![Sample our Behavioral Sciences journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110801/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Behavioral-Sciences.jpg"})
Abstract
This paper follows up Bion’s development, focusing its attention on Cogitations in particular and suggesting that it can be read as a sort of new “Clinical Diary” à la Ferenczi. The authors, showing us both the link between the writings of the London Bion and those of the American one, stress the dramatic change that took place in his theoretical and technical position around about 1967, when he crossed the Atlantic for working and teaching in North and Latin America, and gradually arrived to formulate a kind of listening more authentically centered on his own thoughts and emotions and those of the patient during the analytic encounter.
Notes
1 This article was originally presented at the International Centennial Conference on the Work of W.R. Bion held in Turin on 17th of July 1997, and was originally published in slightly different versions in Italian in Lavorare con Bion (Bion Talamo, Borgogno and Merciai, Citation1998a) and in English in W.R. Bion: Between Past and Future, edited by Parthenope Bion Talamo, Franco Borgogno, and Silvio A. Merciai (published by Karnac Books in Citation1998b). The authors thank Karnac Books for the kind permission to reprint it.
2 Begun at the suggestion of P. Bion Talamo with the constitution of a study group on Bion held at Centro Torinese di Psicoanalisi and subsequently continued on the basis of her stating that: “We cannot say that we are Bionians, because being “Bionian” would mean, above all, being oneself, being mentally free in one's journeys of discovery, always, however, on the basis of iron personal discipline, because liberty and anarchy are not synonyms” (Bion Talamo, Citation1987).
3 To provide documentary evidence of this we analysed the bibliographies of all the articles published in The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis during 1996. A simple reference in a bibliography is obviously no guarantee that the work cited is of relevance to the article as a whole, but we thought it best to leave aside this objection. The year in question contained 87 articles (a significant number of which, we might add, referred to the then recent convention in San Francisco). Of these, 14 (or 16.09%) cited Bion at least once in their bibliographies. There were 22 citations in all and, considered as a whole, they break down as follows: Second Thoughts (8), Learning from Experience (7), Elements of Psycho-Analysis (3), Attention and Interpretation (2), Transformations (2), Notes on Memory and Desire (1) and Two Papers: The Grid and Caesura (1). Today such a trend has changed and, many times, the “Later Bion” is much quoted than the “Classic Bion”.
4 One of us – Silvio Arrigo Merciai – has interviewed Parthenope Bion Talamo about her father and she revised the transcription of this interview. We will refer to it in all this paper as “Personal communication, P. Bion Talamo”.
5 It seems to us that the authors belonging to the Kleinian school operate in this manner (Bott Spillius, Citation1988; Anderson, Citation1992), dismissing as irrelevant anything that falls too far outside their model. As the Symingtons (1996, pp.10-11) point out (see also Bion Talamo, Citation1987, Citation1997a; Borgogno, Citation1990, Citation1993, Citation1994), “The loyal disciples of Melanie Klein accept Bion's early work but are distrustful of his later work. One senior Kleinian said that Bion never wrote anything worthwhile after Elements of Psycho-Analysis. Others believe that he deteriorated on leaving England and that everything he wrote subsequent to his departure is to be dismissed as the ramblings of a senile man. [. . .] Therefore Bion's prescription and encouragement towards a personal act of understanding stands as a threat to those anxious to maintain the purity of Melanie Klein's teaching. This attitude is always felt more strongly towards those who have been nurtured within a group's scientific culture”. But the fact is that many of these authors are simply trying to appropriate Bion's thought, with the consequence that several different Bions have appeared on the psychoanalytic scene – in addition to the Kleinian version and Meltzer's classic version – independently of any justification they might or might not have or their effective compatibility and possibility of integration: the groupists' Bion, the Bion of human relationships, the Bion of the Grid, the Bion proposed by numerous South American authors, and so on.
6 What irritated Bion was not so much the reference to Kleinian thought as the idea of being rigidly classified as a Kleinian. The fact is that the Kleinian matrix continued to form the substantial, solid centre of his thinking right up to his last writings.
7 We were to find ourselves more in agreement with her later, regarding the Memoir (here was a truly evocative work!). “Bion always thought” – maintained P. Bion Talamo – “that the problem with psychoanalytical writing is that it is unable to transfer the liveliness of human experience to the written page, so that the theory always seems cut off from emotional reality and to have few connections with it. Bion's evocative way of writing was his answer to this problem”; “He wanted to be as evocative as possible, so that the reader would find himself face to face with his own emotions, wrenched up, so to speak, from deep within”. But here again we had to ask ourselves whom to give credence to, considering that in the afterword, requested by the publisher, Bion himself said: “All my life I have been imprisoned, frustrated, dogged by common-sense, reason, memories and – greatest bug-bear of all – understanding and being understood. This is an attempt to express my rebellion, to say, ‘Goodbye’ to all that” (Personal communication, P. Bion Talamo). On this question, see also Borgogno, Citation1993.
8 “I think that Cogitations is a sort of rough-book and that Bion extracted and abstracted the bits and pieces which have now been published from a bigger store [ … ] I don't know to what extent Cogitations was supposed to be merely private notes, since, for example, he took some of the notes with him to America and back again. I think that he had the idea, somewhere in the back of his mind, that sooner or later he would have published something. So these were rather more formal notes. I have other notes of his, some of which are just one or two words jotted down, which are quite a different matter” (Personal communication, P. Bion Talamo). See also: P. Bion Talamo Citation1997a,Citationb.
9 P. Bion Talamo is also of this opinion: “He was always very free, inside himself, but I think that in England there was not then the right sort of climate for expressing this sort of thing, least of all in the Kleinian group, which was very rigid. He was an extremely private sort of person, and on the other hand it is possible that he thought that revealing himself, revealing his emotions might have made him easier prey to his enemies and detractors. Introspection has always been considered with a good deal of suspicion, and it is only now that we are beginning to say officially that it is really important for us to know how we, as analysts, work and communicate this” (Personal communication, P. Bion Talamo). On this question, see also Borgogno, Citation1993.
10 Regarding “narciss-ism” and “social-ism”, see the following Cogitations: above all 15 July 1959 (pp. 29-30), but also 16 May 1959 (pp. 23-24); undated (pp. 103-106); 31 January/1 February 1960 (p. 122). The theme generally outlined here recurs in fact throughout the book, although it is not always viewed from this perspective.
11 These concepts were to be found in Bion's reflections from the beginning, initially appearing in the first cogitation of 1959.
12 Undated, pp. 172–83.
13 Donald W. Winnicott (1987/Citation1999), moreover, in a subsequent letter to John O. Wisdom of 26 October 1964, laments that Bion's ideas are never discussed in relation to other contemporary authors or connected to his own. And in an earlier letter to Bion dated 16 November 1961, he lets it be known that he too is interested in thought processes, though bearing in mind the infant's narcissistic wound and the mother's failure.
14 André Green (1992, p. 588) also seems to wish to underline Bion's lack of concern for the patient: “The same detachment is observed in Bion's position on the therapeutic reaction (both positive and negative), in that it is always bound to divert attention from psychoanalysis proper. Such a position is unusual among English-speaking analysts, with their concern for helping the patient”.
15 7 October 1959 (p. 89).
16 16 October 1959 (p. 94).
17 24 February 1960 (p. 142).
18 On this point, see also Speziale-Bagliacca, Citation1997.
19 On this point, see the work of Paula Heimann (Borgogno, Citation1992; 1999/2007).
20 Undated (p. 112). Bion is extremely lucid when he defines common sense as the shared beliefs of a particular social or scientific group, underlining that these are not sufficient grounds for evidence: “Such evidence is not proof but is at least not incompatible with the view I am proposing: that certain perceptions of the individual are not so much qualities under investigation as impositions on the individual's outlook by common sense (in my terminology) or God's idea (in Berkeley's) or the deception by God and Demon (in Descartes')” (italics added).
21 See the Cogitation of 24 February 1960 and in particular Bion's reflections (pp. 143-144), which seem to imply that the function of the analyst is precisely that of intellectual leader.
22 Asphyxiating since it is entirely centred on the description of psycho-pathological mechanisms.
23 Undated (pp. 204-206).
24 Bion seems to metacommunicate: “Stay away from me!”, “You are different from me, you are not me!”
25 “Until 1961, more or less, he always went up to town wearing a dark suit and a bowler hat; at a certain point, I don't know what had come over him, he changed his wardrobe completely: he bought two more colourful suits and gave up the bowler, as though he had said to himself: ʻOh to hell with it, I can't stand this suit of armour any longer” (Personal communication, P. Bion Talamo). The comment in the text is based on an untranslatable pun in Italian which plays on the dual meanings of in gessato [literally “dressed in a chalk-striped suit”) and ingessato [said of someone who is stuffily conventional or old-fashioned], and also on the two meanings of bombetta: both “bowler hat” and “little bomb” – a fact not without significance, considering Bion's “typically military tactics”.
26 It is curious that there is no mention of Ferenczi in the analytical index of Cogitations, considering that Bion cites him explicitly, albeit with a question-mark, when he speaks of “conflict of will” (an old hobby-horse of Ferenczi, who sees it in a most original way from the point of view of the group's or parents' imposition on the individual and particularly as a kind of grafting on to the will of others and extraction of one's own). Ferenczi is also implicitly present when Bion goes on to talk about “sincerity” and “non-hypocrisy” (both Ferenczian leitmotifs) and when in the preceding pages he reflects on education and society. In our view there are undoubted similarities between Bion's and Ferenczi's respective journeys: in their relationship with the group; in their search for recognition and a sense of belonging while at the same time investing intensely in personal freedom and having the desperate courage not to give in to preconceived truths that are not really felt by the analyst-patient couple; and in their use of speculative imagination as a source of encounter, dialogue and knowledge.
27 Regarding to his education in England, the Symingtons write: “When he was relating something to grown-ups they would often laugh at him. This made him feel small and put him into a rage against them. This mocking laughter produced what psycho-analysts call a bad internal object [ … ] The sense that he retreated into himself while surrounded by uncomprehending adults remained with him through his ten years of schooling, through his traumatic experiences in the army and through the remainder of his life” (J. and N. Symington, Citation1996).
28 In these works Bion seems to confirm repeatedly the image we have of him as a cold and distant person, above all afflicted by an oppressive dulling of his emotional responses. In prose that is terse and almost telegraphic he describes himself as full of self-doubt and uncertainty and dominated by the stupid and vapid causality of events, a man who does not feel himself to be the equal of his ideals and the expectations he puts on his behaviour (André Green, Citation1992, p. 588, wonders “is this false modesty or an uncommon superego demand?”). Also to be considered is the insistence with which Bion – despite numerous official accolades which, it must be said, he never shied of citing on the cover of his books – depicted himself as a man lacking in courage and daring. Yet as the Symingtons (1996) note: “There is not a shadow of doubt that Bion was a man of outstanding courage. At the age of nineteen he was faced with a crisis of appalling proportions – not just one crisis but an array of crises which, strung together, make a catastrophe. His courage was indisputable” (p.15); “Bion was conscious of fear, conscious of his own inner states; he was also not identified with Britain and its patriotic purposes. He was always conscious of himself as separate from the group, analysing its nature and questioning its purposes. He was one of the most extreme examples of the outsider. We define the outsider as one who is not identified with the several groups of which he is a member” (p.19).
29 The seminars all took place during Bion's stay in America, between 1973 and 1978 (the year before he died).
30 Several times during the seminars Bion cited an aphorism of Maurice Blanchot's: La réponse est le malheur de la question [“The answer is the misfortune of the question “] which he had been introduced to by André Green (Personal communication, P. Bion Talamo).
31 “If psycho-analytic intuition does not provide a stamping ground for wild asses, where is a zoo to be found to preserve the species? Conversely, if the environment is tolerant, what is to happen to the ʻgreat hunters' who lie unrevealed or reburied” (p. 5). See also: M.H. Williams Citation1985.
32 Brazilian Lectures, Rio de Janeiro – Five, 1990, p. 122.
33 “At some point a mechanism was triggered in Bion and he came to realise that the analyst is a human being and that, if he wants to work with his patients, all he has is a head and a heart – and something here in the stomach. He only discovered this at a certain point – or rather it was only then that he allowed himself to know it. It's like calling yourself a coward and then realising how brave you are” (Personal communication, P. Bion Talamo).
34 “Psycho-analytical training has had an oppressive effect upon Bion. It is perhaps one of the great limitations of this sort of training that the personal analysis takes so long to ʻrecover from', to use a phrase Bion employed in 1976 in his lecture at the Tavistock Centre. In this regard one should note that all Bion's major publications came after the death of Mrs Klein in 1960” (Meltzer, 1978/Citation1998, p. 19). Green (Citation1992) makes the observation that Bion's most important works were all published outside the more or less official circuits of the IPA.
35 The reader who is interested in appreciating the more personal aspects of Bion the man is referred to the published letters edited by Francesca Bion (see Bion, 1982/Citation1991b, 1985a/Citation1991a).
36 Our paper was read at the Bion Conference in Turin on 17 July 1997, twenty years to the day later. There is a poignant sadness in the fact that Parthenope and her younger daughter Patrizia were killed in a tragic road accident on 16 July, 1998.
37 One is struck once again by the affinity of vision between Bion and Ferenczi.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Franco Borgogno
Franco Borgogno is full professor of clinical psychology, Turin University, and a training and supervising psychoanalyst of the Società Psicoanalitica Italiana (IPA). He is the recipient of the 2010 M. Sigourney Award.
Silvio Arrigo Merciai
Silvio Arrigo Merciai is psychiatrist and associate member of the Società Psicoanalitica Italiana (IPA).