The Tavistock Seminars

Wilfred R. Bion

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429922404
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie in der Psychologie

Previously unpublished lectures from Wilfred Ruprecht Bion. The book consists of eight talks Bion gave at the Tavistock Clinic between 1976 and 1979. Topics explored include the importance of observation; dreams; art and psychoanalysis; and the significance of time in psychoanalysis. In addition, this volume includes an illuminating interview of Bion by Anthony G. Banet in 1976.'In your practice you will find yourself under pressure. You say whatever you have to say, and then there is an entirely new situation. You don't really know what is going on because it is an entirely new situation, things will not be the same. It is likely enough that the patient will say, "Why don't you say something?" Or if not the patient, the relatives - "Why don't you do something?" So you are always under pressure prematurely and precociously to produce your idea. Poor little thing! Pull it up by the roots and have a look at it - it hasn't got a chance. So you have to act as a sort of parent to the idea - protect it and give it a chance to grow in spite of these pressures; you have to be able to tolerate this state of ignorance.'- W.R. Bion

Seminar One

28 June 1976

[This was the year of the record-breaking heatwave and drought. The videotape shows Bion wearing a short-sleeved, open-neck shirt rather than his usual long-sleeved shirt, bow-tie and jacket.]

BION: It took me a very long time to realize that the actual experience of being psychoanalysed was a traumatic one and it takes a long while before one recovers from it. In physical medicine you usually have to go through a period of convalescence; you then hope that if you are fortunate you will reap some benefit from the violence that has been done to you physically. I was introduced to the kind of idea that violence is not done to you by psychoanalysis—that in the course of time you gradually got more and more cured. That doesn’t seem to me to fit in at all; it was quite a long time before I began to feel that I knew where it was “at” and what sort of niche I occupied in this peculiar universe or domain that we call “psychoanalysis”—for want of a better word. But I can’t say I have got very far with that particular line of thought. Part of the difficulty is that one has to borrow the terminology from all sorts of sciences, religions, aesthetic activities, in order to attempt to formulate a language of our own. There isn’t a suitable language for this extraordinary domain, but I am convinced that there is such a domain, that there really is something which it is fair to call a mind, or character, or personality. The problem is having to use a debased currency, a language that has lost a great deal of its value and has therefore lost its cutting edge—in so far as one has to use it for a particular purpose.

Freud described the situation in which people suffer from an amnesia—a gap, a space where there ought to be some sort of memory—and then fill this gap with paramnesias. That’s fine, and a very profitable sort of idea it has been. But after a time when we get more and more accustomed to hearing about psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, the more we wonder whether there isn’t another great gap—not amnesia—the vocabulary is so difficult we don’t know what to call it. But anyway, when we are at a loss we invent something to fill the gap of our ignorance—this vast area of ignorance, of non-knowledge, in which we have to move. The more frightening the gap, the more terrifying it is to realize how utterly ignorant we are of even the most elementary and simplest requirements for survival, the more we are pressed from outside and inside to fill the gap. You can do that perfectly well—with art, with religion, you can multiply theory. You only have to ask yourself what you do individually in a situation where you feel completely lost; you are thankful to clutch hold of any system, anything whatever that is available on which to build a kind of structure. So from this point of view it seems to me that we could argue that the whole of psychoanalysis fills a long-felt want by being a vast Dionysiac system; since we don’t know what is there, we invent these theories and build this glorious structure that has no foundation in fact—or the only fact in which it has any foundation is our complete ignorance, our lack of capacity.

However, we hope that it isn’t completely unrelated to fact that psychoanalytic theories would remind you of real life at some point in the same way as a good novel or a good play would remind you of how human beings behave. Leonardo could draw things that remind you of what human beings look like. If you look at his drawings of hair and turbulent water in his Notebooks, there is an attempt to give an aesthetic representation of the sort of turmoil I have described.

Without wanting to forget all that—the fact of our ignorance and the fact that we have to try to make inroads into this universe in which we live by these various methods—scientific, religious, artistic—we can go on multiplying the number of approaches that we as individuals make, our own small contribution to scratching a little space into this great mass of material that we don’t know.

I suppose it was permissible for biologists and others to talk about sex, but remember the furore that was created by Freud’s suggestion that sex played a great part. The fact that he was able to do this also had the effect of making us see most of the development of psychoanalysis in terms of biological effect. Appropriate to that is the work of Mendel and his promulgation of the laws of inheritance. Of course, it begs the question when we talk about “Mendelian inheritance”, because it is tautological. However, I think a rather awkward situation arises when it comes to supposing that there is such a thing as a mind, that we all have a mind or soul or psyche, or whatever you want to call it. We have to talk like that because we haven’t a proper vocabulary for it. As soon as we recognize that, there is some gap there that isn’t in fact quite empty. The borrowing from biology begins to break down when it comes to the question of the mind and the transmission of ideas. In fact, we have to consider that in addition to this biological inheritance, this Mendelian myth of propagation, it becomes one that applies to the world of ideas in which characteristics are transmitted from one generation to the next, or to some subsequent generation. We could say that on the one hand there are the genotypes, the genetic inheritance, and on the other the phenotypes, the transmission of appearances. I used to be taught to believe that these acquired characteristics are not transmitted—the only characteristics that are transmitted are the Mendelian ones, the genetic ones genetically transmitted. I don’t think this is good enough; I think there is something quite unmistakable about the way in which ideas are transmitted. The individual gives birth, so to speak, to some other individual who bears signs or symptoms of these phenomenes—I am inventing a word to describe these particles that continue to be passed on, so that you can imagine a situation in which there is an English nation affected by Shakespeare and then the characteristics become, as it were, somehow transmitted—not altogether in an obvious way that you would suppose, by books and so forth. I remember John Rickman telling me about his experience at York railway station when a soldier came up to him and said, “Sir, weren’t you at Northfield?” Rickman said he was. “It was the most extraordinary experience I ever had—just like being at university”, said the soldier. That man hadn’t a hope of ever getting to university—as far as we know. His educational and financial background, his cultural background, were all against him. So it was probably the only chance he had had. I don’t know why, out of all the people at Northfield, that idea was transmitted to that particular person and changed his outlook—it certainly sounded as if it had. Whatever may have happened to all the pampered darlings of my generation at Oxford and Cambridge, they could pass through university without having the faintest idea of what a university was. But one man, who couldn’t possibly know what a university was, almost certainly did. We are led to suppose that something happens to an individual, and then that “something” gets transmitted elsewhere; but the laws of Mendelian inheritance don’t apply—some other laws do, such as phenotypes and phenomenes.

We can look at it very closely and in great detail, as in psychoanalysis. But I am not sure that the increased depth of observation that becomes possible when one is closely in contact with another person will tell us very much about this other form of transmission. Indeed, it is very difficult to know what effect an analysis has on the individual anyway. Some people certainly seem to be able to turn the experience to good account. But I think that in many cases it is purely ephemeral—there is apparently a “cure”. We can use a term like “cure”, but it has no lasting reality, no particular significance—in contrast with the basic, fundamental characteristics transmitted according to Mendelian laws. We could say, “That, Exhibit A, is a human being; that, Exhibit B, is a tiger, a cat, or a sheep.” It would seem as if there are certain fundamental things that follow the laws of Mendelian inheritance. The other laws (if there are any) have to be discovered. It is possible that if you take a group of people—say, like those at Northfield—you might in the course of time be able to detect what sort of course is pursued there by an idea, by something that would seem to be a part of thinking. That is where people who observe groups may have a chance of seeing some of this form of inheritance.

To get back to the psychoanalytic view: it is quite useful to talk about “transference” and “countertransference”. Or, as Winnicott puts it, the transitory object; it is in transition, in passage from goodness knows where to goodness knows what, from oblivion to amnesia—the tiny little bit in between that could be filled up by saying “transference relationship” and “countertransference”, but I think it will have to be filled in with something else. Because the relationship of these little packets cannot be so easily determined, you may be able to see an idea zigzag its way through a group. I don’t know where the idea comes from and I don’t know where it goes to, but it may be observed in passage. This is where you get back to the practice of analysis and the practice of group observation.

Q: [inaudible]

BION: Pain is a fact of existence—not so very different from pleasure. Indeed I think that one requires a terminology in which there are not specific words so much as concrescences; a number of feelings or ideas get collected together and could be put into some sort of order. You could regard pleasure and pain as different ends of the spectrum.

It is quite easy to see why we like to have a nice feeling and even to believe that it is possible to have a nice feeling by itself. I think it is rubbish; you have to suppose that either you have feelings or you don’t. If you are not willing to pay the price of the inescapable fact of pain, then you get reduced to a situation in which you try to isolate yourself. Physically it is quite possible: you can draw the blinds, turn off the light, have the telephone cut off, stop reading the newspapers and keep yourself in a situation of complete isolation—physically. Mentally, I don’t think it is quite so easy. For example, even if it were possible to go back into the womb, it is very doubtful to imagine that one would be completely isolated so long as one continued to live. The human foetus lives in a fluid environment, the amniotic fluid, and embryologists say that it has these auditory and optic pits. At what point do they become functional? There is no reason why they shouldn’t become functional, even to the foetus, because a watery fluid does transmit pressure. I think that, at some point, the foetus can be so subjected to these changing pressures that long before it changes from a watery fluid to a gaseous one—the air, birth—it does its best to be rid of the whole lot.

I think it would be a complete distortion of Kleinian theory to suggest that even a foetus might resort to splitting off thoughts and ideas and phantasies, and evacuating them into the amniotic fluid. However, I don’t see why we shouldn’t indulge in these phantasies. Freud said, “I learned to restrain speculative tendencies and to follow the forgotten words of my master, Charcot, to look at the same things again and again until they themselves began to speak” (S.E. 14, p. 22). I have great sympathy with that, but I think it is dangerous to imagine that we can do without these speculative adventures. Some sort of discipline is required.

It seems to me that if you consider what appears to be this curious progress from something like the fishy existence to the amphibian existence to the mammalian existence, there seem to be these archaic survivals. A surgeon will say, “I think there is a branchial cleft tumour.” It’s a survival, an archaic part of the body that proliferates and becomes dangerous. There’s a vestigial tail, and that begins to produce a tumour and requires an operation. It would be nice, so seductive, if the mind, this archaic survival, could be so easily detected—but it can’t. We don’t seem to be able to smell it, touch it, feel it or see it, and yet we are aware of it. Unfortunately we can only say that perhaps we are completely mistaken: we are being stimulated by something or other, and then we build up this elaborate system of paramnesias, these elaborate systems of theory, because it is so much quicker, so much nicer to be able to fall back on theory. If I am right about this, then I think we could say that as far as mental life is concerned, we are in our infancy, we simply don’t know what development is likely to take place or whether the development will be terminated by our magnificent equipment of simian capacity—being able to produce nuclear fission and blow ourselves off the earth before we can develop much further.

Q: [inaudible]

BION: Living in a watery medium, one of the foetus’s long-distance probes is its sense of smell. Dogfish and mackerel can detect decaying matter at a considerable distance—in a watery medium. Transported to a gaseous medium, the individual carries a certain amount of the watery medium with it—mucous, saliva and so forth—and can therefore continue to smell things that are not completely desiccated; the watery medium that was once outside is now inside. Some people can be very sensitive to that; they don’t congratulate themselves on their capacity to smell things that other people cannot, but complain bitterly of “nasal catarrh”, talking exactly as if they feel afraid that they will be drowned by it. In short, this “catarrh” which could be an asset becomes a liability of which the individual is terrified.

I think this also applies to the eyes that show you things even if you are not in physical contact with them, and may indeed show you things that you don’t like to see at all. …It is possible that we have hit on some measures by which we can develop our mental capacity. This is probably quite all right provided that it is more or less harmless. But suppose it becomes really penetrating; there is a mediaeval drawing of a person shoving his head through a sort of adamantine shell and is then able to observe the universe that lies outside. If astronomy actually enabled the individual to penetrate into space, then there might easily be an objection to that—a violent objection against all these radio telescopes and so forth, a wish to destroy them all because they made life so uncomfortable—it is so much nicer to be blind and deaf.

What it means, then, is this: are we going to dismiss X by saying, “Oh, he’s terribly hypochondriacal”—finish; we thank God we don’t have to bother any further? Or should we listen to what he says? Should we expose ourselves to what this individual is trying to communicate?

Freud said that we should pay attention to dreams. That has quite a history—lots of people have said it before, but Freud carried it to very great lengths, suggesting that we should have real respect for what we see and hear and experience when we are off our guard as we are when we go to sleep. There are very few individuals who have any respect whatsoever for the continuation of those dreams when they are wide awake. They are not even likely to admit to having them, because they know that the rest of us will call them hallucinations or delusions—as we all know, the authorities in some places are at pains to shut people up where they can do little harm—inside mental institutions. It is another future that lies before psychoanalysis likewise: to disturb the authorities and help them to imprison the human mind to keep it in a harmless condition. In a way we feel that it is all very well for people like Picasso or Solzhenitsyn—they were great men, and it was reasonable for them to put up with that sort of thing. But it is awkward to think that we, with our ordinary capacities, might have to stand up against it to support the movement towards freedom of mind, the movement that might aid development and discover the rules of mental nutrition. How do you feed the mind in such a way that it can develop, not get poisoned?

This is fairly easily discernible when it comes to a question of the application of drugs of one sort or another—alcohol, soporifics and so forth. But it is not so easy to know what ideas are soporific, what ideas are poisonous, and whether we, as analysts, are not furthering these developments of methods by which thought would become impossible.

André Green drew my attention to this statement: “La réponse est le malheur de la question” [“The answer is the disease, the misfortune, of the question”: Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003), L’Entretien Infini]. In other words, the answer is the thing that will put a stop to curiosity better than anything. If anybody is at all curious, you can stuff an answer down their throat or into their ears and that will stop them doing any further thinking.

Q: [inaudible]

BION: The impression I get about morality is that it is basic. I have been struck by the fact that making a faintly disapproving noise will cause an infant to shrink back as if something very terrible has happened. I don’t get the feeling that there is any conscious idea of what the crime is; in fact, the nearest that I have got to Melanie Klein’s statement of it is, “free-floating anxiety”. It is an anxiety without any concept attached to it—so much so that I think the growing creature does its best to find a crime to fit the feeling. So there is no difficulty about rationalization, no difficulty about having rational feelings for regarding someone as a criminal or thinking of oneself as one. And if the worst comes to the worst, the person can always commit a crime to match the feeling, so that the morality will actually precipitate the crime as a kind of therapeutic attempt; the person concerned can feel, “Yes, I may feel guilty, but who wouldn’t? Look what I have done.” In reality, I think that someone can really commit a murder in order to be able to feel that at least his murderous feelings of guilt are rational. But all this usually means is that the so-called rational event is one that we are capable of understanding according to our logical rules. That is a matter of our human limitations—it has nothing to do with the universe in which we live. Another trouble is the sense of guilt that can be so enormous that the person concerned tries to get rid of it, tries to embrace a sort of theory or idea that is absolutely amoral.

Q: [inaudible]

BION: Nearly everybody has been taught to bother about other people, to be concerned for them. That can also be one of these tricks learnt in the course of one’s life—how to be just like a loving or affectionate person takes the place of becoming one. That is one of the solutions that put a stop to growth and development.

In analysis you have to be sensitive to the situation where the patient is talking very clearly, very comprehensibly, about his concerns for this or that cause or instituti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• BION SEMINARS AT THE TAVISTOCK CLINIC
• 1 28 June 1976
• 2 4 July 1977
• 3 5 July 1977
• 4 3 July 1978
• 5 4 July 1978
• 6 5 July 1978
• 7 27 March 1979
• 8 28 March 1979
• APPENDIX A: Extract from Péguy’s Basic Verities
• APPENDIX B: Interview
• INDEX