Gary van Breda Student number: 1488123
The Legacy of Wilfred Bion Meaning is revealed by the pattern formed and the light thus trapped – not by the structure, the carved work itself. W.Bion, A Memoir of the Future, Book I.
Bion Thinking about thinking Definitions Symbolic equations: disorder thinking whereby things-in-themselves are confused with what the thing represents (Aguayo, 2009) Group: an aggregation of individuals all in the same state of regression THE GRID Vertical axis/columns: -
B- Elements: the raw unprocessed data of experience. A-Elements: thoughts derived by a function and usable for conscious activity Dream thoughts, dreams, myths: anything expressible in terms of sensuous images,
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commonly visual, including an individual’s narrative. L-Elements: referring to the love subject H- Elements: referring to the hate object MYTHS: the client’s perspective of events, thus the interaction of social (Oedipus)
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and personal opinions. Concept: truth which can be purified by anything, commonly associated with
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emotions that could interfere with its expression. Alpha Function: a process whereby B-elements are transformed into a-elements. Reversal of a function: a process whereby a-elements that have been created by a-
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function, are transformed back into B-elements Contact barrier: permeable separation and correlation of conscious and unconscious
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material. Beta screen: “elicits feelings in the analyst rather than thinking which might eventuate in an interpretation” Key emotional link: primary emotional link that underlies all emotions express in a given session
1.The evolution of Bion's work
Bion's distinguished career began early. At seventeen, he joined the army Tank Regiment to fight in the first World War and was awarded the D.S.O. for his efforts at the battle of Cambria. In 1918 he was demobilised and then went to read Modern History at Oxford where he fell under the influence of the philosopher H.J. Paton who introduced him to the work of Kant and to other philosophers, such as Plato, Hume, and Poincaré This philosophical input was to exert a powerful influence on his later metapsychological formulations. In 1924 he went to study medicine at the University College Hospital in London. By 1929 he was qualified and had achieved the Gold Medal for Clinical Surgery in 1930. Bion's preoccupation with psychology flourished and was strengthened by his association with the John Rickman, a prominent member of the British Psychoanalytic Society, who was to introduce Bion to Melanie Klein and suggest that he be analysed by her.
2.W.R. Bion’s theory of thinking and new techniques in child analysis When W.R Bion died in 1979 his own work, in his lifetime, had changed psychoanalysis. Bion formulated a theory of the origins of thinking. He posited an early first form of thinking, different from, but the basis for the development of later, forms. The first form of thinking strives to know physic qualities, and is the outcome of early emotional events between a mother and her infant, which are decisive for the establishment -or not- of the capacity to think in the infant. Bion’s theory, which carries the interesting implication of the physical world, represents a new understanding of thinking; one of the fundamental links between human beings, link which is fundamental also for the forming and functioning of a normal human mind. It is not easy to convey the rare originality of Bion’s thought. Bion expressed himself in austere propositions.
The question is what does Bion mean by thinking? He does not mean some abstract mental process. His concern is with thinking as a human link- the endeavour to understand, comprehend the reality of, get insight into the nature of, etc., oneself or another. Thinking is an emotional experience of trying to know oneself or someone else. Bion designates this fundamental type of thinking- thinking in the sense of trying to knowthe symbol K. If xKy, then ‘x’ is in the state of getting to know y and y is in a state of getting to be known by x. His theory of thinking is based on the conjecture that pure thoughts exist long before there is a mind to think them. According to his theory, they are evoked from passivity into disruptive energies by the sense organ of consciousness as the latter is stimulated by the events in the external and/or internal world. A mind is needed to think these thoughts. According to Bion (following Freud), the thinking apparatus evolves in response to the pressure of thoughts. This begins when the infant projects his uncontainable fear, discomfort and anxiety into the mother, who acts as a container for the child's fears. The mother is able to receive these projections and modify them so that the infant can introject the fear but in a 'detoxified' form. Bion introduces the terms: 'alpha function', 'alpha elements' and 'beta elements' to designate certain aspects of this process. Alpha function refers to the ability to create meaning out of raw, unprocessed sensory data which he called 'beta elements'. The mother's 'reverie' is her alpha function, and represents the ability to modify her child's tensions and anxieties. The mother and the child form a 'thinking couple' which is the prototype of the thinking process that continues developing throughout life. According to Bion, the alpha function works on the unprocessed beta elements and transforms them into alpha elements in a way similar to a chemical transformation - indeed, Bion compares it to the digestive process, thinking being 'alimentary'. The 'beta elements' (which are fit only for projection and splitting) are so modified that they become absorbable and quite literally, food for thought. The alpha element represents the link between our innate preconceptions (intuitions) and raw experience of the external
world. They form the building-blocks of thought upon which more complex systems can be built. Ultimately, Bion saw the psychotic experience as the result of a failure by the mother to contain her infant's fear of dying. Perhaps the mother was psychotic herself or depressed and unable to contain and modify her child's fears. In this situation, all the infant's anxiety is projected into the mother and instead of being contained and modified by her, the fears are returned to the child but now in a heightened form. The establishment of the alpha function is impeded and thinking seriously impaired. With Bion's model, the task of the analyst treating a psychotic is similar to that of the mother who contains the infant's projections without being destroyed by them. The reestablishment of the patient's ability to tolerate anxiety and frustrations depends on his ability to make use of the analyst's own alpha function. When the patient's own alpha function is re-established and his anxieties contained, then the whole process of normal thinking can begin. This model of the analytic encounter is very similar to that of Winnicott who also saw the analyst as taking over the role of the environment-mother that first failed the child. In 1962 Bion formulated these discoveries theoretically in a paper called ‘A Theory of thinking’ and published his book Learning from Experience, in which he developed his ideas further, expounding them in terms of the symbol K. Bion never tired of acknowledging his dept. both to Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein, particularly to Freud’s Formulations on the two principles of mental functioning (1911) and to Melanie Klein’s theory of early object relations and anxieties, and her concept of projective identification. Bion developed their ideas and also combined them in a new way which formed then the foundation for his own discoveries. Freud described the aim of the pleasure principle as the avoidance and discharge of un-pleasurable tensions and stimuli (Freud 1911). Melanie Klein described something similar to the pleasure principle from a different perspective- an early mechanism of defence which she named projective identification. In her view the young infant defends his ego from intolerable anxiety by splitting off and projecting unwanted impulses, feelings, etc., into this object.
Bion formed his work from psychotic patients, recognised that more quantitative factor was involved. He came to the conclusion that psychotic patients employ a different abnormal type of projective identification. Bion made another discovery. Projective identification, in addition to being a mechanism of defence, was the very first mode of communication between mother infant- it is the origin of thinking. The very young infant communicates his/her feelings, fears, etc. to his mother by projecting them into her for her to reive and know them. During a psychoanalysis projective identification as a mode of communication is an important and distinctive occurrence in a therapy session.
The nine-year-old girl (Case study) While going swiftly in the session, from one activity to the next, a times projected into me the feeling of isolation. I felt the isolation intensively in myself, I contained myself and identified with her projection. Such an event in the session is a primitive transmission from patient to analyst by the means of projective identification, the transference version of the type of early event between mother and baby which forms a K link between them and which allows thinking to develop. According to Bion, the infant discharges unpleasure by splitting off and projecting anxietyarousing perceptions, sensations, feelings etc., -such as in his example of isolation- into the mother for her to contain them in what Bion calls her ‘reverie’. This is her capacity with love to think about her infant- to pay attention, to try understand, i.e. to K. Her thinking transforms the infant’s feelings into a known and tolerated experience. If the infant is not too persecuted or too envious, he/she will introject and identify with a mother who is able to think, and he/she will introject also hi/her own now modified feelings. Each such projective-introjective cycle between infant and mother is part of a momentous process which gradually transforms the infant’s entire mental situation. Instead of a pleased ego evacuating unpleasure, a new structure is slowly achieved: a reality ego which has unconsciously internalised at its core an object with the capacity to think, potentially also to differentiate between seeing, imagining, phantasizing, dreaming, being awake and being a
sleep. This is known as the normal mind, the achievement of which depends on both mother and infant. Failure to develop a reality ego may be due to the mother’s failure to K her infant’s communications to her by his/her first method of projective identification. This failure might be also due to the infants hatred of reality or his/her excessive envy of the mother’s capacity to tolerate what he/she cannot. These lead him/her to continued and increased evacuation, both of the modified more tolerable elements returned to him/her by his/her mother and also of the containing mother herself, and, in extreme cases, aggressive attack on his own mental capacities. It is this last that brings psychosis. The differentiation of the psychotic from normal functioning to non-psychotic personality depends on the minute splitting of all the personality that is concerned with the awareness of internal and external reality. According to Bion, K is hard-won by the infant ego from emotional experiences with a nurturing object, functioning normally on the reality principle. But even when K is achieved, K is subject to hazard; it may become minus K through being stripped of significance. Minus K is understanding denuded until only misunderstanding remains. Excessive envy changes the way projections are given.
Bion states, “… the infant splits off and projects its feelings of fear into the breast together with envy and hate of the undisturbed breast”. From the mother’s side, a failure to accept projections forces her infant to (Assail) attack her and project increasingly, and he/she experiences her as denuding him/her. The infant then internalizes a “greedy vaginalized breast” that strips of its goodness all that the infant receives leaving only degenerate objects. This internal object starves its host of all understanding. Continuing mutual denudation and misunderstanding between mother and infant will leave only minus K between them, a cruel, empty, degenerative link of superiority/inferiority.
K the emotional experiences of trying to know the self or others; no K, the psychotic state which no mind able to know the self or others- the patient, I the psychotic part of his/her mind, exists in an unreal universe of bizarre objects which he cannot think; the minus K, the cruel and denuding link of misunderstanding the self and others. Bion places the capacity to know at the very centre of mental life. His work puts the pleasure principle and the reality principle on a par with the life instinct and the death instinct as the fundamental governors of physic life. In Bion’s symbols, K is a fundamental as L (love) or H (hatred). According to Bion there is a key for each session, the key is L or H or K.
The Therapist role according to Bion The therapist ultimate goal is to be an auxiliary alpha function for the client, and consciously help the client develop their own capacity for alpha function. The therapist should attempt to forget all psychoanalytic theory when engaging with the client, in order to freshly discern the client’s ultimate truth. The therapist needs to attune unconsciously with the client’s unconscious, in order to have moments of reverie. The therapist at all times must keep their own feeling and projections in check, while strategically utilizing this to interpret elements of the therapeutic relationship.