Reading Bion

Rudi Vermote

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780415413336
• eBook ISBN: 9780429959530
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Wilfred R. Bion is considered a ground-breaking psychoanalyst. His thinking is rooted in Freud and Klein from where it takes an original flight. Reading Bion shows the evolution of his seminal insights in psychic functioning and puts them in a wider context.

Rudi Vermote integrates a chronological close reading and discussion of Bion's texts, with a comprehensive approach of his major concepts. The book is divided in two main parts:

1. Transformation in Knowledge: Bion's odyssey to understand psychic processing or the mind
2. Transformation in O: in which Bion reinterprets his former concepts from the dimension of the unknown and unknowable

The running text is put against a background of biographical data and scientific, artistic and philosophical influences on his work, which are highlighted in boxes and separate chapters. Bion's concepts are important for anyone dealing with the mind. His ideas have an ongoing deep impact on psychoanalysis, psychotherapy and psychopathology. His concepts help to understand psychic change, creativity, individual psychodynamics and small and large-group phenomena. The discovery of their value for studies on art, literature, sociology, religion, economics has just begun.

Reading Bion starts from the very beginning so that it is instructive for people who are new to his work, but the close reading and background information make it a meaningful companion for experienced psychoanalysts and psychotherapists studying his work.

Part I

BEFORE THE CAESURA

Transformations in Knowledge

1	BIOGRAPHY, 1897–1966

Leaving India at the age of eight and going through the British public school system on his own left its mark on the young Bion. When he was 19 he volunteered to fight in the Great War. His war experiences would have a lasting influence on his attitude and his theory. He wrote a short factual report of the horrors he experienced during and shortly after the war (Bion 1997) and a long biographical account in later life (Bion 1982). The autobiographical writings are typical of Bion’s approach in his later work and they will therefore be discussed in chronological order in Part II of this book.

Immediately after the war Bion went to Oxford to study history at Queen’s College. In 1922 he accepted a position as a teacher at his former school, Bishop’s Stortford College. In spite of his popularity, Bion left the school rather abruptly after an unpleasant incident with a student’s mother. After Bion had rather awkwardly invited her for tea, she accused him of making advances to her son (Bion 1982). Bion clearly indicates that the mother’s accusations were groundless and although the school investigation failed to substantiate the mother’s accusations, Bion decided to leave at the end of the term (Bion 1985: 16–17). Realizing that he was not cut out to be a schoolteacher, and aiming at becoming a psychoanalyst, he went on to do medical training at University College London, where he felt more at home than in Oxford. In London, he was taken under the wing of Sir Jack Drummond, a distinguished biochemist, who was murdered in 1952 in France in a notorious criminal case (Bion 1985: 46). At the hospital, Bion was impressed by the surgical skills of Wilfred Trotter (Bion 1985: 37–39). Trotter’s work on the herd instinct may have influenced the young Bion, although he does not acknowledge this in his autobiography and bibliography (see Box 1.3).

At around this time, Bion had his first experience of psychotherapy with Dr J.A. Hadfield. Although he was a war hero, Bion wrote of himself as very insecure and sexually immature at that time, and described how he felt extremely hurt and angry when a beautiful girl who he started to date after she sent him wild roses, and to whom he proposed, left him without explanation for someone else (Bion 1985: 28–33). Bion’s trust in his therapist was shaken when Dr Hadfield made clear his expectation that he would receive a fee from Bion for referring patients to him, a frowned-upon practice known as ‘fee-splitting’ (Bion 1985: 42–43). Although Bion won a gold medal for surgery (to which he referred with the same ironic ambivalence as his war medals) he nevertheless opted for psychoanalysis, his initial choice. After receiving his medical degree, he began work at the Tavistock Clinic in 1933. The Tavistock Clinic was rapidly growing as a treatment and training centre. It was staffed by part-time doctors who were able to offer low-fee therapy to people with a low income because they were allowed to see patients privately at the same time. His psychotherapist Dr Hadfield was a training director and mentor at the Tavistock. He advocated a kind of reductive analysis, explicitly not working with transference but linking current symptoms through a kind of forced fantasy to specific incidents in the past (Dicks 1970 in Miller 2014). Bion therefore ironically called him ‘my “Feel it in the Past” (FiP) analyst’ because of his tendency to reduce everything to past trauma, including recent grief or hurtful events (Bion 1985: 34), like an unhappy love affair. Later numerous Hadfieldians including Dicks, Bion and Geoffrey Thompson formed a ‘rebel’ group who went on to formal training at the Institute of Psychoanalysis (Dicks 1970: in Miller 2014). Towards the end of his apprenticeship at the Tavistock, in 1937, he was the first psychiatrist of the clinic to go into psychoanalysis with John Rickman (see Box 2.1).

Initially, Bion worked for some years with Dr Hadfield (Trist 1985). Bion had a part-time practice in Central London in ‘a prestigious but sordid room’ on Harley Street, where Rickman, Trotter and most doctors of the Tavistock Clinic had their offices (Bion 1985: 42). Meanwhile, he was also working at the Portman Clinic, then an independent centre which specialized in those with sexual perversions, committing crimes and delinquency. It is now connected with the Tavistock Clinic.

World War II

Bion’s analysis with Rickman ended in September 1939 (Bléandonu 1994). Bion rejoined the army in 1940.

In the RBMC (Royal British Medical Corps), psychiatrists had a double task: on the one hand, to find better means for selection of soldiers, on the other hand, to provide therapy for soldiers suffering from war neurosis, shell-shock, trauma, etc and to investigate procedures to rehabilitate soldiers back into the army or into civilian life more efficiently. Bion started working with shell-shocked and traumatized soldiers at Craigmile Bottom Hospital. Soon, he was appointed as ‘Command psychiatrist’ for the Western Command, i.e. a specialist adviser to other medical officers and a consultant for all patients, at the David Hume Military Hospital in Chester.

In 1941 Bion was suddenly transferred from Western Command to Area Command in York. There, he was assigned to work on psychological selection tests for the army. In this context, he proposed his ‘Leaderless Group project’ to replace the lengthy individual tests by a two-and-a-half-hour-long group experiment. The project is described at some length by his collaborator and friend at the time, Eric Trist (1985), and by J.D. Sutherland (1985). Putting the recruits together in a leaderless group allowed observing army officials and medical staff to assess the candidates’ attempts to organize the group from within and to judge their suitability for army life. The main focus was to ensure that good leaders were selected, because according to Bion’s rationale ‘the social role and “adaptability to persons” was central to the officer’s job’ (Harrison 2000: 91).

I can recall vividly how struck I was by the simplicity of the notion, and yet what a stroke of genius it was to create in this way a living manifest sample of personal relationships in a situation in which the conflict between self-interest and a concern for others was an active reality.

(Sutherland 1985: 50)

With Rickman, Bion wrote a report for the army’s psychiatric service in order to improve the situation in the medical hospitals, proposing to treat neurosis through group therapy. This would eventually lead to the Northfield experiments. Although he was respected by army officials because of his heroism in World War I, Bion was not appointed as head of the Research and Training Centre. The lack of recognition may have been due to a growing hostility within the army to psychiatry in general and certainly to Bion’s revolutionary experiments, which were considered to be potentially subversive or even communist-inspired (Bléandonu 1994: 59).

After he was fired as Command psychiatrist without any forewarning or explanation (Trist 1985: 11), Bion asked to be transferred to the Northfield Military Hospital in Birmingham, where he joined his friend Rickman (see Box 2.1) and was put in charge of the Military Training Wing. Together they initiated a series of experiments with group therapy designed to treat war neurosis, known as the Northfield experiments. In his autobiography, Bion was rather sarcastic about this (Bion 1985: 50) (see Box 1.1).

Box 1.1 The Northfield Experiments

At Hollymoor Hospital, Northfield, Birmingham, a rehabilitation clinic for soldiers with war neuroses, two experiments were conducted. As Harrison points out, ‘Foulkes, Bion, Rickman, Main and Bridger showed how the enemy could be defeated, but failed to convince their superiors’ (Harrison 2000: 182). Indeed, these experiments were conducted not only because of the need for mass treatment of war neuroses, but also because these pioneers had psychological insights into how to make army life more human and effective. They are regarded as the basis of group therapy and of the therapeutic communities.

The first Northfield experiment was conducted by Bion and Rickman in 1942–1943. They tried to bring hospital functioning closer to the functioning of a military unit by putting the patients together in small groups. In these groups, they did not try to ‘steer the discourse when handling the groups’, but rather focused on the actual dynamics of the group (Harrison 2000: 187). Bion’s vision was rooted in his leaderless group experiment in selecting officers. Bion took a scientific approach. He wanted to focus on the management of problems in interpersonal relations within a group, in order to allow group members to gain some distance from their situation and to gain understanding of their problems. He reorganized the training wing of about 100–200 patients, imposing strict discipline, with a daily parade to make announcements, and by creating different work groups.

While the initiative initially stirred a lot of discussion in the group, Bion soon observed that only 20% of the residents did all the work while the others shirked their duties. In order to address this problem, he did not rely on an authoritarian or moralistic approach but told the group members to study the organization of the work with scientific seriousness and to come up with their own solutions for the problems. The group, which was like both society and individuals in its unwillingness to deal with psychological distress, had first to be made aware that the nature of the distress was psychological, otherwise they would not have been able to use their energy for self-cure. Bion did not suggest practical solutions until the psychological dynamics had become clear and could be discussed.

Although the situation on the wards improved after a month and the number of patients that were able to return to their duties as soldiers indicated the experiment’s dramatic success (Bridger 2005), it was abandoned after six weeks. Different accounts are given of the abandonment of this first experiment. Bion and Rickman failed to convince their rigid commanding officer Pearce, who felt that their method was too Freudian and too slow (Harrison 2000: 191). As a result, the structure was prematurely closed down after an unexpected supervision at night where the military staff discovered that the wing was a mess. The floor of the cinema hall was covered with newspapers and condoms (de Mare 1985).

One of the collaborators at Northfield, Bridger, has a somewhat different analysis. On the one hand, he points out that there were also differences in approach between Bion, Rickman and other staff members such as Foulkes and Bierer (who continued the second experiment in which Bion did not take part). Secondly, Bridger also suggests that Bion’s authority problem, also evident in his writings about his experiences as a soldier, may have played a part. According to Bridger, ‘he neglected – and was indeed somewhat disparaging of – the more immediate environments of the hospital and traditional reactions of the bureaucratic aspects of the military machine’ (Bridger 1985: 97). Moreover, Bion was not prepared to compromise. Thirty-five years later, Bion still considered the experience a betrayal and resented his superiors (Bléandonu 1984: 62–63). Accounts of the experiment by Bion can be found in a paper for the Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic (1946) and in the first paper of Experiences in Groups (1961). Analyses of both Northfield experiments (and the differences between them) are found in Pines (1985), which collects first-hand observations by collaborators of Bion at the time and in Harrison (2000), who describes the relationship between psychiatry and the army from a more sociological perspective.

Early in World War II, probably while socializing with other officers, Bion got to know the well-known actress Betty Jardine (see Box 1.2). They married during the war in about 1943. Trist, his friend, described Bion’s first wife as a warm, gifted, mature person, who matched him perfectly. Their presence as a couple, the proud, athletic and heroic officer and the beautiful actress, attracted envious looks. Bion does not write a great deal about this marriage in his autobiography, but he and his wife seem to have been fairly happy and active in this period. Bion started writing his paper a small, little-known – in Harrison’s (2000: 53) view, not very well written – article on the ‘war of nerves’ for a summary of military psychiatry (Bion 1940). Betty became pregnant. Bion accepted a new project, the 21st Army Corps, for which Bion seems to have been Montgomery’s first choice (Bléandonu 1984: 64). It had been found that it was better to treat emotional disturbances of soldiers close to the unit, and Bion wanted to use his group method for this. Therefore, he was in Normandy when he was informed that Betty had given birth to a baby daughter, Parthenope, on 28 February 1945. Betty died of a pulmonary embolism three days after giving birth. It took the army a week to locate Bion. In his autobiography, he describes his dissociated reaction to the news, showing how traumatized he was by it. (‘The long-distance call from Brussels to the War office brought the reply “Can you hear me? The baby is very feeble. Can you hear me?” “Yes, yes get on the blast with it, I’m not deaf”. “Betty died last Wednesday”. “Thank you very much. No, no, not at all. I can arrange”’ (Bion 1985: 27). He describes how when he returned to London, he found himself alone with a baby daughter who he wanted to care for himself, an insecure future and £8,000 left (equivalent to £250,000 today), which he and Betty had saved.

Box 1.2 Betty Jardine

Elisabeth Kittrick Jardine, alias Betty Jardine (born Cheshire, England, 1904, died 28 February 1945), started out as an actress in Manchester in 1926, staying with the sa...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Reading Bion
• The New Library of Psychoanalysis Teaching Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Boxes
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Before the Caesura: Transformations in Knowledge
• Part II After the Caesura: Transformations in O
• Conclusion
• Addenda
• References
• Index