Do I Dare Disturb the Universe?

A Memorial to W.R. Bion

James S. Grotstein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367099473
• eBook ISBN: 9780429912856
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

All the contributors to this compilation knew Bion personally and were influenced by his work. They include: Herbert Rosenfeld, Frances Tustin, Andre Green, Donald Meltzer and Hanna Segal.Wilfred R. Bion has taken his place as one of the foremost psychoanalysts of our time, yet it is only within recent years that the impact of his achievements are being felt. His death has stilled his pen and voice but demands a restatement of his view by those who have been most influenced by him. Bion's greatness lay, not only in the odd vertices of his incredible observations, but in the resources of his epistemological vastness, his respect for truth obtained in the disciplined absence of memory and desire, and his paying such scrupulous attention to and interpreting of recombinant constructions he achieved with mental elements their functions, and their transformations. His was the Language of Achievement, which is the tongue begotten by patience. Of note is his introduction of Plato's theory of forms and Kant's categories into psychoanalytic metapsychology, to say nothing of his mathematical, group and religious theories.

THEORETICAL CONTRIBUTIONS

New Theories: Their Influence and Effect on Psychoanalytic Technique

A.B. Bahia, Rio de Janeiro

Controversy is the growing-point from which development springs, but it must be a genuine confrontation and not an impotent beating of the air by opponents whose differences of view never meet (Bion, 1970, p. 55).

I

Introduction

In his introductory note to Freud’s first six works on psychoanalytical technique, James Strachey (1958) points out the relative scarcity of texts on this theme by the creator of psychoanalysis. He goes on to remark that Freud never ceased to maintain that mastery of psychoanalytical technique could only be achieved through clinical experience, never from books. Strachey adds: “clinical experience with patients, no doubt, but, above all, clinical experience from the analyst’s own analysis.”

The cornerstone of technique is, thus, experience from the analyst’s own analysis which, according to Freud (1937a, p. 249), should be periodically resumed “at intervals of five years or so.” Based on his own experience of undergoing or re-undergoing analysis without idealization, the analyst realizes the problems of the development of psychoanalytical technique better than anyone. Such development has to be limited to “exercises with ideas,” following trends of thought which have stemmed from Freud’s first discoveries.

However, exercises can be as exhausting and challenging as any other activity. Freud (1914) pointed out that the theory of psychoanalysis can be defined as:

an attempt to account for two striking and unexpected facts of observation which emerge whenever an attempt is made to trace the symptoms of a neurotic back to their sources in his past life: the facts of transference and resistance. Any line of investigation which recognizes these two facts and takes them as the starting-point of its work has a right to call itself psychoanalysis, even though it arrives at results other than my own (p. 16).

Although this remains valid in its general terms, its recognition in specific clinical practice is very difficult. What may appear to be resistance may be, in fact, a veiled manifestation of a positive transference relationship and, conversely, an ostensibly positive but hostile transference may become a barrier to the progress of an analytical process. But Freud’s synthesis remains true: psychoanalytical theory still is an “effort to make transference and resistance understandable.” Only, in order to grasp these concepts clearly, understanding their meaning in connexion with the development of psychoanalytical technique, one must provide wider and at the same time more precise terms of reference which will enable new interpretations of meanings to show up within the total historical pattern of psychoanalysis.

It should be recognized that in Freud, as in later authors, there are “seminal moments” the study of which helps in understanding new tendencies which they inspired. Identifying such “moments” is difficult and, given the extraordinary richness of Freudian clinical experience and critical elaboration, perhaps even useless. Moreover, to the risks of one’s own limitations are added the restrictions of time and space imposed on such endeavours.

Recognizing and accepting these difficulties, the present work sets out to study the appearance and development of new trends within psychoanalytical technique. This study follows three main lines of reference: the first is Freud’s synthesis-”the effort to make transference and resistance understandable,” adding that the two facts referred to (transference and resistance) are a result of repression and are based, as Freud stressed throughout his whole work, on the processes of “remembering” and “forgetting”: psychological mechanisms inherent in the phenomenon of repression. The second line is the renewal of some of the concepts concerning primitive anxieties, introduced by a reappraisal of the Oedipus conflict, as postulated by Melanie Klein after her experience in analysing children. The third line is the clinical concept of the loss of contact with reality, as described by Freud (1924b) in cases of neurosis and psychosis. I shall relate to each of these, “indicators”: (1) saturation of the mind by memory and desire; (2) intolerance of frustration and incapacity for thought; (3) simultaneity of the pleasure principle and the reality principle.

II

1. The Significance of “Remembering” and “Forgetting” According to Freud

In an essay on the nature of preconscious mental processes, Kris (1950) remarks that “Freud’s ideas were constantly developing, his writings represent a sequence of reformulations, and one might therefore well take the view that the systematic cohesion of psychoanalytic propositions is only, or at least best, accessible through their history.”

The facts concerning the intimate connexion of “remembering” and “forgetting” with the processes that rule repression, however, seem to contradict Kris’s statement. In fact, analysing Freud’s writings with reference to the laws which seem to regulate the relationship between repressive processes and “remembering” and “forgetting” phenomena, one does not find that “continual reformulation.” On the contrary, one seems to be faced with an impressive unity of point of view along the years.

From the “Studies on Hysteria” (Breuer & Freud, 1893-5) to the “Constructions in Analysis” (Freud, 1937b) one can derive the same technical postulate: that in the course of psychic processes amnesia indicates repression, and the appearance of a recollection, on the other hand, always means a suppression of repression. But as soon as we state this apparently so reliable principle, we can see a disturbing exception. The facts are neither so clear nor so well established. Adopting the critical approach recommended by Kris and considering all occasions on which Freud handled the phenomena of “remembering” and “forgetting,” we find that there are memories which, far from indicating suppression of repressive mechanisms, rather imply a direct manifestation of their action. Those recollections that contradict and confuse the links painstakingly established by Freud between “forgetting” and repression, on the one hand, and “remembering” and suppression on the other, are-needless to say-the so-called “screen memories.”

As is well known, in his study of this type of memory, Freud distinguished a peculiarity in the temporal relationship between the covering recollection and its hidden real contents, namely between retrogressive or retrospective, and progressive or advanced memories. But (as Freud himself remarked) it is not the temporal relationship between the “screen memory” and the “covered experience” that is important. The fundamental fact is that in “the so-called earliest childhood memories we possess not the genuine memory-trace but a later revision of it” (Freud 1901, pp. 47-48). In other words, Freud’s clinical findings and his concept of “screen memories” contradict the identity previously established in his writings, between the appearance of a recollection and the suppressing of the repressive process. His own explanations are not very encouraging:

Out of a number of childhood memories of significant experiences, all of them of similar distinctness and clarity, there will be some scenes which, when they are tested (for instance, by the recollections of adults), turn out to have been falsified. Not that they are complete inventions; they are false in the sense that they have shifted an event to a place where it did not occur—or that they have merged two people into one, or substituted one for the other, or the scenes as a whole give signs of being combinations of two separate experiences (Freud, 1899, pp. 321-322).

From these remarks one can see that Freud is comparing the processes of screen-memory construction and dream construction. “Screen memories” are not “genuine” recollections, but dream distortions created by the memory process, mutilated or metaphorical allusions to the “genuine,” “complete” recollections.

But what in fact is a “genuine,” “complete” recollection? How can it be defined, by which elements can it be recognized? Certainly, no help is to be had from the idea that “screen memories,” nearer to dream structure than to memory structure, might possibly represent an exceptional memory process. In fact, if they occur in a “certain number of childhood recollections,” what guarantee can we have that they are not present in the whole memory process? Granted that they occur only in some of the cases, how to proceed, in a particular case, in order to identify a recollection as a memory of a real fact, as a “genuine” memory, and not only a distortion disguising a fantasy? And, more, how to reconcile the meaning of the displacement of a “screen memory” with the accepted identity between a memory “in general” and the suppressing of repression, when this displacement is nothing but an effect of repression? In order to give an answer to these embarrassing questions, one must reformulate the meaning hitherto given to “remembering” and “forgetting” within the analytical process. This reformulation, moreover, can and must be done bearing Freud’s works in mind.

Kris’s warning concerning the “constant developing” of Freud’s ideas, reminds us that this reformulation should not mean unconditional reacceptance of the total suppression of gaps of memory as a condition for cure. The Freud who in his “History of an Infantile Neurosis” (1918) tells us how he obtained new analytic material from his patient by fixing a date for the termination of the treatment, must certainly be superseded. Nowadays, we would call that famous “infantile material” a mental construction by the so-called Wolf Man, designed to get from Freud the satisfaction, in a degraded form, of instinctive, primeval needs, not sufficiently clarified by analysis.

But a clue can be found from the “other” Freud, the one who found-with such sagacity and scientific rigour—the concept of “screen memories.” In one of his writings on this subject Freud (1899) expressed his suspicion that all conscious infantile recollections show us “our earliest years not as they were but as they appeared at the later periods when the memories were aroused.” Freud concludes, baldly: “in these periods of arousal, the child-memories did not, as people are accustomed to say, emerge: they were formed at that time. And a number of motives, with no concern for historical accuracy, had a part in forming them, as well as in the selection of the memories themselves” (p. 322).

2. “Saturation” of the Mind by Memory and Desire

It is difficult to understand how Freud could have established two concepts about the memory process-one linking the suppressing of repression and the arousing of memories, and the other marking “screen memories” as the work of repression-without ever putting the two together for a comparative study. Everything points to the conclusion that if Freud had compared the two concepts, he would have called the memory process, in its entirety, a huge “screen memory,” a “fantastic construction,” in which “remembering” and “forgetting” are not antagonistic but complementary instruments, both with the same function, i.e., transforming external reality in accordance with instinctual needs.

In this sense, one can say that we all, whether successful or unsuccessful in our personal lives, in sickness or in health, actively creating or actively hallucinating, are, to some extent, genuine “fabricators of memories” (Bahia, 1956).

This “falsifying,” “screening” character of the memory process is taken to its logical conclusion by Bion in his concept of “saturation” of the mind by memory and desire. This concept, as will be seen, underlies one of the most fertile trends of psychoanalytical technique in our day.

Apparently, what Bion claims is not very different from what Freud meant when he wrote about “free-floating attention.” Thus Bion (1970) remarks: “a fallacious but helpful description … is that the practising analyst must wait for the analytic session to ‘evolve.’ He must wait not for the analysand to talk or to be silent or to gesture or for any other occurrence that is an actual event, but for an evolution to take place” (p. 28).

Bion goes further. Considering memory as “a container” for the “evacuations” or projective identifications, he proposes, as an active routine during analytical work, the avoidance of memories and desires of any kind. This, including the wish to “cure” the patient. He thinks it “a serious defect to allow oneself to desire the end of a session, or week, or term,” since “such desires erode the analyst’s power to analyse and lead to progressive deterioration of his intuition” (Bion, 1970), pp. 26-54).

Similarly, Bion stresses that “forgetting” is not enough, one must try positively to stop memories and desires. In this context he quotes a letter of Freud’s (to Lou Andreas-Salomé) in which he suggests a method of reaching a mental state to compensate for the obscurity of certain objects of investigation: “I had to blind myself artificially to focus all the light on one dark spot.” Bion proposes a constant watchfulness in keeping memories and wishes away, noting that this does not mean any lack of desire to get in touch with psychic reality. On the contrary, this would be the best-and possibly the only-way to reach an effective contact with that reality.

In his own words, “the more the analyst becomes expert in excluding memory, desire and understanding from his mental activity, the more he is likely at least in the early stages, to experience painful emotions that are usually excluded or screened by the conventional apparatus of ‘memory’ of the session, analytical theories often disguised desires or denials of ignorance.”

What would the mental state be that is most likely to replace the mental saturation resulting from “attachment” to memories, wishes and previous “understandings”? According to Bion, the word that would approximately convey what he means is “faith.” Faith in the existence of “an ultimate reality-the unknown, unknowable, ‘formless infinite,’” out of which only a small portion can be known during an analytical session. Such faith, characteristic of scientific endeavour, “must be distinguished from the religious meaning with which it is invested in conversational usage.”

In other words, only when disrobed of all artifice, lacking any sense of “anticipation,” not saturated by memories, desires or previous “understandings,” only then can an analytical session take place and “evolve” in an atmosphere of scientific truth.

As an illustration, take the following passage from a session with a recently married patient, three months under analysis. During the session, the patient’s mental “saturation” by memories from previous sessions hinders the stimulus of new perceptions and the “evolving” of the present situation. Feelings of fear toward “the unknown” are also present. It should be stressed incidentally that this and all other instances of clinical material included in this paper should not convey any impression of the material being at all exceptional. These instances should be seen as mere illustrations which may recall something in the reader’s own experience.

P.: I remember last session, when you interpreted something concerning my wife … [pause]. By the way, it was connected with last Wednesday’s session, I remember it well… How was it again? [pause of approximately 4 minutes].

A.: I doubt whether you really can recall the last session, or last Wednesday’s. What you are doing is trying to be sure that nothing is happening now. Or is going to happen. But those sessions you mention are over, and you know they can be of no use now.

P.: Yes, I know, yes … but why am I afraid then?

A.: I didn’t say you were afraid. I only said …

P.: [interrupting] But I am. At least, I feel I am afraid of you.

A.: Perhaps this fear, as well as the “memories” about last week’s sessions, are something created by you in order to get the illusion of being a helpless child, protected by a strong authority-myself, in this case-against anything new which might arise in your mind now.

P.: But that is absurd! How could I feel at the same time protected and afraid of you?

A.: Because you transform me into this authority I mentioned, though you know that I am not a protective or frightening figure.

P.: Well, I remember that such was and perhaps still is my relationship with my father But I have already learnt a lot here, one thing being that you are not going to “father” me … [pause]. I appreciate this … [laughs]. Funny; I’m not afraid any more. Now I even feel encouraged to tell you that I had sexual contact with my wife on Saturday and that it was not satisfactory … I don’t know why, but I felt I had to produce that coitus.

A.: You talk about “producing” that coitus, not simply having it. As if you were an automaton or a machine for producing coitus, on the assumption that you are obliged to do it. Exactly as you feel obliged to produce recollections here, or to force yourself to talk. You cannot be here simply, without feeling compelled to do something.

P.: By the way, you know my father inherited a flat from my deceased brother. Well, he offered me that flat for a very low rent… 700 or 800 cruzeiros a month, I don’t remember which … I was going to accept, taking the way of least resistance, as I did before…. But then I thought it better to put some money aside, as I’m doing now, in order to buy my own flat… Fortunately my wife is of the same opinion …

A.: Now you seem to recognize that it is better for you to have an independent mind and li...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Wilfred R. Bion: the Man, the Psychoanalyst, the Mystic. A Perspective on His Life and Work
• A Personal Reminiscence: Bion, Evidence of the Man
• Clinical Contributions
• Theoretical Contributions
• Contributions on Groups
• Publications by Wilfred R. Bion