Three Papers of W.R. Bion
For those of us (which is all of us) who have struggled to read Bion over the years, wading through his often cryptic, ambiguous, or controversial utterances (or, worse still, his grids and other mathematical formulae that dredge up high-school traumata of various and sundry kinds), the prospect of a new book publishing three of his previously unpublished essays will be greeted with....ambivalence.
Appropriately enough, this collection begins with an excerpt from Bion's All My Sins Remembered in which he recollects with searing humility on how much time he has wasted over the years reading a "terrible lot of bilge" that has in turn prompted him to "add to the flood of rot" in his own writings. But reading all sorts of materials, even bilge, is useful insofar as it generates "epistemic crises" that prompt further searching and thinking, and prevent us from constructing rigid and unchanging structures of thought.
Suitably enough, this short book opens with a previously unpublished presentation of Bion on that most infamous of his themes: the idea of a clinician beginning each session "without memory or desire." Presented here is a paper, "Memory and Desire," first given without notes in Britain in 1965 at a psychoanalytical meeting (2 years before he gave a similar presentation in Los Angeles, which I discussed here). Before we get into that theme, which Bion treats very lightly here, he offers four prefatory comments that perhaps serve as justification for his claim: first, that our memories are often very fallible, and that even when we claim to have taken careful notes of a session, or written up the case, nonetheless "the distortion is really terrific" (p.3). This, I confess, is an irritation that occurs with me reading nearly every case report I have ever encountered: how neat and tidy they seem, and how they always conveniently and cogently illustrate the point at hand! Surely there has been a good deal of tidying up here, I have always suspected, but most clinical writers never admit to that. But when I compare these written records to the oral nature of a session, I am always at least a little bit suspicious of the author's "embroidery."
Second, much of the emotion of the session has probably been left out or is difficult to convey in writing. And for Bion, "the psychoanalytical experience is really...an emotional experience" (ibid). Third, the problem with having desires for the patient is that these can quickly become oppressive and misleading impositions of your own need to effect, and be seen to effect, a "cure," a word that Bion (as do others, including Nina Coltart) regards with obvious horror. Fourth and finally, allowing your own memory and desire to intrude is, he suggests, a way of trying--poorly--to control your own anxiety and uncertainty about what is happening in the room, a problem he will return to in the second paper, "Negative Capability."
The editor's post-script to this first paper gave me a gasp of delight in documenting--through other sources in Bion--that Bion was, in recommending that one denude oneself of memory and desire, drawing on his earlier reading in 16th-century Spanish mysticism of all things--above all its Carmelite proponent St. John of the Cross. I did a course on him with Richard Hardy when I was a psychology undergrad in Ottawa and his writings have haunted me for three decades now. There is, Mawson shows, an "ascetical" strand to Bion's writings, a theme I briefly treated here, and that owes a lot to John and also to Meister Eckhart.
I would have been glad to have this new book for the second essay alone: "Negative Capability." This is a concept in Bion that does a lot of work but he seems not to have fleshed out at least as far as I can see based on my very limited reading in his vast corpus, pictured below. It is also a concept that shows up in the work of other members of the so-called Independent Group of British psychoanalysts.
℣: "I understand that what I write does seem strange," Bion admits at the outset of this second paper (p.19) to which all the readers make their response:
℟: Amen!
None of these essays, in part because of their brevity as well as the circumstances under which they were delivered, is a comprehensive treatment of each theme. It is now clear to me that part of the reason for Bion's brevity and cryptic nature is so that he doesn't crowd out the reader. In ways I had not grasped before, he seems very much to require a reader to think with him. Previously, I felt that by going on about grids and beta elements and all the rest, Bion must have been trying to shake as many of us as possible off his tail and make it as difficult as possible for us to read him and read with him, but I am relieved to be wrong on this point.So Bion very much does want us to read with him and, indeed, to think beyond him. That becomes clear in this second paper where he notes in the third paragraph that "people often feel that I don't really give clinical examples," which he says is true before turning the tables on the critics and readers: "I want to give as my clinical example the session that you are going to have tomorrow with your patient. That is to say, a session that has not taken place"! He justifies this by appealing again to the inadequacies of language and the deceptions we impose by structuring clinical speech in ways to make it comprehensible to outsiders while draining it of its ineffable and perhaps irrecoverable feeling. This approach leads the editor in his post-script to make the interesting argument that "in listening to a scene described by a patient in analysis we are not constrained to the order or direction of events put to us by the 'narrativized' organisation presented to us by the patient" (p.30). I admit I heaved a sigh of relief at this for I have done this thing on several occasions but immediately felt guilty for doing so, wondering: "Who am I to doubt the patient's chronology?" And yet, if I allowed some doubt about the narrative organization to arise, or entertained an alternate ordering to events, it almost always allowed things to arise in discussion with a patient that got us out of some impasse or other or generated an otherwise inaccessable insight.
