Snapshots of the Work of W. R .Bion

 

Selected Contributions from the International Centennial Conference on the Work of W. R. Bion, Turin, July 1997’ Karnac Books.


Bion’s “Transformations in ‘O’” and the concept of the ‘transcendent position” by James Grotstein

In the title of this chapter, I suggest that Bion’s concept of O transcends Klein’s concept of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions as well as preceding and succeeding them. I could also have said that it goes beyond not only Freud’s pleasure principle but also his and Klein’s notion of the death instinct, each of which my thesis renders as signifying mediators of O, thereby making  O the ultimate, though unknowable, signified. From another perspective one can think of O as analogous to the ‘dark matter’, that amorphous mass that his hidden in our universe, which thoroughly perfuses it. It also summons concepts of  pure ontology for psychoanalysis, especially the idea of Ananke (Greek: ‘Necessity’ or ‘Fate’; Ricoeur, 1970), Lacan’s (1966)concept of the Register of the Real, and Peirces’s (1931) concept of ‘brute reality’. I believe that the concept of O transforms all existing psychoanalytic theories ( e. g. the pleasure principle, the death instinct, and the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions) into veritable psychoanalytic manic defenses against the unknown, unknowable, ineffable, inscrutable, ontological experience of ultimate being, what Bion terms ‘Absolute Truth, Ultimate Reality’. It is beyond words, beyond contemplation, beyond knowing, and it always remains ‘beyond’ in dimensions forever unreachable by man.

Furthermore, I believe that Bion’s O interfaces with Heidegger’s concept of ‘Being’. Although Bion never referred to the works of Lacan, Sartre, or Heidegger, I believe that he was attempting to position psychoanalytic thinking away from its ontic (deterministic, scientific) roots and recast it in an ontological perspective. While I shall endeavor to explicate the concept of transcendence to encompass Bion’s endeavor, this very term is misleading if one does not glean that the intrinsic aim of psychoanalysis is to help the analysand transcend the veils of illusion that obtrude between him and the other and between him and his Being-in-itself - his ‘Dasein’ as well as his desires. Thus, the seeming ‘beyondness’ of transcendence signifies one’s being just beyond the veil of defensiveness on one’s way to the unknown that is immediately near, both inside and out. In other words, what we commonly call reality itself is an illusion that disguises the Real (O). . . .

My own views (and by association, Bion’s) differ somewhat from Kant’s. In his Prolegomena (1783) he archly responded to a critic of the first edition of his Critique of Pure Reason (1781). After first quoting an unnamed critic’s evaluation of his work, ‘This work [Kant’s] is a system of of transcendent  ( or as he translates it, of higher) Idealism’ , Kant then states in a footnote:

‘By no means ‘higher’. High towers, and metaphysically great men resembling them, round both of which there is commonly much wind, are not for me. My place is in the fruitful bathos, the bottom-land of experience; and the word transcendental, the meaning of which is so often explained by me but not once grasped by my reviewer . . .does not signify something passing beyond all experience, but something that indeed precedes it a priori, but that is intended simply to make cognition of experience possible. If these conceptions overstep experience, their employment is termed transcendent, a word which must be distinguished from transcendental, the later being limited to immanent use, that is, experience.’

My reconciliation between my views as well as those I assume to be Bion’s  and Kant’s with regard to the ‘transcendent’ as ‘something passing beyond all experience’ is that O is not experienced per se - that is, as an object of experience. O, like the God of Moses in Exodus (‘I am that I am’) is the subject, something with which one can only subjectively resonate. . . .

The concept of the transcendent position does not constitute a whimsical journey into lofty, ethereal abandon, nor does it necessarily validate religion, spirituality, or the belief in God, except as the need by humans whereby they attempt to close the maw of the ineffable with an all-encompassing name. It is not in the oeuvre of Somerset Maugham’s Larry Darrel, who sought ‘enlightenment’ atop the Himalayas as in the Razor’s Edge. In other words, it is not a blissful ‘autistic enclave.’ O is one’s reality without pretense or distortion. This reality can be a symptom, the pain of viewing beautiful autumn leaves, gazing upon the mysterious Mona Lisa, contemplating the horror of Ypres, trying to remember Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Auschwitz, or Vietnam, or resting comfortably beside one’s mate trying to contemplate the exquisiteness and ineffability of the moment. . . .

What is Thinking by Paulo Cesar Sandler

Freud-like, Bion was seemingly able to integrate some most outstanding contributions stemming from the Renaissance and from the Enlightenment and Romantic periods with psychoanalysis, furthering the development of the knowledge of ‘facts as they really are’’  (Bion often quotes this phrase of Samuel Johnson) and the study of the vicissitudes, obstacles, and difficulties created by the same human being in order not to know what ‘the facts really are’: what Bion calls the –K field  transformations, such as rigid, projective, and in hallucinosis. Knowing and thinking are inseparable from the perception of reality and its vicissitudes.

Freud unburied the relevance of the Oedipal; triangle– in itself an antithetical pair followed by synthesis- in the same way he realized the existence of a principle. Poets such as Shakespeare and Goethe were able to convey it implicitly in poetic form; musicians such as Bach and Beethoven, in a musical form. For lack of a better name Freud called this principle the “Reality Principle” and bestowed on a practical use on it. Its hallmark is a ‘frustration factor’. This realization was doomed to remain stubbornly outside the reach of Science, whose silly infancy insists of being ‘positive’ –that is , pleasure seeking, satisfaction fulfilling. The ‘no-breast’ aspect of reality was and is continuously denied. ‘I think’, ‘I know’, “I discovered”, ‘I have”, ‘The solution’ seemed to be preferable to ‘I think that I think’, ‘I am and I am also not” (to put up with paradox), ‘I know and I do not know’, ‘I think and I hallucinate’, ‘I hate and I love.’. When once experiences what ‘No’ is all about, one may realize – in oneself- the evolving ‘Yes’. Psychoanalysis describes the names of our lies, through the formulation of names such as ‘transference’, narcissism’, ‘projective identification’, among many others. Perception of those lies may be a way for the person to become ‘what he or she is in reality’ as Nietzsche, Freud, and Bion insisted many times. The fact that psychic reality comprises psychic non-reality still befuddles many authors. . .


Searching for Bion in Cogitations by Franco Borgogna & Silvio Arrigo Merciai

But what is the tragedy that emerges in  Bion’s Cogitations?  Simply that it could let us realize with great lucidity how in the name of some supposed truth an institution may go so far as to kill the individual in all his uniqueness and singularity – yet, despite this awareness, that he remains roped to and duped by the very approach  he condemns. At many points in Cogitations, Bion, let it be said, unmasks a ‘social-ism’ that in an almost delusional fashion asks the individual to sacrifice himself for the sake of the group, while courageously re-evaluating ‘narciss-ism’ as a possible healthy response to murderous group pressures, if not as a potential bid for life and freedom, particularly when the subject is banished, uprooted, and forced into exile.

 

Thus during the period covered by Cogitations Bion appears as a tragic hero, caught up in a struggle for identity that is ultimately doomed to failure because he is still bound to the breast that fed him and first awakened in him the passion for analysis: that of Melanie Klein and her theoretical edifice, to which he looks uncritically and whose thesis he bends, with surprising and uncommon ingenuousness, in the shape of truth with a capital T.

 

 It is in this sense, therefore, in Bion’s wavering between ‘knowledge’ and ‘non-knowledge’, between listening to the patient’s and his own voice and that of the ‘group’, that it seems to us that in Cogitations the institution and its dogma finally gets the better of him. For he sacrifices or at least dodges the issues of reverie and dream- work alpha which, in theory at least, had suggested mating in the encounter with the confused and uncertain beast that lurks in each of us, to emit perhaps a simple grunt heralding a future individual voice, one that would no longer be bond by the mortifying chains that assail the subjectivity of any operation of thinking, however humble or inchoate.


The Primordial Mind and the Work of the Negative by Andre Green

Thinking is often confused with psychic activity. Freud, like Bion, was interested in that difference – or instance, when he said that drives were rooted in the somatic, though they are already primitive psychic activity ‘in a form unknown to us’. Can we say ‘unthinkable’? There surely is a difference compared with what we would have to say about thinking . The conclusion is that we have to distinguish between psychic events, which have to be understood as rooted in the body, thoughts without a thinker, which are very close to this primitive psychic activity, and thinking, which has to be thought by a thinker and therefore can be communicated to another thinker. Bion’s hypothesis that emotional experience is the matrix of the mind is related to the closeness of the thoughts without a thinker to models drawn from bodily activity. Thinking is the digestion of the mind.

Frances Tustin, who was analyzed by Bion and has worked with autistic patients, has convincingly shown this, reporting a session. The price that must be paid for thinking is that the thinker is almost necessarily a liar. Bion applied this conclusion to himself. The  thinker who had constructed this sophisticated theory inevitably falsified  the experience . . .

To some extent all knowledge is a loss of absolute truth compared to the formless infinite. [in so far as thinking provides consolation it diverges from the truth]. Hence Keat’s negative capability: another figure of negativity. Bion advocates an attitude where ‘man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without irritable reaching after facts and reason’ (Keats, 1817) Patients take refuge in evacuation  or omniscience; analysts have ready-made answers. I remember how struck Bion was when I quoted Maurice Blanchot’s sentence La réponse est le malheur de la question [ the answer is the misfortune of the question] He used that phrase many times.