Wilfred Bion on Memory and Desire

I've read rather a lot in British object relations theory, and of the psychoanalysts associated with the Middle/Independent "school" in the United Kingdom--those who refused in the main to get drawn into the "Controversial Discussions" resulting from the split between the Kleinians and the (Anna) Freudians in the early 1940s. But one figure of significance, who wrote a considerable number of dense books I have not yet read, remains on my list of those to explore: Wilfred Bion. (I've found the book by the Symingtons, The Clinical Thinking of Wilfred Bion, a very helpful place to start. There they emphasize the overriding lesson to therapists from Bion is: Think and speak from your own heart and mind.)

I have, however, read a couple of Bion's essays on Memory and Desire, and seen one passage from them quoted in many places over the years: the therapist must approach each session with the same patient "without memory or desire." I admit I was very much taken aback the first time I read this for it seems to fly so strongly in the face of that deeply Freudian respect I have for history and archaeology. 

Now, though, I cannot stop thinking about this passage, and I rather expect it will have to show up as a chapter in the book I am working on about faith, Freud, and psychoanalysis. For there is much language (as noted below) in Bion about ascesis and mysticism, leading the Symingtons to conclude that "Bion is committed to the view that there is an absolute truth which can never be known directly. He says, ‘The religious mystics have probably approximated most closely to expression of experience of  it’."

This shocking, if not counter-intuitive advice, of Bion's about abandoning memory and desire is stated repeatedly in several places in a number of ways, lest we miss the point: "The psychoanalyst should aim at achieving a state of mind so that at every session he feels he has not seen the patient before." And even more strongly: "I do not mean that ‘forgetting’ is enough: what is required is a positive act of refraining from memory and desire.”

Why should we want to do this? Bion is quite blunt about the implications: "nothing will throw your judgment out more than to be concerned with trying to remember what the patient or you yourself have said." Once you give in to this desire to remember, you will "keep at bay and...keep out of mind certain other feelings." This, it strikes me, is something very much in keeping with what I have read Yalom say on several occasions about always asking about the here-and-now going on between patient and therapist. 

It seems difficult, if not downright unpleasant, to avoid memory and desire. And yet I find it attractive if you conceive of the therapist's role, as I increasingly do, in apophatic and kenotic terms: to be emptied to the greatest degree possible in order to have the space not for your own words to be spoken, but the words of the patient, and the words those words will generate in you in turn. 

In his book Attention and Interpretation, Bion goes on to spell out the advantages of leaving memory and desire behind: doing so allows the therapist "to increase his ability to exercise ‘acts of faith’." Such acts, he hastens to add, are not meant in the conventional "religious" sense. Rather, such acts are the necessary precursors to a genuinely scientific approach, open to where one is lead by the experience without memory or desire interposing themselves and subtly directing one in a particular and preconceived direction. 

All this is directed by and towards the goal of serving the patient: "If the psycho-analyst has not deliberately divested himself of memory and desire the patient can ‘feel’ this and is dominated by the ‘feeling’ that he is possessed by and contained in the.analyst’s state of mind, namely, the state represented by the term ‘desire’." The "desire" of the analyst then, especially when it is repeated and reembodied each session in the analyst's "memory" of that desire, can be restrictive of the patient and even harmful. 

Bion goes on to note this when he says that "desires for results....must not be allowed to proliferate."

This is a point I have seen others make, including the great Adam Phillips and Nina Coltart, who talks about the notion of "cure" with something close to horror. 

The problem with notions of cure is that they can often be simultaneously too small and too large, too impossible of realization. In addition, they can often bring with them unrealistic expectations, not least for those dealing with sustained, long-term trauma. Can there be healing from that? Yes. Can it be total, complete, without blemish, erasing all that was wrong, binding up every wound, and restoring the patient to some prelapsarian and Edenic position? Of course not. 

To abandon these notions of cure and practices of memory and desire is not easy. As the Symingtons recognize, "Bion’s technical recommendations are radical. To carry them out requires considerable discipline of an inner mental kind. What is required is nothing short of an inner emotional ascesis that can open out into new and unsuspected field of inquiry."

Bion seems to have been forced into some of these radical re-evaluations and new practices after working with a patient he took on as an "ideal" analysand, who was always agreeing with everything Bion said, but nothing changed. Externally this patient seemed to progress, but internally nothing changed. That analysand eventually committed suicide. 

From this, according to the Symingtons, Bion seems to have derived the sense that he failed the patient by not actually being open to him fully. Bion's own desires and memories may have been too restrictive for this patient and intruded into the analytic frame, crowding out a patient who already found most of his life restricted by the memories and desire of others, leaving him no room to breathe on his own. 

Adam Phillips and Leo Bersani on Intimacies

Some day I might write that very long review essay about Adam Phillips, almost all of whose books I have read and re-read.

One that had hitherto escaped my attention is a slender volume co-authored with Leo Bersani in 2008: Intimacies. Herewith just a few thoughts from it.

The book is characterized by an anti-historical approach which is surprising to find in psychoanalysis. By that I mean they begin by asking whether or not "psychoanalysis has misled us into believing, in its quest for normative life stories, that knowledge of oneself is conducive to intimacy" (vii).

More strongly still, the authors assert that "There are other satisfactions than the satisfactions of personal history" (3). This is not to say that history is irrelevant or can--or should be--escaped. But it is to take up again a theme developed across many of Phillips' books: the danger of imprisonment in the past, in the stories of our past which presume to determine who we are, what we are and are not allowed to think about ourselves.  

This is a danger which can in fact drive some people to analysis and therapy, but even there sometimes certain stories get reinforced if, e.g., one is especially wedded to a diagnostic history. It requires careful clinical discernment to know when to set aside diagnostic history and labels because they end up doing more harm than good, forcing people to believe something that may not work to their total good.

This becomes clear towards the end of the book when the authors note that "as a clinical practice, psychoanalysis is committed to the unsettling of the individual's hard-won (i.e., defensive) self-knowledge" (93). 

Another theme common in much of Phillips' writings--but here expressed in a more explicitly Lacanian vein--is the fear we have of being too much for ourselves. In this book, both Bersani and Phillips recognize "the fear of jouissance, despite and because of the longing for it,...is not to be underestimated" (97). 

Finally, perhaps the most interesting question raised by and in the book is this: must we understand ourselves in order to be happy? The authors do not quite put it this way, but instead note the assumption of most standard analytic therapy is that "whatever is strange about myself I must make familiar; recognition must replace bewilderment" (99). This they take to be the gist of Freud's famous (and famously mistranslated) "where id was, there shall ego be." 

But why? One of the things Phillips has helped me to see over the years is that a certain degree of self-forgetfulness is very much to be welcomed. Put in concrete terms, I have realized--never more so than during this pandemic--that one way to even temporarily lift one's mood is to go do something concrete for someone else, forgetting about your own struggles for a time. Make soup for someone in a shelter, or help shovel the driveway of your elderly neighbor. Such seemingly "banal" things can in their own way be therapeutic.