A Theory of Thinking: A Theory of Desiring

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on aspects of what is broadly known as countertransference in centering on the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion’s explicit theory of thinking as constituting an implicit theory of desiring. I make a distinction between the discursive terms “thoughts,” “thinking,” “desires,” “desiring,” “wants,” and “craving” and tease out their relationship to one another for clinical practice. I explore how thinking and desiring operate in and around frustration and suggest that the thinking apparatus is not just a mechanism for dealing with thoughts but also is a way of transforming wants into desires. I separate out desires and the desiring apparatus, as Bion does with thoughts and thinking, and argue that thinking is inextricably linked to desiring and thoughts to desires. The interpretative act, moreover, constitutes the analyst’s acting on desire, whereas acts of projective identification are bound up with craving. I demonstrate the potential uses of this theory by discussing it with reference to two published clinical examples.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Nicole Murray, Lisa Baraitser, and Toni O’Brien Johnson for their comments on earlier drafts of this article and to Berna O’Brien and Ann Murphy for helping me to think about the clinical application of Bion’s writings.

Notes

¹ See Giffney (2013a) for a discussion of how discourses of desire operate in Bion’s writings and desire’s relation to memory and understanding.

² I have previously examined desire as it operates in Bion’s work in Giffney (2013a, b, 2015).

³ Looking at the resonances and dissonances between the theory of desiring I present in this article and Bion’s Grid does not fall within the scope of this study due to limitations of space.

⁴ The terms “mother” and “breast” can refer to the biological mother and bodily organ, or the words can refer symbolically to the caregiver and the apparatus from which the infant feeds.

⁵ The symbols ♂ (contained) and ♀ (container) are used by Bion to designate a process involving psychological acts of taking/not taking in that implies a relation between two objects: “If a patient says he cannot take something in, or the analyst feels he cannot take something in, he implies a container and something to put in it. The statement that something cannot be taken in must not therefore be dismissed as a mere way of speaking. It implies, furthermore, a sense of at least two objects” (Bion, 1963, p. 6). At times he presents the symbols as abstractions to try to open up a space for thinking about problematics encountered within psychoanalysis and the psychoanalytic process without having the amount of discursive baggage words can have: “It would be a valid observation to say that psycho-analysis cannot ‘contain’ the mental domain because it is not a ‘container’ but a ‘probe’; the formulation that I have tried to further by using the symbols ♀ and ♂ minimizes this difficulty by leaving ♀ and ♂ as unknowns whose value is to be determined” (Bion, 1970f, p. 73). Elsewhere, however, he does allude to the sexed and also gendered nature of the symbols: “The signs ♂ and ♀ I call the contained and the container. The use of the male and female symbols is deliberate but must not be taken to mean that other than sexual implications are excluded. These signs designate a relationship between ♀ and ♂. The link may be commensal, symbiotic or parasitic” (Bion, 1970d, p. 106).

⁶ Readers well versed in Lacanian psychoanalysis will notice that analogies can be made between Bion’s writings on desire and Jacques Lacan’s differentiation between need, demand, and desire. I believe these analogies to be superficial. There is insufficient space to address this issue here because this article’s focus lies elsewhere, in my exploring the relation between need and desire in object relational terms. Bion’s stance on desire in relation to the clinical situation also shares something with the Lacanian notion of the analyst as the cause (l’objet petit a) of the analysand’s desire (Fink, 1997, pp. 38–41). This is especially true of Bion’s use of the sign O, which he says is “expressed by terms such as ‘cause’ or a ‘first cause’” (Bion, 1965, p. 152).

⁷ In Cogitations (1992), Bion asks, “Is ‘hope’ different from desire? Yes; like knots; it is desire + time. Or, Desire + Frustration = Hopes ↔ Fears” (p. 300). I do not have space in this article to explore Bion’s configuration of hope in the context outlined in the aforementioned quotation except to say that I believe hope to be a facet of desire.

⁸ Bion (1965) mentions countertransference in his book Transformations in the following way: “I ignore the distractions produced by counter-transference as I have nothing to add to what is already known about it or the methods of dealing with it” (p. 26). I believe Bion has lots to say about countertransference without using that actual word as a term of reference. See Giffney (2013a, b).

⁹ The difficulty of using excerpts from published clinical material is that the material is being used by the analyst (in a lot of cases), who has conducted the analysis with the patient, for a specific purpose. My co-opting of said material takes it out of context and also misrepresents it in the sense that I was not a participant in the analysis so was not privy to the experience. Although I have chosen to use published material for illustrative purposes, I do so while recognizing that there are inherent problems with this practice. Note Bion’s reservations about the retrospective reporting of even one’s own examples because, for him, “the clinical experience affords a mass of detail that cannot be communicated in print” (Bion, 1965, p. 22).

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Noreen Giffney

Noreen Giffney, Ph.D., MSc., works as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice in Dublin, Ireland. She also provides supervision to clinical practitioners conducting research in the fields of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. She is the convener of Psychoanalysis +, an interdisciplinary initiative that brings together clinical, theoretical, and artistic approaches to, and applications of, psychoanalysis.