The Myth of Bion: a Continuing Discussion

Robin Chester

Over the years I had the privilege of having many discussions with Neville, mainly about analytic theory and its practice.  In later years these were mainly about Bion.  These, inevitably and importantly, continue in my head.

This paper is, therefore, a part of those discussions, possibly their continuation.  I suspect that Neville would disagree with some of the points that I will make, probably many, but I believe that he would support my right to hold those ideas just the same. What would have happened is that I would say a lot to justify my views and he, in his taciturn way, would say a lot more in just a few words.

This paper, therefore, is me saying a lot in anticipation of Neville’s comments.  

It has been said, perhaps as truism or possibly aphorism, that we are in our theories.  This implies that we are drawn to certain theories because they feel correct to us, they touch something in us.

But what of those who discover and create our theories.  Their theories must say something essential - unconscious and vital – about them.  And importantly this something will add a subliminal clinical edge to their theories enriching them, and allowing further growth: a quality that can be mainly experienced but not often thought.  

Perhaps I can offer some-putative-examples about authors and their theories:  Klein’s aversion to genital sexuality, as identified by Grosskurth(1986,p40-41), and the possible reasons for this, can, possibly, be seen in her determined focus on the pre-genital, upon hate and the death drive, guilt etc., i.e. away from the sexual of Freud; or with Winnicott his possible difficulties with the creative sexual union of opposites, his possible fear of what lurked in the depths of the mother/woman, could possibly be seen as the driving force behind his idealisation of the creative role of the mother in development, and the creativity of the coming together of contradictions in paradox etc.  And Bion..?  That is what I wish to discuss.  However with Bion our attempts to understand are immediately confronted by a unique difficulty with respect to a psychoanalyst; we have too much primary source material, not to mention what has been written about Bion although mainly about his theories.

And further, the material by Bion is disturbingly contradictory in its nature and form, leaving us with the dilemma about Bion, how much of this form of communication was orchestrated by him intentionally, and what were his intentions if so, and what was unconscious?

These Bionian communications include his theoretical books and papers – generally described as forbiddingly difficult -, his autobiographies, which are distressingly bleak and painful in his bitter deprecation of self and almost everybody of importance in his life. Then we have his “Cogitations” rather jauntily written apparently to an attentive other.  

Also there are his lectures and seminars which have, to me, a repetitious, and at times frustratingly obtuse, quality to them with only enough scattered hints of his genius to not be too frustrating.  And, then there are his personal letters curiously published posthumously by his widow to attempt to show a different side of him. These, to me, are also distressing but in another way: in their cloying “try-hard” quality they sadly communicate how much Bion needed to be something he seemingly wasn’t.  And of course there is his curious attempt at fiction in the style of Carroll, the reading of whom to him by his father he successfully destroyed as a child, or of the later Joyce from whom he would seem to have freed Beckett.

I will focus on his theoretical papers and his autobiographies.  Like the criminal who unconsciously needs to be caught, Bion offers us not only clues but even tools to track down what he is truly saying; i.e. negative capability, the selected fact, PS<->D, container/contained and myth.  Bion’s theoretical papers are certainly forbiddingly difficult and off-putting if approached from the vertex of knowing or needing to know, but if one takes a different vertex, one open to experience, what one hears is like a Bachian fugue, you never know what the next note will be and even when it is repeated it is as if you are hearing it for the first time and you feel richer for the experience because it reaches to something in one at a key experiential level.  We experience and grow rather than the strengthening of our psychic shield through knowing.

Another experience I suggest is similar to being irresistibly drawn into a Borgean labyrinth, or maze.  With Borges the common-sense of following the left wall to the exit doesn’t work and we are drawn to the realisation, albeit with a bit of kicking and screaming, that there is no exit, in fact paradoxically our freedom lies in this, between our being and Being overall.  

Even though Bion also traps us in the labyrinth of his thinking he leaves exits.  He was obviously a very clever man but what I am suggesting would require the genius of Shakespeare to achieve deliberately so I am assuming that these offered exits, mainly,  were his unconscious slips.  I want to, with some trepidation, nominate these as “naiveties and errors”.  “Error” can stand as I will explain and I will come back to the question of naivety.  I will give you one example of his errors.  They arise in a long paragraph in a dictation to an imagined audience published by Francesca Bion curiously as “Taming Wild Thoughts” (1977).  I don’t have time to go through the whole paragraph but because of the need to be clear I will take up the points of error.

He states (page49) “mathematicians have considered, like Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, the incompleteness theory;”.  Of course the incompleteness theory or theorem, was put forward by the mathematician Gödel.  In case that this may be seen as simply sloppy English – hardly likely with Bion – later in the paragraph he rather surprisingly writes, “In metapsychology Gödel’s investigation, his theory about the Law of the Excluded Middle…”.  Of course the law of the excluded middle began with Aristotle and in Gödel’s theoretical and philosophical writings (he was a Platonist (e.g. see Shanker, 1988, P8)) there would appear to be an absence of direct reference or consideration of the law of the excluded middle. 

My point is not to criticize Bion, I have no wish to be a martyr, but to point out flaws in the encompassing movement of his theory, possibly unconscious hints, clues.  These apparent errors of knowledge, which he in fact repeats later in the same transcript, if we context them, to me have the jarring quality of the smart adolescent who doesn’t yet know what he doesn’t know – been there.  But what does it mean for an elderly Bion?

Possibly more revealing, I believe, are his what, with indicated trepidation, I am calling his naiveties.  I believe that there are a number but when I discussed these with Neville, feeling a little more confident from reading Meltzer (1978), I had to wonder whether it was my envy speaking.  But allowing for that possibility I believe that the possible gains in further understanding are there.

I will put forward two examples.

One is his rather magical conceptualization of the rudimentary beginning of thought and the idealization of the mother in this. As you will know he conceptualizes that the infant experiences the emotional distress of unthinkable experience of bodily origin e.g. the experience of imminent death. This is projected into the mother who through her love for the child and its father (1962, p36) contains the experience and it is processed and modified i.e. loses its raw edge, its end-of –the-world quality, and she projects both the modified experience and the processing function into her infant who grows in emotional and cognitive capacity accordingly.  Because of the unthinkable and therefore unknowable qualities Bion labels these  β  and  α  elements and  α.  Function.  But who is this other?  The mythical mother, with such purity of thought?  Eve, Mary and Anna come to mind.  The ordinary mother, if she is to process the experience through her waking dream, her “reverie”, will subject the experience to her dream-work with its involved origins unconsciously and experientially. 

Simply put, what the infant will get from the mother will be a large dose of her: it is inevitable and unavoidable if she is seen as human.  And when Bion refers to her love for her child and the father as being basic to her creative reverie, he is introducing the idea of her psychology being central to her actions, which doubtlessly it is.  So if we introject the mother’s  α  function we also introject what is associated with it and this extra will obviously be central to our being, at an unconscious level, and presumably will manifest in our dreams.  How, much is us and how much is her, we obviously can never know.  Bollas’ concept (1981) of the shadow of the object comes in here.  

The second example involves his concept of  O  of which he proposes a number of, not wholly consistent, definitions which I am sure you know.  At the most straightforward and important level  O  is seen as the emotional truth at the base of the interaction between the two protagonists in the analytic situation.  As such it cannot be known but it can be approached with discipline, at least by the analyst.  Doubtlessly this is important and extends Freud’s ideas about the interaction of the dynamic unconscious mix-up of analyst and patient to which free association and free floating attention are directed.

I will focus on another of Bion’s definitions of  O.  Bion equates – if such is logically possible -  O  with Kant’s noumenon – the Ding–an-sich, the thing-in-itself.  Of course Kant (1991, p213) wrote that we can have no intuition that would give us knowledge or understanding of the noumenon, nor can we even have any intuition of what that intuition would involve.  Here then Bion is using a Kantian concept but then discarding Kant.  And further Bion even suggests that particular individuals, mystics and perhaps genii can in fact have knowledge of  O  .  Also he proposes that at least being at one with  O  is good, growth enhancing for the individual, being at one with their essential truth.  This is an Enlightenment view.  But even Kant and Hegel had no such positive view. For Kant if we could access this essential truth we would shockingly realise that we are only mere puppets; Hegel wrote of it as the “Night of the World”.  Let me quote Hegel reference to this from his “Jena Lectures” 

“The human being is this night, this empty nothing, that contains everything in its simplicity – an unending wealth of many representations, images, of which none belong to him  ...... This night, the interior of nature that exists here  ..  .in phantasmagorical representations  ….  here shoots a bloody head – there another white ghastly apparition, suddenly here before it, and just so disappears…..,”.

Who said philosophy is boring!  Of course the tragedy for Bion was that he was exposed to this “night” – including for four awful years.  One can understand why he is seeking something else as the truth – something that possibly takes him back to his Ayah of his infancy.

I trust I have made my point that within Bion’s writings there are these slips and errors and that as analysts we understand these as the unconscious’s sign posts.  But to what in Bion?

As introduced, Bion offered us tools with which to build understanding.  I will use one, that of myth.  Of course myth has several significations e.g. the mythology that surrounds Bion e.g. “Bion said”.  However, at a basic level, myths are created individually, or by a group, to ease the discomfort of being confronted by an overwhelming unknown existential force by giving narrative and often visual form to this force and hence essentially containing it.  In analytic terms it is the manifest content of the unconscious dream.  In Bion’s writings myth manifests on level 3 of his grid.  He extends his ideas from here to his involved discussion of the use of myth in psychoanalytic practice in his “Cogitations” (1992, p238) in which he proposes that myths elucidate the problem of learning, which for him is learning from experience.  In essence what Bion proposes is that myths are constructed by constant conjunctions and as such say more than what otherwise one may be able to think in the clinical situation.  Accordingly the analyst deduces what is, to their understanding, the appropriate myth corresponding to their patient’s communications, free associates to the myth which elucidates more than what is being said and thought at the more straightforward level.  

In this Bion proposes that the analyst is better served with a pocketful of myths than a pocketful of theories.  Bion proposes further that each analyst has to choose their own myths and if they are different from Bion’s this would not bother him. [page237]

My understanding is that each analyst will be drawn to the myths that touch them personally, and constantly conjoin disparate elements held apart by their anxiety in their emotional experience of themselves in the clinical situation.  

So what about Bion, what myths caught Bion?  He lists them (1992 p237):  (1)  the fall of Adam (he doesn’t mention Eve).  (2)  the Oedipus myth with an emphasis on the Sphynx and Oedipus’ hubris; to know at no matter what cost ; (3) the Babel myth with an emphasis on verbal cooperation destroyed by an anxious God (4) and Narcissus punished by God for attempting to observe his own beauty.  So, what do these myths, and in particular Bion’s associative focus, indicate about Bion and his difficulties to which our attention is directed mainly by his autobiographies.  And it must be remembered that these were written late in his life.  He had had two analyses, with Rickman and Klein but the impression gained is that he approached these, to borrow a term from Kay Souter (2009,p796), in a “tankish” manner – which to me means that he pushed on with his formidable intellect, bullet-proof, but knowing that a hit in the right spot would lead to catastrophe.  I am therefore proposing that his autobiographies and his fiction were attempts to address, or have addressed, what wasn’t in his personal analyses.  He must have known that we would be curious about what he was telling us and why.

However if, as I propose, our chosen myths say something about us, then I feel that we should adhere to Bion’s with respect to him.

However immediately a problem arises, three of his four myths are to do with an anxious and punitive paternal authority which at first glance seems only peripheral to his angst-ridden outlines.  These outlines instead direct to an unresolved and unresolvable nightmare around the trauma of the second major existential caesura, that is that between infancy and childhood, the experience from which Freud in his “Outline” proposes that none of us fully recover (1940(1938),p189).  

This is the change from our entwined relationship with the mother of our infancy to that with our metamorphosed mother who brings formed language, social rules, sexual guilt and crippling shame, and the presence of the third.  For Bion this would seem to have been from his relationship with his Ayah who seemingly filled him with carnal life, to the cold, guilting, emotional sterility of his actual mother who complained of dirt while farewelling her son to what could have been his actual death, the son who preferred the Front to the sense of emotional death with his mother.

And further to this, Bion (1986,p127)does nominate the day of his psychic death with the fatally wounded boy named “Sweeting”.  Sweeting seeks his essential mother through Bion and Bion hates him for it as he also later did his daughter, Parthenope, (seemingly) for the same reason (see Bléandonu, 1994,p97-98).  But, why?  And why does Bion nominate this as the day of his psychic death?

As Winnicott proposes we don’t break down, we break down again.  Bion didn’t die, he died again. They exposed in him the death-like qualities of the mother who hated the life and creativity in him.  In this they also exposed the death of, the permanent loss of, the Ayah, who loved the life in him, who, I suggest, became his  O  , the elusive, unknown eternal, who is psychically placed out there and becomes the central focus of Bion’s later ideas and contact with, being at one with, became his goal in his later years.

So where do the myths come in?  My analysis so far is straightforward so we would be looking to the myths to help us grow further in understanding, as proposed.

Bion’s idiosyncratic take on the Oedipus myth, I believe, offers most in further understanding.  His dual focus is on the central role of the sphinx and Oedipus’ hubris around determined knowledge.  Oedipus slays the sphinx, that which gobbles up the inadequate, with his knowledge – with the profound statement, “It is man”.  But Oedipus is drawn towards knowledge that lies beyond man, the essential driving force in his life which is a fate-driven magnification of all our lives.  In our dreams and fantasies we can kill our fathers, claim conjugal rights over our mothers, be king but…., but how do we gain freedom to be ourselves, free of our need to do and these?  The answer to this question which eluded Oedipus to the end, would seem to always lie beyond us and possibly lie with, held by, a symbolic father who remains as the unknown controlling force in our life.  This would seem alluded to in Bion’s other (referred to) myths with their focus on the central determining role of God.  This is possibly emphasised in Bion’s take on the Narcissus myth and his placement of God in this.

In the slaying of the sphinx with his knowledge, there would seem implied that Oedipus had achieved that knowledge but then of course a plague descended and more knowledge was pursued with its disastrous results.  Although paradoxically like Sisyphus in Camus’ reasoning, Oedipus was freed.

So what can we learn from this.

Interestingly what we seem directed towards is the uncomfortable notion of the apparent hubris of psychoanalysis and philosophy with their pursuit of the concept of emotional freedom lying within knowledge of the essential meaning of human existence, but with freedom actually lying in blindness.  Bion possibly helps here with his eschewing of knowledge ( K ) as the primary goal and instead placing the blind emotional concept of being at one with the essential emotional interactive basis of the analytic situation (or any human interaction) as the analytic goal or truth.  But in the Bionian labyrinth we’ve already been here, as if we have missed an exit and we begin to experience the familiar feeling with Bion: the sense of being trapped in the labyrinth of his ideas with our usual guiding ideas unavailable to us.  So how does he do it?  And also why does he do it?  To me, although I’ve never been there, it has the quality of the soldier overwhelmed by the enormity of what surrounds him on the battlefield where his sense of existence becomes reduced to meaningless.  All he can do is await the officer’s orders.  Lacan’s concept of the big A ( O ), and also of objet petit a and especially his concept of the Real come to mind,  But, in keeping with the direction of this paper, what can we understand about Bion and beyond by this experience.  

At another time, and perhaps now in another place, this would be when I would stop and Neville would outline, in his considered and thoughtful manner, his ideas free of the Bionian entrapment.

So that’s where I should stop 

Thank you for listening. 

REFERENCES:

Bion, WILFRED.R. (1962) Learning from experience. London: Karnac Books.-(1986) THE LONG WEEK-END 1897-1919 Part of a Life. London: Free Association Books.

Bion, W.R. (1992) COGITATIONS. London: Karnac Books.-(1997) TAMING WILD THOUGHT. London: Karnac Books.

Bollas, Christopher. (1987) THE SHADOW OF THE OBJECT Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known. New York: Columbia University Press. 

Bléandonu, Gérard. (1994) Wilfred Bion HIS LIFE AND WORKS 1897-1979. translated by Claire Pajaczkowska. London: Free Association Press.

Freud, Sigmund. (1940[1938]) AN OUTLINE OF PSYCHO-ANALYSES. S.E.23,139-207

Grosskurth, Phyllis. (1986) MELANIE KLEIN HER WORLD AND HER WORK. NEW YORK: Alfred A. Knopf. Inc.

Kant, Immanuel. (1993) CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. London, Everyman 

Meltzer, Donald. (1978) THE KLEINIAN DEVELOPMENT. Scotland Perthshire: Clunie Press.

Shanker, S.G. (ed.). (1988) Gödel’s Theorem in focus. London and New York: Routledge 

Souter, Kay M. (2009) The War Memoirs: Some origins of the thought of W.R. Bion. Int J Psychoanal 90:795-808

Vermote, Rudi. (2019) Reading Bion. London and New York: Routledge