The Clinical Thinking of Wilfred Bion
A book by Joan and Neville Symington.
Bion: Think and speak from your own heart and mind.
The authors clearly admire Bion, almost embarrassingly so.
Reading this book on a flight, while in a left aisle seat. My fellow passengers on the left and right are both nail- and cuticle-biters, and I am thinking about how being confined on a long flight with strangers is a such a strong trigger for self-soothing behavior.
“Bion’s concern is the application of thought to emotional experience. The question then arises: What is it that triggers emotional experience?’ And his answer is: ‘An emotional experience cannot be conceived of in isolation from a relationship’.” (27)
“Bion reduces the links between human beings to Love (L), Hate (H), and Knowledge (K).” (27)
Learning the terminology: given his paper “Attacks on Linking”, his talk of attempts to destroy links between objects, and the Kleinian equation of objects with people, an attack on linking is an attempt to destroy one’s relationships with others.
Links are activities. I’m not sure yet what it means to say that K is an activity.
I am on a flight (from Denver to NYC) and it occurred to me that I find the people around me overwhelming. I feel as if my emotional boundaries are being violated by strange people doing their things while being so close to me.
Talk about attacks on linking! Fewer links with the people around me, please.
“In an analytic session, the couple may achieve an understanding through the K relationship only to find that it degenerates into having a piece of intellectualized knowledge of it. This reversal occurs as a way of evading the painful realization achieved through the K link.” (28)
Cf Winnicott, ”Fear of Breakdown”:
The analyst and the patient are having a good time colluding in a psycho-neurotic analysis, when in fact the illness is psychotic.
Over and over again the analysing couple are pleased with what they have done together. It was valid, it was clever, it was cosy because of the collusion. But each so-called advance ends in destruction. The patient breaks it up and says: So what? In fact, the advance was not an advance; it was a new example of the analyst's playing the patient's game of postponing the main issue. (104-105)
“The link is a crucial activity in which the emotional experience of learning takes place. Hatred of learning, deriving from the psychotic part of the personality, leads to an attack on the link, resulting in the process being stopped and even reversed.” (28)
Characterizing The Grid as the “essence” of the psychoanalytic process feels to me like a mistake, and counter to Bion’s intent. In Learning from Experience he introduces the abstract symbols L, H, K not as a way of capturing an essence, but as a way of describing phenomena without biasing the writer or reader. Thus, I'd say The Grid is an abstract, informative-but-noncommittal way of describing psychological phenomena.
“Column 2 remains to be described. Interpretations falling in this column are those made by the analyst in order to reassure himself that he understands what is going on but in fact does not. It is a case of the analyst not being able to bear frustration. Column 2 interpretations prevent the emergence of something else which could reveal the truth.” (37-38)
Related to solving problems in general, but in particular to showing people how to solve problems. Tolerating being in a state of ignorance, allowing that frustration to persist while you gather more information and think through it, is enormously valuable in helping people learn.
The authors explain The Grid as a post-session diagnostic tool, but The Grid is also an attempt to capture what I can only call the phenomenology of thought. BIon is trying to understand how people in analysis subjectively have the experiences that shape the psychoanalytic session.
"A beta element evacuation does not only occur in the overtly psychotic; it is a very common occurrence, and when it occurs there is a change in quality observable in the session. The beta element discharge may sound like rubbish, a sticky mess, or a stream of monotonous material that evokes no images.
The beta screen elicits feelings in the analyst rather than thinking which might eventuate in an interpretation, which in turn might get the patient in touch with the reality he hates and fears. The analyst finds himself making a remark that sounds either accusatory or full of banal reassurance, neither of which will get the patient in touch with the nourishment his mind needs, that is, of psychic truth." (66)
This is what I'm getting at: people "get in touch" with "nourishment" in the form of "psychic truth". The language is explicitly tactile.
An important footnote:
Bion is particular in his use of the term 'counter-transference' in that he maintains the early definition of it being the unconscious reactions of the analyst to the patient's material. He says that nothing can be done about this except analysis of the analyst. In speaking of the beta screen he wishes to focus on the contribution of the patient to the analyst's feelings. (66)
"The interaction was now experienced as an emotional reality." (67)
"In his Brazilian Lectures Bion quotes a poem by John Donne to illustrate the transitional area between beta and alpha elements, from something that is not thought to something which is: 'the blood spoke in her cheek ... as if her body thought'. (67)
"In analysis we are attempting to elicit true facts about the personality, so the choice of whether to evade frustration or to modify it is particularly important. Both in analysis and in oneself it is possible to see the moment-by-moment choice to evade frustration or to tolerate it and on this depends our mental health.
If a decision to modify frustration by tolerating it is taken, then instead of discharging the undigested beta elements or reversing alpha function, the unpleasant experience is held in the mind in such a way as might render it meaningful, that is, long enough for alpha function to act on it so that it can be thought. This then has the effect of modifying the feelings of frustration, the thinking process itself, giving some containment of the painful experience, thus making it more bearable." (70)
"Although through common sense everyone 'knows' the difference between love and hate, yet the scientific difference is not known." (87)
This sounds odd: "the scientific difference" between love and hate. I suppose "love" and "hate" are objects of study in psychoanalysis, but I doubt psychoanalysts would say they're investigating the nature of love (hate).
But how can we use those concepts in psychoanalytic theory if we can't define them? Maybe psychoanalytic theory isn't aiming to be "scientific", or least not in the way we have traditionally understood science?