Recollections of Bion’s IPTAR Lectures

by William Fried

In the fall of 1977, The Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) in New York City, contracted with W.R. Bion to deliver a set of lectures to its members and others. They would take place over the course of five consecutive days. Under the same auspices, clinicians might also schedule individual supervision or consultation sessions with Bion. Several did.

Thirty-seven years later, on November 22, 2014, a small group of IPTAR members who had attended Bion’s lectures gathered to share their recollections of the experience with an audience of analysts and other Bionians at a conference held in New York City for the purpose of recalling and reviewing Bion’s clinical seminars in Los Angeles and New York. I was one of the presenters. The essay that follows was my contribution.

Bion’s lectures had been arranged by Saul Tuttman, who was president of IPTAR at the time. He was an analyst, psychologist and psychiatrist whose principal interests, so far as I can recall, were in group therapy. It was perhaps this connection that led him to Bion who was not so well known then as he has since become.

Although there must have been a program committee that planned the event, I don’t know who served on it but I doubt they received much gratitude for their efforts after the fact. At the time, IPTAR seemed to be in a transitional phase in which power, prestige, and leadership passed from the so-called “founding mothers” to a coalition of relatively prominent Freudian, male analysts led by Bertram Freedman and a group of his colleagues.

The schedule of Bion’s visit called for lectures on each of the five weekdays. The participants could register either for days 1,3, and 5, or 2 and 4. I think I signed up for 2 and 4, but the transcript shows that someone made a comment during lecture 5 that sounded suspiciously like one I would have thought of. It was a quotation from Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Kahn” in response to Bion’s quoting from Paul Valerie to the effect that

...it is assumed that the poet is a person who is undisciplined, disordered goes into a rhapsodic state and emerges, wakes up with a poem in his mind as the outcome of an undisciplined, intoxicated--literally and meta-phorically--state of mind. Valerie believed that, on the contrary, the poet is much nearer to an algebraic mathematician than to an intoxicated individual.

What I, or someone who sounded like me, interpolated, was, “Coleridge would say, ‘Weave a circle round him thrice,’ in the hope of refuting Bion and Valerie on at least two counts: first that, since “Kubla Khan” was composed in an opium dream, some poets sometimes produce poems in an intoxicated state; second, the relevant passage from the poem reads,

And all should cry Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread
For he on honey-dew hath fed
And drunk the milk of paradise.

which strongly suggests that the poet in question is of Dionysian, not Apollonian persuasion. Moreover, whoever made the comment would certainly have hoped and assumed that Bion, whose literary erudition was well known, would recognize the quotation and respond to it. Alas, the transcript shows that he did not, although he did later insert a footnote specifying that the quote was from Coleridge. To round off this digression then, if it was I who made the comment, I must have attended the 5th lecture in addition to the earlier two for which I had registered.

At a remove of thirty-seven years, the overwhelming majority of the events are present in my memory as general impressions picked rather clean of the details that add vividness and verisimilitude to reportage. What I am most certain of, however, is that the atmosphere in the room was anxious from the start as a function of the audience’s preconceptions regarding Bion’s discourse which, as the transcript will attest was abstruse, difficult and, as it seemed to me. densely intellectualized. This effect only became more pronounced within and between sessions as many participants felt a mounting frustration with Bion’s apparent failure either to meet their initial expectations or to respond to their questions in a way that they might find satisfying.

Many in the room seemed familiar with at least some of Bion’s writings and some tried to get him to address the ideas he’d written about. Most of these efforts failed, however, because Bion’s responses to questions tended to be experienced as evasions or non-sequiturs. I think that most of the audience came expecting a format and approach that was and remains typical for psychoanalytic conferences, in which the presenter reads a prepared paper that sets forth certain of her views and is usually replete with clinical material that illustrates the author’s theses. This is ordinarily followed by a Q & A period when the participants have the opportunity to clarify, challenge, and contribute. Invariably, a presenter will provoke a wide variety of reactions in an audience of psychoanalysts, almost all of which create a tension for release as verbalization. This tension is present to varying degrees in everyone in attendance, whether or not they are quick enough to be called on or up to the microphone. As a result, some approach the speaker after the Q & A, some whisper their remarks to their neighbors, and still others discharge the tension in a more delayed fashion that night or the day after.

If what I have just described is accurate for most psychoanalytic presentations, it was intensified by many degrees as a result of Bion’s enigmatic, elliptical, and ambiguous utterance. For Bion spoke spontaneously, without a written text or notes. His remarks often seemed associative rather than logical, and his ideas were at times circumstantial. Those who wished for relevant, coherent answers to their questions showed their disappointment in their body language and, to an increasing extent, in their vocal expressions of frustration. Though he implied that he sympathized with their irritation, he did nothing to relieve it.

It may be instructive, at this point, to draw upon some observations of the occasion made by Saul Tuttman in something he wrote several years later:

I came to know Bion (1959) and his wife quite well when I invited them to New York for the first time to deliver lectures and conduct seminars, although I found Bion quite extreme in his reaction to the neediness of the group members who, in the study group I had organized for the occasion, were relatively mature professionals in the field. The participants became frustrated and in fact enraged at his unwillingness to “feed” them. Personally, I found his approach very interesting, but the extreme position of group leader and group members impressed me as unnecessarily frustrating to all, although he certainly made his point in that way as to how needy and angry those who feel like neglected children can be. (p.293)

Among those most exercised were several of the senior women analysts to whom I referred previously as “the founding mothers.” More outspoken than most of them was Susan Deri who, ironically enough, had been Saul Tuttman’s first and well loved analyst.

Some of the participants dealt with the situation by adopting, either consciously or unconsciously, a stilted version of Bion’s convoluted syntax in addressing him. Others flatly declared their puzzlement and still others seemed to suspend their critical inclinations for what they professed was the sheer pleasure of listening to Bion’s improvisations. Many of them tended to explain their behavior with the rationale that their own original ideas would be stimulated and provoked by this process.

One aspect of Bion’s discourse that seemed especially vexing to many in the audience was his repeatedly emphasizing how little we know, and how risky it might be to entertain any certainties about psychoanalysis. A significant segment of the attendees felt this to be an undermining of their power and authority as psychoanalysts, as though the great effort they’d exerted studying and mastering theory and technique, and their long experience, were all being declared of little value in the face of the tasks at hand. And if this were not sufficiently chastening, the Jeremiah who subjected them to it categorically refused to comfort them by substituting something for what he was taking away.

This procedure was familiar to me and others who had attended the International Conference on Borderline Disorders at the Menninger Foundation in 1976, where Bion had been the last speaker. His presentation on emotional turbulence provoked consternation among the audience because of its radical divergence from the papers that preceded it, the great majority of which were based on empirical and clinical foundations, its startling initial exploration of the phrase “bloody cunt,” and its meandering discussion of intrauterine experience. Moreover, anyone who had read Bion’s Experiences in Groups, would have known of his preference for indirection from his description of the way he abdicated leadership of the therapy groups for which he was nominally responsible. It would not be far fetched to assume that he applied the same principle to the IPTAR group; that is, that he refused either to lead it or to relinquish his position as the invited “speaker.” He explained this method as a procedure for inducing thought in his audience. To quote from Francesca Bion’s Preface to the transcript of the New York Lectures,

He believed that “La reponse est le malheur de la question”; both in his professional and his private life problems stimulated in him thought and discussion—never answers. His replies—more correctly, counter contributions—were, in spite of their apparent irrelevance, an extension of the questions. His point of view is best illustrated in his own words: “I don’t know the answers to these questions—I wouldn’t tell you if I did. I think it is important for you to find out for yourselves” “I try to give you a chance to fill the gap left by me” “I don’t think that my explanation matters.” (Preface)

Bion asserts here, and in many other places, that he fails to answer questions because he wants people to think for themselves. I have written that he wanted people to be original, to accomplish transformations in O, not merely in K, to be creative. He also said that he wanted people to attain to truth. What the IPTAR audience resented was that he had made all of these stipulations for them a priori, without their permission or participation. The final quotation in Francesca Bion’s preface reads,

“When I feel a pressure—I’d better get prepared in case you ask me some questions —I say ‘To Hell with it, I’m not going to look up this stuff in Freud or anywhere else, or even in my past statement—I’ll put up with it.’ But of course I am asking you to put up with it too.”

Perhaps there was an implicit contract between Saul Tuttman and Bion that permitted him to assume this or perhaps he assumed that anyone who asked him to come and lecture was thereby giving him license to do what he did. The question abuts a more general one regarding both a speaker’s responsibility to ascertain what his audience might expect of him and an analyst’s to determine what his patient expects or wishes for from the treatment. In both cases, conscious and unconscious components must be taken into account.

A significant proportion of the IPTAR Seminars was focused on the ideas Bion had put forth in “Notes on Memory and Desire,” a short, aphoristic paper. Many of the questions raised by the participants were attempts to get Bion to flesh out and elaborate that which seemed cryptic, compressed, and intriguingly obscure in the paper. At the same time as his oblique responses gave grudging but fleeting acknowledgement to the questions to which they were superficially directed, they often created further obscurity. It is my belief that Bion did this deliberately not merely to induce thought in his audience but because he wanted to shock them out of what he saw as a kind of smug self satisfaction with their status and knowledge-base as analysts. Being Bion, he could scarcely have ignored the models of his illustrious predecessors and rivals who’d been invited to present their views to new audiences: Jesus, who said “Do not think that I came to bring peace on earth: I did not come to bring peace but a sword;” and Freud, who upon arriving in New York, commented to Jung, “They don’t realize that we are bringing them the plague.”

I believe Bion thought of himself as an avatar of the messianic tradition, on the one hand and on the other, that of the conquistador. As both, he appropriated the license to say what he wanted to, not what people wanted to hear.

Having just violated the first part of Bion’s admonition to eschew memory and desire, I look forward both to the accounts of my partners in crime, and to the contributions, today, of those who will certainly violate the second part.

The reader may have observed that my own reflections here have clearly violated Bion’s admonition to eschew memory; whether they also reflect a failure to have banished desire is for you, alone, to judge.

REFERENCES

Tuttman, S. (1996). Family influences. In Reppen, J. (Ed), Why I became a psychotherapist  (pp. 283-295). Northwale, New Jersey, London: Jason Aronson, Inc.

CONTRIBUTOR

William Fried, Ph.D., FIPA is a psychologist and psychoanalyst who practices in New York City. He was formerly the associate director of psychiatry residency training and the director of training and education at the Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York. Dr. Fried has published papers on clinical psychoanalysis, group therapy, applied psychoanalysis, mental health education and training, and has written essays for the exhibits of prominent artists. His book, Critical Flicker Fusion: Psychoanalysis at the movies was published by Karnac in 2016.