Bion’s Long Road toward Intuiting the Patient’s Suffering: ‘Theoretical’ vs. ‘Clinical’ Bion

Abstract

This article presents a chronological investigation of three of Bion’s own analytic case descriptions, while comparing them to a close reading of his evolving theoretical writings during those years. It is divided into three parts: Bion before 1967; Bion in 1967–1968, when he launches a radical revision of his psychoanalytic theory and technique; and the late Bion, especially during the last two years of his life. Respectively, it focuses on three of Bion’s clinical descriptions, presented in Bion’s October 1955 lecture to the British Psychoanalytical Society, and in two of his seminars—the Fourth Los Angeles Seminar (1967) and the Fifth Buenos Aires Seminar (1968); and the account of Brazilian analyst, Junqueira de Mattos, of his analysis with Bion over the final two years of Bion’s life. These detailed accounts allow a textual investigation of Bion the theoretician versus Bion the practicing analyst, particularly highlighting the significant gap between them. The author attempts to offer a possible explanation and understanding of this disparity between Bion’s theoretical and clinical texts, and especially of Bion’s long road toward intuiting the patient’s suffering.

Keywords:

• ‘theoretical’ vs. ‘Clinical’ Bion
• Bion’s Los Angeles Seminars
• Bion’s Buenos Aires Seminars
• late Bion
• Junqueira de Mattos
• intuiting the patient’s suffering

Notes

1 Paul Celan spoke these powerful words at his acceptance speech for the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen in 1958. Tormented by catastrophic reality [of the Holocaust], longing desperately to reach out to an Other, Celan said that the poet “goes with his very being to language, stricken by and seeking reality…perhaps toward an addressable Thou, toward an addressable reality” (1958, p. 596). Despairing and inconsolable, Celan drowned himself in the frozen waters of the Seine in 1970.

2 Bion (1959) powerfully wrote: “the patient had felt… that I evacuated them so quickly that the feelings were not modified, but had become more painful. …This originated in what [the patient] felt was my refusal to accept parts of his personality. Consequently, he strove to force them into me with increased desperation and violence. His behavior, isolated from the context of the analysis, might have appeared to be an expression of primary aggression… but I quote this because it shows the patient in a different light, his violence a reaction to what he felt was my hostile defensiveness” (my italics, pp. 103–104).

3 I would add here Vonofakos and Hinshelwood’s words regarding Bion’s 1958 paper “on arrogance”: “One could speculate that Bion was here confiding consciously or unconsciously something of his own reaction to the catastrophes in his life, being sent to boarding school as a child, the tank battles of World War I and, in 1944, when he suffered a disastrous bereavement when his wife, Betty, died three days after giving birth…. as if Bion had found some means of keeping that side of his life unexpressed (2012, p. 63).

4 Atonement, in Bion’s second thoughts: “The central postulate is that atonement with ultimate reality, or O,…is essential to harmonious mental growth” (1967a, p. 145), suggesting the meaning of reparation. See also the entry “Atonement, at-one-ment” in Sandler (2005, pp. 60–69).

5 A Memoir of the Future is comprised of three volumes: The Dream (1975), The Past Presented (1977) and The Dawn of Oblivion (1979).

6 This was a radical undertaking for Junqueira de Mattos, at the time already an experienced psychoanalyst and father to five children, that ended with him having to sell his house to make this move possible (Nosek, 2017, p. 257).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ofra Eshel

Ofra Eshel is a faculty member, training and supervising analyst of the Israel Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, and member of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA); an honorary member of the New Center for Psychoanalysis (NCP), Los Angeles; former vice-president of the International Winnicott Association (IWA); and founder and head of the postgraduate track “Independent Psychoanalysis: Radical Breakthroughs” at the advanced studies of the Program of Psychotherapy, Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University. Her papers have been published in psychoanalytic journals and books and presented in national and international conferences all over the world; author of The Emergence of Analytic Oneness: Into the Heart of Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2019). She is in private practice in Tel Aviv, Israel.