiltiness, fear of suicide and fear of murder [it is easier to destroy something inanimate than something alive!] . . . The need for love, understanding and mental development is now deflected, since it cannot be satisfied, into the search for material comforts. [1962, p. 11]

Confusion between the animate and the inanimate is the consequence of the child’s long term and natural dependency upon parents, who experience their baby as an object “belonging” to them. However, autonomy of the self and consciousness of aliveness is something to be achieved by the individual, a potential that is dependent for its development on the parent’s capacity for reverie.

Another important vertex on this issue is given by Bion in his book, Cogitations (1992), where he refers to those attacks made by the baby against objects linked to displeasure, something that will induce persecutory anxiety and, as a consequence, there will be a need to placate these objects by mechanisms of idealization. This process of idealization is reached by providing them in the future—usually after they are dead—with superhuman qualities and changing them into objects of adoration and worship. Bion states that,

Contrary to common observation, the essential feature of the adored or worshipped object is that it should be dead so that crime may be expiated by the patient’s dutiful adherence to animation of what is known to be inanimate and impossible to animate. This attitude contributes to the complex of feelings associated with fetishism. [1992, p. 134]

In other words, the punishment for attacking bad objects is produced when the dependency upon an inanimate (dead) object—now animated and idealized—is assured to provide nothing, like the believer who expects a miracle from a wooden statue. It seems as if the unconscious incapacity to differentiate the animate from the inanimate works both ways: dead objects acquire life, and living objects become inanimate. The main issue in this conflict seems to be a strong narcissistic need to attack the process of separation and individuation. Alive objects that are made inanimate, or the opposite, inanimate objects made alive, represents a schizoid–paranoid interaction that attempts to exercise possessiveness and complete control of the object. The conflict is usually related to anal sadistic forms of object control, meant to deny the fact that, different from faeces, alive objects are autonomous and have lives of their own. This conflict or condition obstructs the possibility of a mourning process and the establishment of the depressive position. Such conflict works either way, not only in relation to the outside object, but also with the self. There will be present a feeling of deadness and of “non-existence”, a dynamic I consider of great importance in the understanding of any form of pathological depression. Bion states:

The patient feels the pain of an absence of fulfillment of his desires. The absent fulfillment is experienced as a “no-thing”. The emotion aroused by the “no-thing” is felt as indistinguishable from the “nothing”. The emotion is replaced by a “no emotion” . . . “Non-existence” immediately becomes an object that is immensely hostile and filled with murderous envy towards the quality or function of existence wherever it is to be found. [1970, pp. 19–20]

Confusing the mind with the brain, or psychoanalysis with medicine

The incapacity to differentiate animate from inanimate can expand to confusion between body and mind or between psychoanalysis and medicine, a confusion that was present in Freud at the beginning of his discoveries when, in 1913, for instance, he states that psychoanalysis is a medical procedure that attempts to cure certain forms of nervous illness with the use of a psychological technique (1913j, p. 165). There is extensive psychoanalytical literature, both critical and seeking to justify the fact that psychoanalysis does or does not meet several characteristics found in scientific methodology; moreover, that it is not capable of empirical verification or validation, nor of operational definitions that satisfy the same logical criteria observed in other natural sciences. Paul Ricoeur (1970) concluded:

The scientific status of psychoanalysis has been subjected to severe criticism, especially in countries of British and American culture. Epistemologists, logicians, semanticists, philosophers of language have closely examined its concepts, propositions, argumentation, and structure as a theory and have generally come to the conclusion that psychoanalysis does not satisfy most elementary requirements of a scientific theory. . . [p. 345]

The problem, I think, of great relevance here, is on the one hand the confusion between the phenomena of the mind itself, and on the other hand the psychoanalytical methodology used to explore and change the mind. To accuse psychoanalysis of not being an exact science is, in summary, a barbarism, a pleonasm. To be more specific, it is equivalent to stating that surgery is too bloody, car mechanics too greasy, or swimming too wet. In other words, is vagueness the problem in psychoanalytic methodology, or is such vagueness a characteristic of the organ to be explored?

Psychoanalysis, similar to structuralism, can be considered a methodology that has the specific purpose of investigating and understanding how the mind functions, and in order to properly achieve this purpose, psychoanalysis needs to follow closely and to model itself upon the specific patterns of the phenomena under investigation. It is just those characteristics of the mind, its loose openness and imprecise structure, that have allowed humanity to evolve and progress. It is different for the body, which remains the same from prehistory to the present time. It is precisely in the mind, and not in the body, where many differences between primitive and modern men are to be found. If the mind had been as rigid and structured as the body is, humanity might have been unable to move forward. Accusing psychoanalysis of being an imprecise doctrine that lacks the accuracy of a scientific body epitomizes the incapacity to discriminate between the methodology used as an instrument with which to investigate and the phenomenon under investigation. In a dialogue, Bion states:

Roland: I thought psychoanalysts take religion seriously.

P.A. [Psychoanalyst]: How could I take people seriously if I do not take seriously one of their most important inclinations . . . We should be aware of the distinction between “talking about something” and the “something” itself . . . [1975, p. 303]

In other words, one thing is the noumenon or the “thing-in-itself”—to use a Kantian approach—and another is psychoanalysis as an instrument acting upon the phenomenon in order to reveal the true nature of the noumenon.

Freud never made any attempt to defend psychoanalysis as an exact science. On the contrary, as we shall see, he was more interested in the opposite. Through most of his writings he feared the preciseness of the medical profession and chose instead the vagueness of psychology, sociology, and even the clergy. However, on the other hand, if we were to be methodologically more meticulous, we might be able to infer that in the basic outline of psychoanalysis, not withstanding Freud’s important attempts, he remained attached to some of the neuro-physiological theories present in the Project, such as, for instance, his instinct theory, the mechanisms of repression and of narcissism. Perhaps a few articles published near the end of his life, such as “Splitting of the ego in the service of defence” (1940e), hinted at a possible shift from his basic biological orientation.

From the defence of Theodore Reik, a prominent non-medical member of the psychoanalytical association, concerning quackery, at Vienna’s court in 1926, Freud produced the well-known pamphlet of “The question of lay analysis”. Having the possibility to choose between the exactness of biology and the approximation of psychology, sociology and related fields, Freud favoured the latter, and openly proclaimed his resistance to restricting the practice of psychoanalysis to the hands of medical practitioners alone. He said:

What is known as medical education appears to me to be an arduous and circuitous way of approaching the profession of analysis. No doubt it offers an analyst much that is indispensable to him. But it burdens him with too much else of which he can never make use, and there is a danger of its diverting his interest and his whole mode of thought from the understanding of psychical phenomena . . . Psycho-analysis is a part of psychology; not of medical psychology in the old sense, not of the psychology of morbid processes, but simply of psychology. It is certainly not the whole of psychology, but its substructure and perhaps even its entire foundation. [1926d, p. 252]

I do not think that the emphasis placed by Freud on the defence of lay analysis was solely the consequence of Reik’s accusation. The intensity and almost personal passion Freud invested in the whole issue speaks of a different and perhaps even deeper predicament. Peter Gay (1988) quotes Freud saying, in a letter to Ferdern written in 1926: “The struggle for lay analysis must be fought through sometime or other. Better now than later. As long as I live, I shall balk at having psychoanalysis swallowed by medicine” (p. 491). And one year later, he stated: “The physicians among the analysts have been only too inclined to engage in research closer to the organic, rather than in psychological research” (p. 497).

This attitude was by no means anything new in Freud. Thirteen years earlier, in his introduction to Oskar Pfister’s book The Psychoanalytic Method, he stated:

The practice of psychoanalysis calls much less for medical training than for psychological instruction and a free human outlook. The majority of doctors are not equipped to practice psychoanalysis and have completely failed to grasp the value of that therapeutic procedure. Educators and the pastoral workers are bound by the standards of their profession to exercise the same consideration, care and restraint, in much the same way usually practised by doctors . . . [1913b, pp. 330–331]

How did Freud develop such an animosity towards doctors, when the great majority of his followers were physicians? Furthermore, in 1895, at the time of his well-known dream of Irma’s injection, he had encouraged it otherwise, by saying that a proper evaluation of physical ailments should be disregarded previous to any psychoanalytical proceeding. But perhaps Freud’s greatest critical differences were with the North American Association, who, until only a few years ago, had limited psychoanalysis to medical personnel only, as a form of dealing with several cases of charlatanism and of non-medical persons who were involved in “improper conducts” while practising some kind of psychotherapy. On this account, in 1927, Eitingon and Jones organized an international symposium on the subject of lay analysis, where opinions were completely discordant, and where the Americans, directed by A. A. Brill, held a more radical view in support of physicians being the only persons certified to practise psychoanalysis, a proposition that created almost enough friction to cause Freud to break from the International Psychoanalytical Association.

By early 1929, as the controversy...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• Dedication
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• Introduction
• CHAPTER ONE Murdering the mind. From the perspective of Bion's container–contained theory
• CHAPTER TWO The forgotten self. With the use of Bion's theory of negative links
• CHAPTER THREE Preconceptual traumas and the "internal traumatic object". From the point of view of Bion's concept of "caesura"
• CHAPTER FOUR Self envy. From the point of view of "part objects" and "link" theory
• CHAPTER FIVE "Nameless terror"
• CHAPTER SIX Murdering "gangs" and narcissistic conglomerates. From the point of view of Bion's saturated–unsaturated theory
• CHAPTER SEVEN Excessive projective identification
• CHAPTER EIGHT The relativity of the vertex. From the point of view of a binocular vision
• CHAPTER NINE The unconscious. Denouncing consciousness's fear of truth
• CHAPTER TEN Interpreting or translating the unconscious?
• CHAPTER ELEVEN The three faces of the preconscious. From the point of view of Bion's theory of functions
• CHAPTER TWELVE Listening to "O"
• CHAPTER THIRTEEN "O" or countertransference?
• CHAPTER FOURTEEN Using the Grid
• CHAPTER FIFTEEN Dreams: stray thoughts in search of a thinker
• REFERENCES
• INDEX