Wilfred R. Bion is first and foremost an astonishing, disconcerting, and destabilising thinker, an adept of uncertainty in situations where we generally rely only too readily on our comfortable ways of thinking which have made us, as it were, guarantors of the established order. But Bion is not an “agitator” out of pleasure; he is so due to his particular “turn of mind”, and this indeed is what I hope to show.
Bion is also an original thinker, encouraged by his turn of mind to approach “tangentially” certain questions and situations that others tackle head on. Among the myths, for example, which accompany those who are familiar with psychoanalysis – and the Oedipus myth has a central place among them – there are two that Bion considers as indispensable supports, the myth of the Garden of Eden and the myth of the Tower of Babel; and there are epic events – the discovery of the royal cemetery at Ur and the epic tale of the death of Palinurus – whose importance has raised them to the rank of quasi-myths.
Concerning the Oedipus myth, Bion (1963) writes: “The Oedipus myth may be regarded as an instrument that served Freud in his discovery of psycho-analysis and psycho-analysis as an instrument that enabled Freud to discover the Oedipus complex” (p. 92). It has to be said that he was more interested in the “character” and myth of Oedipus than in the complex, establishing a parallel between an Oedipus who had become King of Thebes entirely devoted to discovering the truth about the death of Laius, at whatever price – and we know just how far he took this, in spite of the attempts of Tiresias to dissuade him from doing so – and the psychoanalyst insofar as he/she is also at risk of only being interested in bringing to light repressed or split-off elements in the discourse of his patients, without measuring the “risk” that such a task of “excavation” (Bion, 1957a) represents.
For every psychoanalyst, the Oedipus myth is of particular importance insofar as Freud, in his self-analysis, came across the feeling of “being in love with my mother and jealous of my father, and I now consider it a universal event in early childhood”, as he put it to Wilhelm Fliess in one of his most famous letters: “Everyone in the audience”, he adds, was once a budding Oedipus in fantasy” (Letter to Fliess, dated October 15, 1897, in Masson, 1985, p. 272). But, as we shall see, Bion does not make any attempt to conceal his reservations concerning the use Freud makes of this myth.
The other myths, like this one, have to do with attempts to gain access to knowledge that men do not have – and to which they perhaps do not have right of access! In this sense, they concern what is at the basis of epistemology and scientific discovery, that is to say, curiosity which, in moral terms, “is a sin” (Bion, 1963, p. 46). In the first version of the Garden of Eden, for example, it is forbidden to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Once the commandment has been broken, the revelation of disobedience is accompanied by guilt and awareness and shame of nudity. The outcome, as for Oedipus, is banishment (ibid., p. 64). In the myth of the Tower of Babel, men seek to reach Heaven in order to take possession of the knowledge that it is supposed to contain. “The outcome”, Bion writes,
is exile … but an important precursor is the destruction of a common language and a spreading of confusion… . There is a god or fate, omniscient and omnipotent … who belongs to a moral system and appears to be hostile to mankind in his search for knowledge, even moral knowledge.
(ibid., pp. 64–65)
Among the epic events mentioned, the first is situated during the second millennium before Jesus Christ and appeared thanks to the discovery of the cemetery of Ur, the city of Abraham, by Sir Leonard Woolley, who carried out excavations there between 1926 and 1931. The archaeologist reconstituted the funeral ceremony during which the King’s suite accompanied him into the beyond. It was not a matter of executions but rather of collective suicide; the individuals concerned were generally found in their graves holding a little cup that no doubt contained the poison that they had taken themselves (Woolley et al. 1934). Such spectacular funeral practices are clearly an expression of specific religious beliefs. The organised sacrifice of the dignitaries and courtiers on the death of their king or queen and master is aimed at ensuring the latter a court to accompany him or her into the beyond; it also symbolises the extreme submission of a court to the leader.
Concerning this practice, Bion (1971, pp. 9–10) asks himself two series of questions:
- (1) “What was in the hearts and minds of those courtiers of Ur, Abraham’s city, when they walked into that death pit, took their potion, and died?” What psychic forces, what conventions drove them towards this fate?
- (2) Was it simply a question of ignorance or of “something unknown and more dynamic than ignorance?”
The unknown is what permanently motivates the author of these questions. He constantly turned his interest towards thought, its origin, its development and its growth, making knowledge one of the three possible links between an animate subject and his/her objects (animate or inanimate), and questioning forms of knowledge in such a way that they could encompass the unknown elements for which we do not have the necessary tools for thinking about them, and, therefore, for acquiring knowledge of them.
In the same cemetery, a second event unfolded five centuries later: a gang of plunderers, unafraid by the sacred character of the spot, excavated the funeral citadel and made off with the riches that it contained. Bion wonders about the motivations that were behind these men’s actions, and sees them as the prototype of investigators driven by scientific interest. They were in search, of course, of riches, but also of the motives that drove the dignitaries to follow their sovereign into the death pit.
The second epic narrative evokes the character of Palinurus, a secondary figure in the Roman mythology of the Aeneid. He was the helmsman of Aeneas’s fleet. He is seduced by (p. 30) the god Somnus who, disguised as Phorbas, his chief mate, encourages him to get some sleep because the sea is calm and favourable. Palinurus tries to resist, but finally the god sends him to sleep and throws him into the sea during the night while he is guiding his fleet towards Italy. Seeing his ship yawing, Aeneas takes over the helm, disappointed and saddened by the fecklessness of his helmsman (Virgil, Aeneid, Book V, 334–338).
In this ocean of the unknown, the story of the death of Palinurus illustrates the state of mind of all those who are driven by a certain taste for failure, by a definite repugnance for success, by a yearning for solitude, by a desire to abandon everything at the last moment. Palinurus is the individual who deserts his post at the very moment of victory … and who cannot spare himself the “bliss of a shipwreck” (Enthoven, 1990, p. 150).
The unknown (inconnu), finally, or the insu, is also the term in France that Jacques Lacan chose to employ to refer to the Freudian Unbewußt (Unconscious) which now leads me to draw the parallel that I have personally observed between Lacan and Bion each time I have delved more deeply into their respective works and lines of research.
A gain for psychoanalysis
The myths that psychoanalysis uses relate as a whole to ancient times which, although they were once historical, it is true, have now become ahistorical due to their particular mode of narration, to the renown and reputation they have acquired. The epoch in which psychoanalysis emerged and the consecutive periods of discovery stretched over several decades, during which a number of governments offered ethnologists and anthropologists financial aid enabling them to plan potential excavation sites and to carry out explorations in Italy, Greece, Egypt, Turkey, Mesopotamia, and so on. This new harvest of knowledge and of common objects relating to lost civilisations was of inestimable value in that they also threw light on our own civilisations and provided us with news ways of thinking. At the same time, we also discover – and here, too, Bion formulated it in a way that is interesting for psychoanalysis when he looks at how the possibilities for the fulfilment of a personality have been impeded, or even destroyed by the circumstances of life and of time – that, for Bion, the metaphor, if there is one, is to be found in the comparison between the archaeologist and the analyst who discovers “not so much of a primitive civilization as of a primitive disaster” (Bion, 1959, p. 40).
We know that Freud considered himself, at the level of the unconscious, as the equal of Schliemann discovering the remains and vestiges of Troy. We also know how much the father of psychoanalysis was torn between the passion for discovery and the growing pessimism that accompanies successive revisions. “You will be able to convince yourself”, Freud wrote, “that much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness” (Freud, 1895, p. 305). Furthermore, we know that for Freud, the psychotic’s delusion is to be understood as an “attempt at healing”, like a reconstruction. What is less well known is that for Bion “psychotic” and “non-psychotic” are not dissociated in such a clear-cut way. At the heart of each individual, psychotic parts and non-psychotic parts coexist and influence each other mutually, depending on the circumstances and situations, and it is above all the links between these different parts that condition more or less “mad” forms of understanding and reaction. Here, again, the parallel is obvious with Lacan (1967a), who states: “If we do not become aware of our own psychotic core, we will never be anything but alienists.” It is for this kind of reason, among others, that Bion writes that it is necessary, more often than not, to be attentive to the differences that exist between an “insane neurotic” and a “sane psychotic” (Bion, 1967, p. 149).
In this book, it is not my intention to refer in an exaggerated way to the episodes deemed to have been turning points in Bion’s life in order to explain his work, even if it is impossible to exclude the idea that there exists a connection between the life and work of an author. At any given moment in our journey through life, we are the sum of our experiences – and something more as well! Wilfred R. Bion was no exception. It has been said that his early childhood spent in India played a part in prompting him, at around the age of 70, to leave England for California in order to find a warmer climate; he spent the last years of his life there with a great deal of happiness and satisfaction. It has been said that being sent to boarding school in England at the age of eight, far away from his parents who remained in India, caused him to lose all his reference points and obliged him to build others for himself, as best he could, in the strongest sense of the expression. All this is no doubt true.
It has been said that his involvement as an officer in His Majesty’s army in the battle of the Ardennes during the First World War, at Ypres, contributed more particularly in forging a character of being “brave – only just having escaped being branded with a cross, bronze, for valour; wooden to mark the spot where my body lay”! (Bion, 1985, p. 19)!
But Bion cannot be reduced to the sum of his experiences. His analyses and, above all, his “retrospective thoughts” that he was able to derive from them, considerably increased his capacities for reflection and his own elaborations touching on the “ways” of approaching the emergence of thoughts in the mind. Bion interests us – insofar as we are analysts – because he makes us, as it were, participate in the constant growth of his fields of thought.
Bion is both a rigorous thinker who seeks through his “formulas” with a mathematical air about them to make psychoanalysis a transmissible “science” thanks to concepts endowed with a strong dose of abstraction, and a “dreamer” who strives to situate himself as closely as possible to experience insofar as “fantasy” allows us to approach it, when, for example, he develops the idea that it is the sensations experienced by a baby that we see reappearing in the form, transformed, to be sure, of certain psychic mechanisms. He writes, for example, “We may be dealing with things which are so slight as to be virtually imperceptible, but which are so real that they could destroy us almost without our being aware of it” (Bion, 1987, p. 320).
I will try to show in the following pages that it was due to his classical analytic training – and not just psychiatric – that Bion was able to carry out the experiments that initially led him to work in groups, to which I would add that it is psychoanalysis, ultimately, that has greatly benefited from the inventive, highly surprising, and constantly unexpected aspects that Bion brought to it. In other words, it was thanks to the broad spectrum of his training as a psychiatric doctor in Her Majesty’s army, and then as a psychoanalyst “knighted”, so to speak, by the other queen at the time, namely Melanie Klein, and to his professional experiences faithful to a strict albeit varied Freudian orthodoxy, as well as to the interested and curious company of his colleagues, that Bion was able to forge for himself a vision of what psychoanalysts “are” (and “do”), irrespective of the degree of completion of their own analyses.
With Bion, to a certain extent, two debates are played out again. The first concerns the “scientificity” of psychoanalysis – I will come back to this when the time comes to evoke the influence exerted on him by the philosophers, mathematicians, and physicists of the Vienna Circle, posing a certain number of questions concerning the relationship between the individual and the reality of his environment (physical and linguistic). The other debate concerns the question of the “transformations” that occur in the mind so that, starting from a sensation, work is produced – or is not produced – work, in any case, that is inevitable as soon as we consider that it is possible to translate somatic and emotional “experiences” into a language that is intelligible to the mind. This language is assumed to be common to all human beings and to be at the basis of all idioms, even if this language, like all languages, has its source in the body. It is assumed that only the intellectual adepts of the human species reflect on what is universal in all human beings (see David-Ménard, 1997), but nothing proves that deer do not do as much! And Bion is one of the adepts of this kind of thinking; for, in reality, we don’t know anything about it, even today!
A clinician first and foremost
Where Bion is concerned, nothing is quite like reading his work directly, written with as much precision as it is ambiguity, and the present book is no exception. My constantly renewed interest in exploring his books, irrespective of the “period” to which they belong, convinced me that I was dealing with one of the most demanding and rigorous thinkers in his domain – psychoanalysis – a conviction reinforced by the precision and richness of the vocabulary and concepts that he uses to help his readers understand his line of reasoning. Bion constantly tracks down approximations and is scrupulously painstaking in the choice of the terms that he uses as well as in clarifying the sense that he ascribes to them. This is the case, for example, for the terms “function”, “link”, “valency”, “emotion”, “factor”, “thought”, “element”, “selected fact”, “constant conjunction”, and “intuition” – all usual terms, which, in the context of psychoanalysis as Bion conceives it, both retain the meaning of their original domain or discipline and correspond to the designation that they may have in the field he establishes (which goes beyond the psychoanalytic universe). On each occasion, he clarifies the reasons why he is using such and such a term and the meaning he is giving to it.
Bion was first and foremost a clinician, and it was from this activity that he derived all the questions which he subsequently tried to elucidate in the light of his reflections.
Frances Tustin (1981), who was in analysis with him, writes: “I have often been asked whether Dr Bion talked in the somewhat inscrutable, oracular way in which he sometimes wrote. I can say very firmly that this was not so. He was always brief, to the point, and extremely simple and clear” (p. 175). She adds that Bion constantly showed “incisive insight, patience and persistence” and a...
