Desire in psychoanalytic psychotherapy: the writings of W.R. Bion

Abstract

This paper considers the place of desire in psychoanalytic psychotherapy, by undertaking a close reading of some of Wilfred Bion's writings on the subject. Focusing on his dictum that therapists should enter their consulting rooms without desire, this paper provides an overview of why Bion believes that the therapist's foregoing of desire is conducive to psychoanalytic work. This paper outlines his preference for primary ignorance, negative capability and acts of faith to facilitate the therapist experiencing what is going on in the here and now as fully as possible. This paper argues that Bion's concept of the caesura is useful for thinking about how the transition from being with desire to being without desire might take place for the therapist.

Keywords:

• Bion
• desire
• discourse
• caesura
• clinical technique

Acknowledgements

It would not have been possible to write this paper without the contributions of Nicole Murray, Berna O'Brien and Mary Pyle.

Notes

 1. The link Bion makes between naming, thinking and meaning here is an example of thinking at a more sophisticated level than the mechanism he refers to by the term ‘thinking’, when he outlines the nascent development of the infant's capacity to think her/his own thoughts before she/he is able to communicate through words.

 2. For further information about psychoanalytic objects, see Bion (1962, pp. 66–71) and Sandler (2005, pp. 592–595).

 3. Bion later extends the word ‘senses’ to include meanings that are not usually attached to it: ‘I include senses of which I myself may not be fully or particularly aware – the uncertainty principle, the incompleteness principle’ (1977b, p. 50).

 4. Thus, facilitating a movement from the paranoid-schizoid position to the depressive position, the selected fact enables the linking of elements that hitherto had no apparent connection to one another. On the selected fact, see Bion (1992, pp. 2, 275–278).

 5. Evolution ‘has no sensuous background but is expressed in terms that are derived from the language of sensuous experience. For example, “I see” meaning I intuit through the medium of a visual impression’ (1970a, p. 383).

 6. See also atmosphere (Joseph (1989 [1985]; Meltzer 2010 [1976]).

 7. ‘The transformation O →  K depends on ridding K of memory and desire’ (Bion, 1970b, p. 30).

 8. There is enough space to mention, but not discuss, the contact barrier, which is, according to Bion, ‘responsible for the preservation of the distinction between conscious and unconscious and for its inception’ (1962, p. 27), and which Lia Pistiner de Corinas (2006) says ‘acts as an articulating caesura that makes thinking and communication possible’ (p. 94).

 9. Giuseppe Civitarese (2008) identifies a large number of caesuras operating in Bion's ‘Caesura’, with which he compiles a lengthy list (p. 1131).

10. ‘We may be dealing with things which are so slight as to be virtually imperceptible, but which are so real that they could destroy us almost without our being aware of it’ (Bion, 1976b, p. 320).

11. This includes what the therapist says because the therapist's saying is a doing.

12. In the ‘Introduction’ to Seven Servants, Bion (1977a) remarks:

Even psycho-analysis is tainted with ideas of cure that imply a better state. I think it is ‘better’ to know the truth about what one's self and the universe in which I exist. But I do not wish to imply that it is ‘nicer’, or ‘pleasanter’. Whether it is ‘better’ is a matter of opinion which each individual has to arrive at for himself: his opinion and only his (unnumbered first page).

13. Bion's sentiment is echoed by Betty Joseph in a documentary made by the British Institute of Psychoanalysis in 2011. In answer to a question posed to her about the qualities, she deems important in an analyst, Joseph replies:

To have a sense for the truth, have a real sense for the truth in relation to yourself, and be prepared to know or to try to find out what is going on and how things are hitting you, because only that is going to enable you really to face what is going on for other people.