BION IN PRACTICE: A STUDY OF W. R.

BIONS WORK AND ITS APPLICATION BY

PRACTICING PSYCHOANALYSTS

A dissertation submitted to the Wright Institute Graduate School of Psychology, in partial

fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Psychology

by
ALAN POEY
MAY 2015

2015
Alan Poey
All Rights Reserved


May 2015

BION IN PRACTICE: A STUDY OF W. R. BIONS WORK AND ITS APPLICATION BY

PRACTICING PSYCHOANALYSTS
by
ALAN POEY
The present qualitative study examines the ideas of W. R. Bion as they exist in the literature and
as they have been put to use by practicing psychoanalysts. A review of the literature presents a
detailed summary of Bions main ideas as he presented them in his written work and recorded
seminars and as they have been reflected and elaborated in the subsequent psychoanalytic
literature. Following the literature review, psychoanalysts who endorse significant Bionian
influence were interviewed about the importance and clinical usefulness that Bions ideas have
had for them in their psychoanalytic practices. They were also asked about the role that
psychoanalytic theory plays for them in their work, and about their subjective experience of
reading and studying Bion. Although the nature of Bions influence upon each psychoanalyst
varied widely, themes emerged across the interviews that highlighted certain Bionian ideas and
theoretical models as particularly clinically useful. It was also possible to generalize from the
participants reports a summary of what could be called a Bionian psychoanalytic orientation,
which includes a way of understanding and working with defense mechanisms, a model of
psychic change and growth through the analytic process, and a description of an analytic attitude
that prioritizes making contact with emotional truth, taking multiple points of view, paying
attention to the unknown and not-yet-symbolized, and maintaining curiosity and openness to
experience.


ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am full of gratitude for the generosity of the interview participants who bought two
hours of time out of their weekdays to meet with me. I feel I gained personally and
professionally in different ways from my experience with each one of them.
I would like to thank my dissertation committee, Susana Winkel, Ph.D. and Alan Kubler,
Ph.D. for their ongoing support and patience.
Finally, thank you to my wife Alyssa Poey for giving me energy and encouragement
throughout the evolution of this project.

ii


Table of Contents
Chapter I: Introduction ................................................................................................................1
Chapter II: Literature Review .....................................................................................................4
Bions Life and Professional Career .......................................................................................4
Reading Bion .............................................................................................................................9
Realistic Projective Identification .........................................................................................11
Frustration ...............................................................................................................................13
The Psychotic Part of the Personality ....................................................................................14
Attacks on Linking ..................................................................................................................16
The K Link ..............................................................................................................................17
The Truth Drive ......................................................................................................................19
K .............................................................................................................................................20
The Group and the Proto-mental ..........................................................................................23
Dreaming and Alpha-function ...............................................................................................25
Beta-elements ...........................................................................................................................31
The Grid ...................................................................................................................................34
Thoughts Without a Thinker .................................................................................................42
Container Contained () ................................................................................................43
Paranoid-Schizoid and Depressive Positions (Ps D) .......................................................49
Transformations ......................................................................................................................54
O ...............................................................................................................................................58
Transformations in O ..............................................................................................................65
Becoming ..................................................................................................................................66
Sensation and Intuition ..........................................................................................................68
Memory and Desire .................................................................................................................70
Chapter III: Methodology ..........................................................................................................82
Exploratory Questions ............................................................................................................82
Recruitment .............................................................................................................................82
Qualitative Method .................................................................................................................83
Chapter IV: Results ....................................................................................................................85
Participants Theoretical Orientation ...................................................................................85
The Interview ..........................................................................................................................87
Thematic Analysis ...................................................................................................................88
1. The influence of Melanie Klein ........................................................................................88
2. Learning theory is useful to an extent ...............................................................................89
3. Reading Bion is an emotional experience with potential benefits ....................................91
4. Advice on how to learn Bion ............................................................................................93
5. The internalization and development of functions ............................................................95
6. Different ways of thinking about psychosis ......................................................................98
7. The role of truth in clinical practice ................................................................................100
8. Relative usefulness of Bions concepts and models .......................................................103
8A. Projective identification as communication ............................................................103
8B. Containment and the mother-infant analogy ...........................................................105
8C. Alpha-function ........................................................................................................108
8D. The concept of O .....................................................................................................108

iii


8E. Without memory, desire or understanding ..............................................................110
9. Other related areas of interest .........................................................................................113
Chapter V: Discussion ..............................................................................................................115
History of Bionian Influence in the Bay Area ....................................................................115
Why There is No Such Thing as a Bionian Analyst ........................................................115
The Role of Theory in Practice ............................................................................................117
Reading and Learning Bion .................................................................................................117
Summary of What Could be Called a Bionian Psychoanalytic Orientation ...................118
Relative Usefulness of Bions Ideas and Models ................................................................120
Strengths and Limitations of the Present Study ................................................................120
Suggestions for Further Research .......................................................................................122
Conclusions ............................................................................................................................122
References ..................................................................................................................................124
Appendix A: Human Studies Protocol ....................................................................................143
Appendix B: Informed Consent ...............................................................................................145
Appendix C: Interview Schedule .............................................................................................147

iv

1
Chapter I: Introduction

Wilfred Ruprecht Bion (1897-1979) is the most cited author in psychoanalytic literature
after Sigmund Freud (Levine & Brown, 2013). He is also not well known outside psychoanalytic
spheres. He is known in other areas of the mental health field mostly for his widely published
book Experiences in Groups for its influence on the practice of group psychotherapy and on
group theory in its many applications. But the psychoanalytic literature continues to reverberate
from all periods of Bions work, in particular his innovations in the psychoanalytic
understanding of the psychotic level of mental functioning, his theory of thinking and the
development of the capacity for thought, and his contributions to psychoanalytic technique.
The value of Bions contribution to psychoanalysis is best attested to by psychoanalysts
and psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapists who have attempted to integrate his ideas into
their own unique approach to the work and taken note of the results. Many of Bions concepts
are tools for thinking (Ferro, 2005a) about the human psyche, the psychoanalytic interaction
and psychoanalytic technique, and how they are used in thought or practice depends on the user
and the experiences to which they are applied. The value of Bions models, when applicable to
experience, consists in their ability to invite new ways of attending to that experience so that new
understandings can be reached or new unknowns be revealed. The value of Bions ideas
pertaining to analytic technique consists in any benefit to the patients of clinicians within whom
those ideas have found resonance.
Over the past 30 years, a growing number of psychoanalysts have been influenced by
Bions ideas and models in their approach to psychoanalysis, their ways of conceptualizing the
human psyche and the analytic situation, and their understanding of the role of the analyst in
facilitating change processes. Among practicing analysts, there is a portion who would endorse
significant Bionian1 influence upon the development of their style and approach to
psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic certification programs are increasingly incorporating Bion into
their curriculums, and a growing number of teaching analysts are applying what could be called a
Bionian perspective in supervision. Bion is also becoming more included in the psychodynamic
theory portion of curriculums of Doctorate and Masters level graduate programs in clinical
psychology and counseling. Clinic-based practicums, internships, and postdoctoral programs
where graduate students get their clinical experience are also venues for the transmission of
Bions ideas through supervision, didactic trainings and readings.
For the student of psychoanalysis or psychoanalytic psychotherapy, Bions work can be
difficult to approach because of the nature of his ideas and his nature of presenting them.
Reading his work can be illuminating and generative, but also frustrating and alienating.
Engaging with his relatively manageable in size but extremely dense body of work is often not
the way that Bions ideas are learned, as many students instead absorb Bions language and
constructs from teachers, supervisors, fellow students, and by way of the psychoanalytic
literature which, post-Bion, abounds with references to, reformulations of and elaborations upon
his original ideas. As a result there are many ways that Bions influence can manifest for the
student of psychoanalytic thought.

1

Bions daughter Parthenope Bion Talamo stated, We cannot say that we are Bionians, because being
Bionian would mean, above all, being oneself, being mentally free in ones journeys of discovery,
always, however, on the basis of iron personal discipline, because liberty and anarchy are not synonyms
(Borgogno & Merciai, 2000, pp. 56-57).

But Bions dynamic models of psychic(al) and emotional interaction and even his
technical suggestions are very abstract and often presented ambiguously and in the absence of
clinical material, and their usefulness to clinicians who have taken the time to attempt to
understand or apply them has not been studied in any kind of systematic fashion. Individual
psychoanalytic authors will often cite Bion to provide theoretical backing to clinical exposition.
Occasionally in article publications authors will explore select ideas from Bions work
attempting to shed new light on their clinical relevance, sometimes attempting to bring them to
life with clinical examples, and several books have been published attempting to elucidate the
clinical applications of Bions full range of theories. But no studies exist that have attempted to
make comparisons across the experience of different analysts with regard to the clinical
applicability of Bions ideas.
This project aims to gather phenomenological data from practicing psychoanalysts in the
San Francisco Bay Area who have been significantly shaped by Bion in their work, investigating
how they have been able to make use of, and make sense of in their own way, his ideas
pertaining to the analytic experience. The intention is to reveal a more real-world picture of the
nature of the impact that Bions ideas have made on practicing analysts and draw attention to the
aspects of his work that have proven the most useful and compelling. It will explore the
experience of reading Bion and making Bions concepts personal: how they take root in the
internal world of each individual analyst and how each analyst applies them to their work. By
comparing different analysts personal relationship with Bions ideas, the author hopes to
identify which of Bions contributions to psychoanalysis appear the most useful and valuable to
practicing analysts who endorse Bionian influence, and demonstrate through exposition of the
data collected ways that individual analysts are able to actualize Bions intention that everyone
create their own meaning from his work and discover its usefulness for themselves in their own
way.
The interview investigates the nature of Bions influence upon each participants
approach to the work. It does this through the use of three types of questions. One type is
questions that make no reference to Bion, asking participants about the role of theory in their
work and their understanding of change, growth, and the psychoanalytic process. A second type
is questions that inquire generally about the impact of Bions ideas upon their work, asking
participants to speak freely about whichever ideas and concepts come to mind first as influential.
A third type of questions ask about specific Bionian models and topic areas taken up in Bions
work (e.g. truth, alpha-function, container-contained, memory and desire, etc.) to explore both
the nature of their actual clinical usefulness to analysts as well as the multiplicity of perspectives
to which each topic, idea or model is conducive. The interview also inquires into how Bion has
fit in to each analysts training, study, and theoretical orientation. It also explores the unique
experience of reading Bion, and takes up the question of how Bion might best be taught or
studied. It is hoped that the results gathered from this project will demonstrate the influence
Bions ideas can have upon psychoanalysts ways of attending to experience in the room,
engaging with patients, and conceptualizing psychical and bi-personal processes.
An extensive literature review will first be conducted by the author in attempts to present
an inclusive but reasonably distilled portrayal of Bions main ideas through his reading of Bion
and his study of the echoes and elaborations of Bions concepts in the psychoanalytic literature.
It will reflect and be informed by the authors engagement with Bions thoughts as Bion
presented them, and as they have been refracted through the lenses of subsequent psychoanalytic
thinkers. More attention will be given to ideas that were developed in greater depth by Bion and

that have garnered significant re-mention in literature, as the durability of certain ideas over time
can be taken as a reflection of their potency as analytically useful concepts. Included at the
beginning is a summary of Bions life and career drawing heavily from Blandonus (1994)
biography, followed by commentary on the experience of reading Bion mainly intended to
demonstrate how that experience has been put into words by psychoanalytic authors. Bions
contributions to psychoanalytic thought are then presented, organized around main topics and
presented in an order meant to be read in sequence.
The literature review aims to provide and demonstrate a basic understanding of Bions
thought, and runs the risk, as does any expository treatment of Bions ideas, of simplification,
mischaracterization, and reification. The process of researching and writing this summary has
functioned as part of the authors process of preparation for the interviews. It is also intended to
provide context against which the emergent content of the interviews can stand. To the extent
that the author has achieved a reasonable portrayal of Bions ideas as they are available to the
world in print, its juxtaposition to the phenomenological data gathered in the interviews will
speak to ways Bions ideas become transformed through the processes involved in their
internalization, personalization and practical application over time.

4
Chapter 2: Literature Review

Bions Life and Professional Career

Wilfred Ruprecht Bion was born on September 8th, 1897 in Muttra of the Punjab region
in what were the United Provinces of India during the days of the British Raj. His father was a
civil engineer in irrigation, a renowned big game hunter, and a part-time secretary to the Indian
Congress. In his autobiography, Bion (1982) recalls the power of his fathers character, a
sensitive man with a big temper. Bions mother devoted herself to the home, and he recalls
fearing her unpredictable moods. Bion wonders if he and his rival sister may have been closer to
their Indian nursemaid than to their parents. (Blandonu, 1994).
As customary for children of colonial class civil servants, at the age of eight Bion was
sent off by himself to boarding school in England. The loss and culture shock were extreme, and
for the first few years Bion endured miserable homesickness. But he made friends with two boys
whose families adopted him, providing warmth and some much needed sense of belonging. In
his teens Bion excelled at sports, particularly rugby and swimming, which helped to restore his
social confidence and sense self worth. When Bion graduated in 1915 the Great War was already
underway. His wish was to be an international sportsman at a prestigious university, but his
grades and his familys finances made that prospect unlikely. After a failed attempt to earn a
scholarship to Oxford, Bion decided to enlist in the military. He was initially rejected at the
recruiting office, but subsequently accepted with the help of a well-connected friend of his
father. Before leaving for training camp he gave away his books and belongings, departing for
war with the belief that he would not return. (Blandonu, 1994).
Bion (1982, p. 112) does not look fondly upon the hard-headed, timid, gloomy and
revolting young man he was then, and recalls feeling alienated from his fellow training officers,
a familiar feeling for him. But thanks to his athleticism he did well in training. He was assigned
to the Royal Tank Corps and deployed to serve in France, where he was soon given the position
of Tank Commander. During a reconnaissance mission Bion narrowly missed a bullet to the
head, and recalls feeling somewhat disturbed by his own indifference to death which the
experience revealed. In 1918 came the battle of Cambrai, a coordinated attack on a German
Army communication center. Deep into battle, Bions tank was hit and immobilized by a shell,
narrowly missing the ninety gallon gas tank. Leaving behind his tank he occupied a trench with
his men in combat, then moved about in the open to direct other tanks. Informed that he was the
only remaining officer, he was asked to take command of the entire infantry. He accepted, aware
that he knew nothing of infantry fighting, and the troops managed to hold their ground. For his
actions in this battle he was recommended for the Victoria Cross and awarded both the
Distinguished Service Order (DSO) by the United Kingdom and the Croix de Chevalier of the
Lgion d'honneur by the French government, honors which Bion (1985, p. 11) felt embarrassed
and ashamed to receive. (Blandonu, 1994).
The horror of war had a deep and lasting influence on Bion. He saw friends shot and
killed before his eyes, and fellow men led to their deaths following orders issued by ranking
officers removed from the reality of the battlefield. This experience instilled in him a distrust for
authority and leadership and the structure of the establishment, and brought him face to face
with death, both literal and psychological. Bion writes that he himself died on August 8th, 1918
at the battle of Cambrai (Bion, 1982, p. 266).
Although Bion never took ownership of his courage (preferring in his autobiographical
works to reflect on his fear and cowardice), courage is clearly evident in Bions approach to

psychoanalysis, where placed above all else is the commitment to Truth, no matter how
threatening or disturbing. Bions ability to keep hold of his thinking mind under fire and in the
face of fear and uncertainty would also continue to serve him later in his career, particularly in
his approach to facilitating therapy groups and in his work with schizophrenic patients. Referring
to the battle of Cambrai and Bions war experience in general, John Wisdom (1987, p. 543)
writes, it fostered a superlative capacity to stay functional under stress; in other words, for Bion,
what it meant to be brave was not to feel no fear, but to be able to operate and continue to do
what one had to do, and, of course, give confidence to ones men, no matter how great the terror
of the situation. A number of authors (e.g. Blandonu, 1994; Brown, 2011; Eigen, 2005;
Szykierski, 2010) have considered the effects of Bions war experiences on his psychoanalytic
writings, which is evident in recurring themes of psychic obliteration and deadening processes,
and his use of war terminology in psychoanalytic description. In an interesting full circle, Bions
first publication (1940) studied the effect that incessant bombing prior to battle has in stirring the
enemy soldiers unconscious phantasies through fear and confusion, the intention being to cloud
their mind and their ability to think clearly (Brown, 2013). In 1979 in the last paper he wrote
before his death titled Making the Best of a Bad Job, Bion (1994, p. 332) returns to this idea as
an analogy for the unconscious tactics of patients, for whom psychoanalysis can become a battle
in which inciting powerful emotions in the other is the only weapon of defense.
After the war Bion immediately applied to Queens College, Oxford, and had no trouble
gaining admission upon mention of his sporting achievements and military decorations. He chose
to read Modern History, and continued to excel in swimming and rugby. It was here that he took
up an interest in philosophy, particularly Immanuel Kant, through the influence of Oxford-based
philosopher H. J. Paton. Bion then spent a year at a French University improving his French,
before returning to his childhood school to take a teaching position. After being asked to resign
due to an accusation by a students parent of boundary crossing, Bion turned his aims to the
study of medicine with the intention to become a psychiatrist. Despite mediocre grades at
Oxford, he was accepted at University College in London, where he began his medical training
in 1924. There he was influenced by his surgery instructor Wilfred Trotter, a mentor and father
figure for Bion. Trotter knew Freud and Ernest Jones, and was widely known for his publications
on the role of herd instincts in social psychology (Torres & Hinshelwood, 2013). It was this
relationship that first sparked Bions interest in the psychological study of group mentality.
(Blandonu, 1994).
By 1930 Bion had earned his medical qualification as well as the Gold Medal for Clinical
Surgery (Bion, 1985). During his six years of medical training, he fell passionately in love with a
young woman who accepted his marriage proposal, only to break off their engagement a few
weeks later to Bions shock and dismay. During this time Bion began psychotherapy. After
receiving his degree he set up a small private psychiatric practice in London, supplementing his
income with part-time work at hospitals. He joined the Tavistock Clinic in 1932, one of the first
outpatient clinics to make psychoanalytic psychotherapy available to underprivileged individuals
unable to afford private treatment. It was there that he treated Nobel laureate Samuel Beckett for
two years.2 In 1937 he began his own psychoanalytic treatment with John Rickman, a Kleinian
innovator and prominent member of the British Psycho-Analytical Society, who would later
introduce Bion to Melanie Klein and suggest he be analyzed by her. (Blandonu, 1994).

2

Simon (1988) speculates that Beckett may have been the patient described by Bion in his 1950
membership paper The Imaginary Twin (republished in Second Thoughts, 1967b).

When the Second World War broke out Bion reenlisted, joining the Army Medical
Corps, and like many of his colleagues began treating soldiers suffering from shellshock and
other nervous disorders. He then took a post as Command Psychiatrist at a military hospital in
Chester. During this time he got married to stage actress Betty Jardine, whom he had met while
working in London. Soon afterward he was sent to York and then to Edinburgh where he was
posted to the first formed War Office Selection Board, where Bion was highly influential in
developing the Armys methods of psychological testing for the purpose of officer selection. It
was there that Bion conceived of the leaderless group project where candidates were given a
communal task and evaluated based on their abilities to work effectively with others. He also
convinced Regional Command to allow candidates for officer training to be nominated by their
peers, a change widely recognized for its effectiveness in identifying suitable candidates, despite
being met with much dissent from above. (Blandonu, 1994).
Bion then asked to be transferred to Northfield hospital in Birmingham, one of the
nations largest military rehabilitation hospitals, where he would be able to work alongside his
former analyst John Rickman. For years Rickman had been interested in applying psychoanalytic
principles to the group setting, and Rickman and Bion were now able to operationalize a model
for group treatment that they had outlined together three years prior. Rickman ran group
treatment in the hospital wing, holding daily group sessions and offering individual
consultations. When patients were ready they were moved to the training wing, headed by Bion,
where they were reintroduced to army life and assessed for their ability to return to active
service. Here, Bion had set in place a transparent system where patients were given freedom to
engage in projects on their own terms, and through their own choices and actions could
demonstrate competence as well as willingness to return to service. Although the project was
shut down prematurely, its success led to the development of Northfields therapeutic
community model of psychiatric practice, which was adopted by hospitals throughout Britain
and the United States after the war. (Blandonu, 1994).
After leaving Northfield Bion took a position interviewing liberated prisoners of war at
Selhurst, a suburb of London, working again for the War Office Selection Boards which had
shifted priority from officer selection to rehabilitation and redeployment. The proximity to
London allowed him to see his wife Betty more frequently, and she soon became pregnant. With
Bettys consent Bion left to Normandy to implement group treatment for soldiers closer to their
units. It was here that Bion received the news of his baby girl Parthenopes birth, which was
followed three days later by the tragic news that Betty had died of a pulmonary embolism.
Devastated, Bion finished his military service and returned to London at the close of the war to
be with his daughter. He resumed his training at the Institute of Psycho-Analysis and began a
second analysis with Melanie Klein, which lasted until 1953. During this time of relative
equilibrium Bion met Francesca, a young widow, whom he married and with whom he had two
children. (Blandonu, 1994).
Invited by the Tavistock Clinic to take therapeutic groups using his own technique,
Bion approached the group process with the intention to make the study of their tensions a
group task (Bion, 1961, p. 29). Despite the wishes and expectations of the group members, Bion
had no intention to lead or teach, adopting the same suspension of leadership approach that he
had used with groups in the army. Drawing inspiration from Trotters ideas on the human herd,
Freuds study of group psychology, and Kleinian theory of unconscious psychotic mechanisms,
Bion proceeded to develop his highly influential psychoanalytic theory of group process,
presented in a collection of papers first published in the journal Human Relations and later

published together in book form as Experiences in Groups (1961). A collection of essays mostly
written between 1948 and 1952, it is his most widely-read publication to date, and can be seen to
contain conceptual roots of his psychoanalytic theory to come.
Bion then went on to study schizophrenia alongside two of Kleins most eminent
students, Hanna Segal and Herbert Rosenfeld. Applying Kleinian concepts to his work with
psychotic individuals, between 1950 and 1959 Bion wrote a series of highly original papers on
the psychotic personality, which he presented at international congresses and published in the
International Journal of Psycho-Analysis (collected and re-published with retrospective
commentary in Second Thoughts in 1967). Bion became Director of the London Clinic of
Psychoanalysis from 1956-1962, then President of the British Psycho-Analytical Society from
1962-1965.
1958-1960 was a particularly fertile period in Bions creative thinking, during which time
he transformed Freuds theory of dreaming into his now widely revered concept of alphafunction, while simultaneously putting into writing many of the previously unthinkable aspects
of the trauma he experienced at the Battle of Amiens,3 an endeavor prompted by a return visit to
the battle site in 1958 (Brown, 2013). In 1962, drawing upon insights gained from his work with
patients with thought disorders, Bion published a short and highly influential paper titled A
Theory of Thinking4 (1962a), followed by his first book, Learning from Experience (1962b),
which taken together culminate an epistemological meta-psychology accounting for the
formation of the capacity to think, learn, and process emotional experience. This began what is
sometimes called Bions epistemological period, since his study became largely focused around
mental processes that either promote or prevent contact with knowledge and emotional truth.
In 1963 he published his second book, Elements of Psychoanalysis, in which he
organized and expanded his theory of thinking into a biaxial table known as the Grid, designed
to categorize thought according to its use and level of abstraction. This phase of Bions work
attempts to create a language of scientific standardization for the study of psychical phenomena,
infusing the psychoanalytic lexicon with signs and symbols denoting functions and variables.
These efforts reach their crescendo in his third book, Transformations (1965), a difficult book
that can be read as a series of conceptual experiments (Meltzer, 1978) for describing the
movement from one form of thought or representation to another within the context of analytic
observation and communication. Towards the end of the book Bion abruptly abandons the
language of mathematical precision and begins to borrow language from Neo-Platonist
mysticism, drawing upon Christian mystics such as Meister Eckhart and Saint John of the Cross.
The shift in language reflects a shift in Bions focus from how something comes to be
represented to what happens at an unrepresented, undifferentiated level and how changes at this
level can be initiated or at least not be inhibited by the analyst (Vermote, 2011b, p. 1091).
Bions attempt to impart a mode of apprehension that is non-linguistic (White, 2011a, p. 218)
continues through his fourth and final theoretical book Attention and Interpretation5 (1970).
Although Bions writing is consistently grounded in the analytic experience, matters of analytic

3

Published in War Memoirs: 1917-1919 (Bion, 1997b) together with a war diary written for his parents
while at Oxford shortly after demobilization
4
To this day one of the ten most frequently accessed articles in the psychoanalytic literature (Ferro &
Foresti, 2013, p. 361)
5
In 1966 and 1967 Bion submitted two papers to the British Psycho-Analytic Society which published
them in its Scientific Bulletin. The ideas from those papers, Catastrophic Change and Notes on
Memory and Desire, are developed throughout Attention and Interpretation.

technique become more explicit in his later work, and in Attention and Interpretation Bion
presents a set of disciplinary guidelines for the analyst designed to optimize receptivity to the
unknown and unformulated, studying what facilitates and what inhibits the observation of
psychic events in the consulting room (Lyth, 1980, p. 271).
In the late 1960s members of the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society were attempting to
establish a place for Kleinian theory in Los Angeles. They invited a number of prominent
London Kleinians to come speak, Bion included. After Bions visit, they asked him to stay and
teach in Los Angeles. The offer made sense to Bion, who was ready to step away from the fetters
of his role in London and start afresh with a new audience of colleagues in putting forward
some of his newly emerging ideas on analytic technique (Aguayo, 2013, para. 4). His thinking
was growing increasingly divergent from the Kleinian orthodox, and the mystical turn taken in
his third and fourth books would be read by some as heretical (Grotstein, 2007). With Attention
and Interpretation already written, the Bions made the move in 1968. Bion was 71. By that time
his work and reputation had begun to spread across the globe. Shortly after the move he was
invited to Argentina where he was received by Leon Grinberg, part of a prolific Kleinian work
group who would shortly thereafter publish in many languages the first expository treatment of
Bions ideas (Grinberg, Sor, & Bianchedi, 1975). Bion was also invited to teach in So Paulo for
two weeks. His reception in Brazil was enthusiastic, and throughout the 1970s he held seminars
in So Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Brazilia. Simultaneously, Italian psychoanalytic thought was
taking rapidly to Bions ideas (Corrao & Neri, 1981), and in 1977 he held a series of seminars in
Rome.
During this late phase of Bions life, alongside teaching locally and internationally,
supervising, seeing analysands, and taking summers to work on an old farmhouse he had
purchased in France (Blandonu, 1994), Bion stayed busy with his writing. He continued to
produce psychoanalytic essays opening up new questions and developing new ideas, often
drawing analogy from history, mythology and biology. During this time Bion was also working
on his autobiography, a self-analytical, starkly honest and often quite self-deprecating account of
his life from his childhood in India through the end of WWII.6 He was also working on a threepart work of psychoanalytic fiction, A Memoir of the Future, which Francesca Bion has called,
a psycho-analytically orientated autobiographical fantasythe most controversial and least
understood of his books (Bion, 1980). Oliver Lyth (1980, p. 272) describes it as puzzling,
exciting, shocking, and stimulating all at once, suggesting that it may be a long time before
this difficult work is understood in all its implications. Set in the year 2000, it is written largely
as if a dream, where each character, grouped together in dialogue, could be seen to represent a
different part of Bions mind or mind in general, illuminating, as Meltzer and Gelati conjecture,
Bions view of the multi-tribal structure of the un-unified modern psyche (Meltzer, 1986, p.
137). The characters amount to a psychoanalytic zoo filled with beautiful and ugly creatures
(Bion, 1991, p. 239) whose significance lies in their links and tensions (Williams, 2010, p. 32).
The novel traces the complex mind in action, talking from many vertices, from the whole gamut
of his yearsthe foetus in the womb to the 77-year-oldit presents the living drama of his
internal history; amusing, argumentative, profound, puzzling, always unexpected, sometimes
blindingly, obviously true (Harris, 1987a, p. 344). Meg Harris Williams, the first to study the
trilogy in depth (1983, 1985), writes that though derived from novel, dream-poem, play,

6

The Long Week-End 1897-1919: Part of a Life, published in 1982, covers childhood through his WWI
experiences. All My Sins Remembered: Another Part of a Life, published in 1985 along with family letter
correspondences, covers through the end of WWII.

Socratic dialogue, its genre is new and unique (1983, p. 75). To whatever degree both selfexploration and aesthetic exercise, it stands a highly imaginative living demonstration of many of
his ideas about psychoanalysis and the human psyche.
Originally intending to remain in California only three or four years, the Bions spent
eleven years in Los Angeles. In 1979 they moved to Oxford, Bions intellectual birthplace, and at
the age of 82 Bion was setting up a new private practice while making travel plans to work with
a psychoanalytic group in Bombay, India (Lyth, 1980) when he developed acute myeloid
leukemia (F. Bion, 1995) which took his life a month later. In the decades following his death
came the publication of his autobiography, his war memoirs, letter correspondences, book
reviews, interviews, his novel, eleven more of his papers, his personal theoretical diary entitled
Cogitations, and transcripts of lectures, seminars, supervisions and discussions held in So
Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Brazilia, Rome, London, Paris, New York and Los Angeles. In 2014
Karnac Books published The Complete Works of W. R. Bion in sixteen volumes.
In the 80s and 90s Bion quickly became one of the most cited authors in the
psychoanalytic literature of Latin America (Rocha Barros, 1995), and simultaneously Bions
work was having a deep and rapid influence on Italian psychoanalysis (Corrao & Neri, 1981). In
America Bion had made a lasting impression through his presence in Los Angeles and visits to
New York, and his popularity has since spread to the San Francisco Bay Area and Seattle. In the
last two decades, conferences have been held devoted to the development of Bions ideas in
cities across the world, including Turin, Buenos Aires, Los Angeles, So Paulo, Rome, Boston,
and Porto Alegre.
Although Bion never liked being classified a Kleinian (Borgogno & Merciai, 2000), by
the time of his death he had made a permanent mark on Kleinian thinking in London and across
the world. All Kleinians today regard their present practice and theory as having been
significantly molded by his work (Hinshelwood, 1991, p. 232). But Bions work has influenced
psychoanalysis across all its cracks and fissures, and the use and development of his conceptual
models by contributors to the field has only been increasing steadily to this day. His thinking has
had a shaping influence on the work of prominent psychoanalytic authors and teachers such as
James Grotstein (who is also a former analysand of Bion), Donald Meltzer, Thomas Ogden,
Michael Eigen, Frances Tustin, Betty Joseph, Andr Green, Antonino Ferro, and Neville
Symington. In a way that is not true of any other contemporary psychoanalytic writer, we are
still dealing with the consequences and implications of Bions ideas (Bell, 2011, p. 81). His
own intuitive thinking was so far in advance of anyone elses in our field that its seminal effect
can only begin to be felt (Harris, 1987a, p. 344).
Reading Bion
Bions writings possess an intellectual breadth that resembles Freuds (Hinshelwood &
Torres, 2013a). His creative and interdisciplinary approach to psychoanalysis draws from
mathematics, philosophy, biology, chemistry, physics, astronomy, scientific logic, theology,
mysticism, aesthetics, literature, poetry, history and mythology. His interdisciplinary forays
broaden the scope of psychoanalytic discourse and generate unexpected links (Blandonu
1994, p. 192) for the reader. Bion writes with bold idiosyncrasy, challenging aesthetic and
linguistic conventions through his original style, and philosophical and theoretical adherences
through his original thinking. He attempts in several ways to wipe clean the slate of theoretical
associations to achieve fresh outlooks, unsaturated with memory and uncontaminated from
intellectual prejudice (Hinshelwood & Torres, 2013b, p. xv). He has a way of using common

10

words or phrases in ways that alter or redefine their generally accepted meaning (e.g. dreaming,
faith, linking, common sense), while at other times he will select novel notational symbols to
designate conceptual models (e.g. -function, -elements, , PSD) in order to avoid the
penumbra of associations (Bion, 1962b, p. 2) associated with existing psychoanalytic terms. In
his later writing as his interests shift to the less knowable layers of experience, increasingly he
wrote from as near as he could get to a voice coming from inside the unconscious (Young,
2003), a trend that culminates in his dream novel.
Bions writing is suggestive and generative rather than lucid and clarifying (Schermer,
2003, p. 227). He writes in a way that forces readers to do their own thinking and apply to it their
own passion for psychoanalysis as they try to make use of and discover the value of his models,
which is perhaps in part responsible for Bions relative obscurity outside of the psychoanalytic
community, as well as for the tendency to sanctify him while not really understanding him
(Hinshelwood, 1991, p. 229). At first attempt, reading Bion is like reading in the dark (Eigen,
1998, p. 71). Rather than reading Bion, one is thrown into his mind and asked to have a look
around (Horne, Sowa & Isenman, 2000, p. 115). What one finds is a writer whose intention is
not to be identified with, and whose uniqueness is uncompromising. Bions idiosyncratic use of
language achieves a poetic syntax quite distinctive; so distinctive in fact that his impact on other
peoples modes and content of thought can be traced, like a radioactive compound, circulating in
the stream of their language usage (Meltzer, 1978, p. 274).
Bions psychoanalytic texts are unapologetically challenging to the reader. There is no
doubt that Bion is a difficult writer (Ogden, 2004a, p. 287), at times infuriatingly difficult
(Meltzer, 1986, p. 22). The difficulty lies in both the nature of his ideas and their unusual
presentation. Bion often wrote in myths and metaphors mixed with seemingly abstruse or
esoteric remarks, and with a minimum of explanatory discourse (Schermer, 2003, p. 226).
Paradoxically, he is also one of the most precise psychoanalytic writers (Eigen, 1985, p. 321)
in his exacting choice of words. His unyielding faithfulness to his unique way of thinking does
not lend readily to accessibility or comprehensibility, although it is very likely that he wrote in
the way he thought could best convey what he had to say (Young, 2003). Among his expositors,
Bions writing style is a frequent source of comment, earning such colorful descriptions as
gnarled and quirky (Boris, 1986, p. 161); non-linear, labyrinthine and enigmatic
(Hinshelwood & Torres, 2013b, p. xv); elusive, recondite, overcondensed and open-ended
(Grotstein, 2004b, p. 1083); complex, compact, and tortuous (Grotstein, 1987, p. 61); gnomic,
irritating and intensely stimulating (Hinshelwood, 1991, p. 229); often turgid, frequently
confounding (maddeningly so), and regularly mystifying (Ogden, 2012, p. 97); abstruse and
ambiguousfrequently terse and seemingly apodictic (Borgogno & Merciai, 2000, p. 59);
opaque, even oracular (Young, 2003); epigrammatical (Billow, 1999, p. 630); aphoristic
(Wisdom, 1987, p. 543) and cryptic (Symington, 2004, p. 1044).
It is Bions intention that his writing be pro- and e-vocative (Bion, 1977). A book would
have failed for the reader if it does not become an object of study, and the reading of it an
emotional experience in itself (Bion, 1992, p. 261). In the introduction to his first book
Learning from Experience, referring to the obscurities the reader will encounter, Bion writes
that the reader may find the effort to clarify these for himself is rewarding and not simply work
that has been forced on him because I have not done it myself (1962b, p. ii). The reader
proceeds to find Bion leaving thoughts half-formulated and models incompletely defined,
dropping them and picking them back up as he pleases in quite an unsystematic way. It is as if

11

he offers us the bare essential pieces of a puzzle that we are to fill in (Grotstein, 2004b, p.
1083).
It is true that Bions work has to be studied and repeatedly re-read before a feeling of
understanding is reached, and even then there is always doubt (Steiner, 1982, p. 492). This is
because Bion intends readers to do their own thinking, reach their own interpretations and
develop their own meaning (Billow, 1999, p. 630; Blandonu, 1994, p. 221; Giffney, 2013;
Ogden, 2004a, 2012; Schermer, 2003; Sullivan, 2010 p. 40). In the same approach he advocates
taking with analytic patients, Bion favors opening up active conjecture in the mind of the reader,
inviting them to arrive at their own personally derived truths, rather than feeding them prethought understandings. The readers comprehension of my meaning should contain an element
that will remain unsatisfied until he meets the appropriate realization (Bion, 1962b p. 96). By
remaining intriguingly suggestive while elusive, his readers thinking is enlisted to pull together
a coherent picture, only to be plunged back into doubt and confusion as new unintegrated
elements are added. This is at core a hermeneutic approach in which there is a progressive
dialectical movement between obscurity and clarification which moves toward, though never
achieves, closure (Ogden, 2012, p. 101).
Bion wrote with an exhilarating terror of not being understood (Blandonu, 1994, p.
274). If psychoanalysts are by nature drawn to that which they dont understand, it should be no
wonder that the field has become so drawn to Bion. I can either be comprehensible and
misleading, or truthful and incomprehensible (Bion, 1990, p. 12). In this statement one hears
Bions view of truth as something ultimately inexpressible. Aware of the deadening effects of
saturation by fixed meanings, Bion aims to leave his objects of study unpinned, alluded to but
undefined. It was Bions project not to define anything, least of all truth, but to set up conditions
for allowing what is true to break through (Horne, Sowa & Isenman, 2000, p. 116).
Bion demands of his readers an emotional engagement with the text, which often serves
as an opportunity to demonstrate for the reader in vivo some of the psychoanalytic concepts Bion
hopes to illuminate. Bion writes about the importance in psychoanalytic work of being able to
remain in a place of uncertainty and doubt without anxiously reaching towards premature
understanding, and his readers are given ample opportunity for practice. Bions ideas often come
at the reader in fragments, unintegrated and split from one another, and the result can feel
persecutory and difficult to tolerate. His use of grammar can be quite unusual, and certain
sentences are written in ways that make them impossible to decipher with any confidence.
Bion has written that he is more confident in his abilities to recreate an emotional
experience in his readers than in his abilities to tell the reader about the emotional experience in
question (Bion, 1992, p. 219). Indeed, at times the reader feels like an analyst trying to squeeze
understanding out of the statements of a psychotic patient, and at other times the reader feels like
the patient or infant in Bions descriptions: unwilling to think, or brimming with frustrated envy
for the absent and self-sufficient object of nourishment, the undisturbed breast (Bion, 1962b, p.
96). At times, reading Bion is like reading a kan, where at a certain point the only option
becomes turning attention and inquiry inward. Out of the struggle unexpected illuminations may
emerge.
Realistic Projective Identification
In 1946, Melanie Klein extended Freuds concept of projection into her theory of
projective identification, an unconscious intrapsychic omnipotent phantasy occurring in the mind
of the infant, but which can be seen operating in people of all ages. It is a primitive defense

12

mechanism where split-off parts of the ego areprojected on to the mother or, as I would rather
call it, into the mother (Klein, 1946, p. 102). The projected aspects of the infants mind can then
be experienced in the other as separate from the self. This may be done to rid the ego of bad parts
in preservation of a good internal world, or to preserve its good parts outside of a bad internal
world. Bion (1957, p. 266) describes how this process manifests pathologically in the analytic
situation: The patient splits off a part of his personality and projects it into the object where it
becomes installed, sometimes as a persecutor, leaving the psyche, from which it has been split
off, correspondingly impoverished.
Studying the projective mechanisms at play in his work with schizophrenic and
borderline psychotic patients, Bion became interested in what he observed to be a
communicative function of projective identification, an insight that would form the basis of his
theory of thinking and the formation of the mind, and have enormous technical implications for
the field of psychoanalysis regarding the importance of the analysts experience of
countertransference. Beyond its consistence in intrapsychic phantasy, Bion proposed that
projective identification is a bi-personal intersubjective process involving the minds of two,
whether infant and caregiver or patient and analyst.7 Bion distinguishes between pathological or
excessive projective identification as described by Klein and normal or realistic projective
identification, the latter of which forms the communicative link between infant and mother (or
patient and analyst), essential to the development of the infants (or patients) capacity to
represent and process emotional experience.
Initially lacking the ability to make use of or represent incomprehensible emotional
sensory data impinging its awareness, the infant will project or evacuate these elements into the
mother, relying on her to do whatever has to be done to convert them into a form suitable for
employmentby the infant (Bion, 1962a, p. 309). Bion uses the term reverie to describe the
mothers ability to intuit the experience of her infant, and to openly receive the infants
projections, whether they are felt by the infant to be good or bad (Bion, 1962b, p. 36). The
mothers capacity for reverie is the receptor organ for the infants harvest of self-sensation
gained by its conscious (Bion, 1962a, p. 309). Sensing within her infants cry, for example, its
fear that it is dying, under normal circumstances a well adjusted mother is able to abide that fear,
process it, and adequately respond in a manner that makes the infant feel it is receiving its
frightened personality back again, but in a form that it can tolerate (p. 308). Using as Bion does
the analogy of alimentary digestion, the mother metabolizes (Grinberg, 1968) or premasticates (Brown, 2013) the infants projections, returning them in a more digestible form.
Over time as this type of interchange repeats, the mothers reverie function becomes internalized
by the infant, who develops a capacity to relate to its own psychic qualities. Initially relying
entirely on the intuition of its mother, the infant becomes capable of intuitive contact with
himself (Bianchedi, 1991, p. 10). Through the work of mental understanding by the other, it
becomes possible for the infant to develop mental understanding in himself and thus to move
towards having a mind of his own and an awareness of the minds of others8 (Spillius, 1994, pp.
343-344).
Bearing in mind the importance of the role of the caregiver in early cognitive
development, Bion returns to Freuds 1911 paper Formulation on the Two Principles of Mental

7

Grotstein (2005) coins the term projective transidentification to refer to Bions concept of
communicative intersubjective projective identification to distinguish it from Kleins solely intrapsychic
version, which is now understood as only one component of Bions bi-personal model.
8
what Fonagy (1991) defines as the capacity to mentalize

13

Functioning. Here Freud postulated that the infant initially relies on motor discharge as a
means of unburdening the mental apparatus of accretions of stimuli until the development of
thinking made it possible for the mental apparatus to tolerate an increased tension of stimulus
while the process of discharge was postponed (Freud, 1911, p. 221). For Bion, there is
discharge in the evacuative component of projective identification, but the increased tolerance
for internal states is not won by the infant in isolation. Bions theory of thinking is thus rooted in
a unification of Freudian and Kleinian concepts: The activity we know as thinking was in
origin a procedure for unburdening the psyche of accretions of stimuli and the mechanism is that
which has been described by Melanie Klein as projective identification (Bion, 1962b, p. 31).
Frustration
Gaining a sense of external reality is essential for the infants ability to cope with internal
reality, and at first, the demands of the babys reality are made bearable only through another
mind capable of bearing reality (Wieland, 2013, p. 110). Freuds Two Principles charts the
process in infant development whereby the reality principle begins to predominate over the
pleasure principle, as concern for what is real begins to take precedence over concern for what is
pleasurable. The mental apparatus tasked with apprehending external reality (via paying
attention to information from the sense organs and using memory to reality-test ideas) begins to
develop for the purpose of learning to use the outside world to get inner needs met. Freud
believed that initially the infant lives in a sort of dream, hallucinating images that correspond to
its needs and wishes. At a certain point, the disappointment experienced by the infant upon the
non-occurrence of the expected satisfaction in reality provides the impetus for the psychical
apparatus to form a conception of the real circumstances in the external world and to endeavor
to make a real alteration in them (Freud, 1911, p. 219).
Bion attempts to rework this process through the language of Kantian philosophy
(Mancia, Longhin, & Mancia, 2000). He begins with the Kantian assumption that thoughts
require an a priori template in order to be thought. He calls this a pre-conception, which may
be regarded as the analogue in psychoanalysis of Kant's concept of empty thoughts9 (Bion,
1962a, p. 306). Bion describes a pre-conception as an unconscious expectation which can be
thought but cannot be known (Bion, 1962b, p. 91). It is a receptivity or susceptibility to thought,
which experience can meet and trigger. Although Melanie Klein believed that every new piece
of experience has to be fitted into the patterns provided by the psychic reality which prevails at
the time (1940, p. 374), she disagreed with Bion that an infant is born with an innate preconception of the breast (Bion, 1965, p. 138). But in the example which Bion uses to illustrate
the model, the infant comes equipped with an inborn anticipation of the breast awaiting
conjunction with a realization (an actual experience) that approximates it. Upon encountering
the actual breast, the pre-conception mates with the appropriate sense impressions (Bion,
1962b, p. 91), and a conception of the breast is formed. This model will serve for the theory
that every junction of a pre-conception with its realization produces a conception. Conceptions
therefore will be expected to be constantly conjoined with an emotional experience of
satisfaction (Bion, 1962a, p. 306).
Following Freud, Bion highlights the crucial step in the development of the babys ability
to generate representational thought on its own, which occurs in those moments when a preconception is met with absence (a negative realization). In the example of the hungry infant with

9

Noel-Smith (2013) explains that Bions application of Kants concept of empty thoughts is spurious
and reflects a misunderstanding of Kant.

14

no breast available, the result is an experience of frustration. The next step depends on the
infants capacity for frustration: in particular it depends on whether the decision is to evade
frustration or to modify it (Bion, 1962a, p. 307). With adequate frustration tolerance, the nobreast inside becomes a thought, and an apparatus for thinking it develops (p. 307). Tolerance
of frustration allows the infant to bear the conception no-breast, a modification that aids the
infant in bridging the gulf between the present want and its eventual fulfillment. Although the
conception no-breast may be difficult to tolerate, as an accurate reflection of reality it
empowers the infant to take more effective action and lends meaning through context to internal
experience.
But in the case of a failed or compromised projective/introjective link between infant and
mother (often attributed to the infants temperament and/or poor maternal reverie), it becomes
harder for the infant to take that key step towards learning to modify rather than evade frustration
because it has not learned through the help of the caregiver that fear, pain or anxiety can be
effectively transformed. When frustration cannot be tolerated it cannot be modified into thought,
and is instead evaded. For frustration to be evaded so must be the experience of the reality of the
separation between self and external object. Thus intolerance of frustration becomes the seed of
psychosis. With psychotic patients, progress can be marked by an increase in projections relating
to the reality of the situation and an increase in projections effective in producing in the analyst
feelings that the patient does not want to have (Bion, 1962b, p. 32). This reflects a turning
towards reality and relatedness.
The Psychotic Part of the Personality
Bions theory of thinking grew out of his work with schizophrenic patients, and lends
coherence to, among many things, the correlation he observed between low frustration tolerance
and a compromised capacity for representational thought. What he has discovered about
schizophrenics is equivalent to a psychology of the new born (Wisdom, 1987, p. 546). In 1957
he published a paper titled Differentiation of the Psychotic from the Non-Psychotic
Personalities, both of which are seen to exist in everyone to varying degrees of negative
juxtaposition. Both arise in infancy as alternative ways of coping with the pressures and demands
of internal and external reality. To the extent that the infant is able to introject and make use of
its emotional links with its caregiver, learn to represent and make use of emotional experience,
and nurture the impulse of curiosity on which all learning depends (Bion 1959, p. 314), the
non-psychotic part of the personality develops. The development of the psychotic part of the
personality is concomitant with failures in these processes.
Both environmental failures (such as a breakdown in the mothers capacity for reverie),
as well as certain predispositions within the temperament of the infant can increase the likelihood
of things going wrong during early mental development. Bion places great importance on the
impact of infantile mental catastrophe in shaping adult psychopathology.10 Freud's analogy of
an archaeological investigation with a psycho-analysis was helpful if it were considered that we
were exposing evidence not so much of a primitive civilization as of a primitive disaster (Bion,
1959, p. 311). Bions view that psychosis develops out of a catastrophic failure in the ability to
generate useable meaning out of raw emotional experience departs from Freuds view of
psychosis as id eruptions overwhelming the egos capacity to quell them (Grotstein, 1987). The
disaster takes place if realistic projective identification fails to modify intolerable experience into
something usable, in which case the infant resorts to excessive use of splitting and projective

10

elaborated in Tustin (1981) and Eigen (1985, 1998, 1999, 2001)

15

identification. The infant is reduced to continue projective identification carried out with
increasing force and frequency. The increased force seems to denude the projection of its
penumbra of meaning (Bion, 1962a, p. 308). The projected fear of death, for example, is not
returned more tolerable, but is reintrojected as nameless dread,11 a feeling that can persist into
adulthood as dread of imminent annihilation (Bion, 1957, p. 266), which, often noticeable in
work with psychotic patients, is a factor contributing to the hasty, dependent, and extremely
fragile nature of the transference formations.
Bion (1959) suggests that infants born with stronger dispositions for destructiveness,
hatred, and envy rely more heavily upon projective identification for help containing their
powerful feelings, but paradoxically, the power of those feelings work against the likelihood of
its success. If the projection in need of modification is projected along with envy and hate for the
receiving object (felt as self-sufficient, indifferent, and withholding), the projected element
becomes spoiled for the infant, and instead of returning imbued with useable meaning through
relationship, it returns stripped of its meaning and goodness. In the above example, the fear of
death becomes stripped of its positive aspect: the will to live (Bion, 1962b, p. 97). Failure to
introject makes the external object appear intrinsically hostile to curiosity and to the method,
namely projective identification, by which the infant seeks to satisfy it (Bion, 1959, p. 314).
Over time what comes to be established within the infant is a projective-identification-rejectingobjecta willfully misunderstanding objectwith which it is identified (Bion, 1962a, p. 309).
Rather than learning to place superior value on what is true or real, agglomerations of
persecutory objects take on the properties of a primitive, and even murderous, superego (Bion,
1959, p. 311) which asserts instead the moral superiority and superiority in potency of UNlearning (Bion, 1962b, p. 98).
This is the internal landscape of the psychotic part of the personality. Intolerant of
frustration inherent to both internal and external reality, it develops a hatred of reality, and
through the mechanisms of splitting and projective identification attempts to sabotage all the
functions of the mind that serve to bring it into contact with the reality it hates. These functions
include the scientific tendencies of the personality (Bianchedi, 1991, p. 9), the perceptual
apparatus itself, and all the functions that Freud implicates in the rise of the reality principle.
Consciousness of sense impressions, attention, memory, judgment, thought, have brought
against themthe sadistic splitting eviscerating attacks that lead to their being minutely
fragmented and then expelled from the personality to penetrate, or encyst, the objects (Bion,
1957, p. 268). With this Bion is describing the formation of what he terms the menacing bizarre
objects12 that populate the world for the psychotic individual. While the non-psychotic part has
succeeded in introjecting and repressing out of consciousness basic operations involved in
thinking, the psychotic part of the personality has attempted to rid itself of the apparatus on
which the psyche depends to carry out the repressions (p. 270). Both the raw material of
thinking and the ego functions needed to think it are split and projected into external objects,
along with anxiety and hostility from projected primitive superego. Surrounded by the furniture
of dreams (p. 269), confusion arises as real world objects fail to obey the rules of mental
functioning. Bion (1957), in an example that dates this seminal publication, describes a patient
who feels that the gramophone is watching him.

11

later referred to as psychotic panic (Bion, 1970, p. 12)

Ogden (1983) has applied Bions insights into the formation of bizarre objects in his
reconceptualization of internal objects in general, which he understands as split-off aspects of the ego
which have been 'projected into' mental representations of objects (p. 235).
12

16

Attacks on Linking
Freud postulated that during the dawn of the reality principle unconscious thinking went
beyond mere ideational presentations and was directed to the relations between impressions of
objects, and that thinking became conscious once bound to verbal residues (Freud, 1911, p.
221). Bion (1957) had the view that unconscious thought exists from birth in the form of a
primitive matrix of ideographs which contains within itself links between one ideograph and
another (p. 269), implying that awareness of psychic reality begins as soon as those links
become active. These links generate representations of reality by bringing together two mental
objects in a way which leaves each object with its intrinsic qualities intact and yet able, by their
conjunction, to produce a new mental object (p. 269). Bion appears to suggest that one way the
psychotic part of the personality attempts to block contact with reality is through attacks on the
inherent links between ideographs (and later, the links between words), denying them the
consciousness needed for their interaction thus decreasing the likelihood of emergent intolerable
thoughts. What is then also denied is the capacity for meaning-making and symbol formation,
which depend on the abstraction of (or location of) a commonality out of the comparison
between object impressions. As a result, the psychotic individual is left stranded in a dry
concrete world of meaningless events (Brown, 2013, p. 9).
Bion expands the model of the link in his 1958 and 1959 papers On Arrogance and
Attacks on Linking, using clinical examples to demonstrate a patients attacks on links
between objects, most easily observed in his attacks on the emotional link with the analyst.
While Kleins work focused on that which the infant does to the object in phantasy (e.g. wage
envious destructive attacks, attempt to repair), Bion shifts the focus onto that which the infant (or
patient) does to its connection to the object. I employ the term link because I wish to discuss
the patient's relationship with a function rather than with the object that subserves the function
(Bion, 1959, p. 102). The prototype for links between objects is the infants emotional
relationship with the caregiver, with whom it is linked through normal projective identification.
Bion (1958, p. 146) illustrates the importance of this link as it appeared in his work with a
patient. By placing bad feelings in the analyst long enough to be modified by their sojourn in
my psyche, and by simultaneously placing good parts of his self into the analyst (as opposed to
envy, hate or fear) so that the analyst is felt as an ideal object, the result for the patient was a
sense of being in contact with me. Through internalization of that link, the infant or patient
becomes able to form links with internal objects and the objects of its experience in the process
known as thinking (which, for Bion, is always an emotional linking experience). The denial to
the infant of the use of normal projective identification precipitates a disaster through the
destruction of an important link. Inherent in this disaster is the establishment of a [hostile]
primitive superego which denies the use of [normal] projective identification (p. 146) which
would otherwise be the infants (or psychotic patients) best chance of connecting or
communicating with himself or another person.
The word link describes the emotional experience that is ever present when two people
or two parts of a person are related to each other (Grinberg, Sor & Bianchedi, 1975, p. 101). It
is a dynamic relationship where both sides are effected, acting on each other in a manner that
promotes change within the system and the birth of something new. As Bion observes, an
emotional experience cannot be conceived of in isolation from a relationship (Bion, 1962b, p.
42). In primitive states of mind occupied by the psychotic part of the personality, emotion is
hated, precisely because of its function in linking objects together, which gives reality to objects
which are not self and therefore inimical to primary narcissism (Bion, 1959, p. 315). Thus for

17

infant or for patient the linking function of emotion can either pose a threat to omnipotence,
equilibrium, and narcissistic encapsulation, or alternatively, act as impetus for thought, learning
and growth, depending on the level of development of the non-psychotic part of the personality.
If the psychotic part of the personality predominates, it will continue to minutely split and project
that-which-links out into objects to join the other bizarre objects, leading to the feeling of
being surrounded by minute links which, being impregnated now with cruelty, link objects
together cruelly (Bion, 1957, p. 269).
The K Link
Bion further elaborates the linking model in his first (1962b) book publication Learning
from Experience. Bion finds it useful to choose from the six signs L (love), H (hate), or K
(knowledge) and their negatives L, H, or K, to describe the felt sense of the active emotional
link with the patient in any given analytic session. Rather like the key signature at the
commencement of a piece of music (Symington & Symington, 1996, p. 29), the choice of sign
can then serve as point of reference or pivot (OShaughnessy, 1981, p. 185) from which the
complex nature of the emotional link can be elaborated in the analysts speculative meditation
(Bion, 1962b, p. 44). In addition to their usefulness for examining the transferencecountertransference emotional field, the L, H and K links serve as models capable of
representing present moment emotional relationships between any two interacting objects,
including intrapsychic objects. They stand for the emotional factor influencing the nature of the
interaction. Bions decision to limit the types of links to just these three emotional registers is
considered in light of the extensive focus already afforded to love and hate relationships (and the
corresponding life and death instincts) at the heart of Kleinian analysis (Blandonu, 1994;
Meltzer, 1978). By placing K alongside L and H, Bion is placing knowing or getting to know
alongside loving and hating as the three most basic forms of object relating. He is also
highlighting the fundamentally emotional nature of human beings relationship with meaningful
subjective truth.
The K link is an active, dynamic, emotional relationship between an object with a will for
truth and the object from which truth stands to be abstracted. As I propose to use it it does not
convey a sense of finality, that is to say, a meaning that x is in possession of a piece of
knowledge called y but rather that x is in the state of getting to know y and y is in a state of
getting to be known by x (Bion, 1962b, p. 47). A K link is active in one who attempts to know
truth about ones self through reflection, and a K link is active in the psychoanalytic relationship,
where, optimally, both patient and analyst attempt to know truth about the patient through
learning truth about the patients emotional experiences. The essential events will be ones of
becoming both knowing and known (Meltzer, 1975, p. 243). K linking and K activity is
central to the psychoanalytic endeavor, as seen in Bions assertion that for a psychoanalytic
session to be considered psychoanalytic and nothing else, what is required is the use by the
analyst of all material to illuminate a K relationship (Bion, 1963, p. 69). For emotional truth as
yet unknown to be revealed and experienced in a meaningful and mutative way (in what Bion
calls the illumination of a psychoanalytic object), an emotional link needs to be present
between patient and analyst (Bianchedi, 1995, p. 473), and Bion is clear that, at least on the
analysts end, the link with analysand should be K, not H or L (Bion, 1965, p. 144).13
Particularly challenging is the establishment of a K link with a psychotic patient, who either

13

Bion later (1970) admits to have rarely failed to experience hatred of psycho-analysis and its
reciprocal, sexualization of psycho-analysis (p. 125-126).

18

behaves as if the verbal communication had not been received, or, that it is a vehicle for
transmission of some aspect of L or Husually projection of it by the analyst into the patient
(Bion, 1965, p. 61).
The K link itself represents a psycho-analytic relationship (Bion, 1962b, p. 47), and
the internalized K link, the function of the mind by which ones own psychic reality is known (or
made knowable), is called by Bion the psycho-analytic function of the personality (p. 89).14
The earliest manifestation of the K link exists between infant and mother in the form of maternal
reverie. The mothers curiosity, attention, and investment in knowing and understanding her
infants emotional experience allows the infant to project out that which it can not yet mentally
represent on its own and receive it back in a form more knowable to its nascent consciousness.
The caregiver provides the infant with regulatory input that can expand the complexity and
coherence of the infants state of consciousness (Murray & Cooper, 1997, p. 74). The same
concept holds in the psychoanalytic relationship, where the capacity of another to intuit and
imagine ones state of mind gives life to the mind and restores life to minds gone dead (Boris,
1986, p. 167). Bion (1970, p. 69) observes that psychoanalytic investigation itself stimulates
growth of the domain it investigates. Symington (2007, p. 1421) places great emphasis on the
expansion of consciousness through the emotional intercourse with another. This expansion is
stimulated through what he calls the contemplative act on the part of the mother or analyst, in
which there is a focused wonder at a quality in the other but the other precisely as other and not
an extension of the finite self. It is a wonder also consisting in passion, delight, regard, love, and
scientific attention. Meltzer (1986, p. 187) describes the passion of the K link as in awe, just as
the passion of the L link would be in love and the H link in hate.
Through the communicative flow of projective and introjective exchanges and the
internalization of the mothers reverie, the infant comes to internalize an object capable of
knowing and informing (Britton, 1992, p. 106). Emotional experience becomes something that
can be known, as the sense organ for the apprehension of psychical qualities (Freud, 1900, p.
574) develops in range. The K link finds its first actualization in the infant when it takes that
crucial step in representing emotional pain through thought. It requires, for example, a certain
level of frustration tolerance to be able to engage with (in a K link) the pain of no-breast. A
thought which is a replacement of an object by its non-material character is in itself a frustrating
experience (Thorner, 1981, p. 75). The emotion that is represented by the K link is not as easy
to define as love or hate. Bion associates curiosity with the K link (1963, p. 46; 1965, p. 67),
cites the impulse to be curious as the requisite for all learning (1959, p. 314), and implicates a
disordered relationship with the curious internal object in psychosis (1958). But beyond
curiosity, awe,15 and wonder, K linking is often a painful feeling, captured in the exclamation,
How can x know anything? (Bion, 1962b, p. 48). In K activity there can be real urgency and
anxiety within the initial period of uncertainty and incoherence, and real pain in withstanding
and integrating the emotional truth or meaning as coming into view. But despite the pain
involved, the drive for finding meaningful coherence in emotional experience prevails at a
fundamental level.
Although the ability to K link could be seen to correspond with the rise to power of the
reality principle over the pleasure/pain principle (associated with L and H links), Bion challenges

14

Ogden (2008) defines this function as the generation of symbolic meaning through simultaneous
conscious and unconscious apperception of emotional experience.
15
Bion (1961, p. 85) would not include in K the type of awe that is more a tribute than a pause for
thought.

19

the necessity of diachronic succession in the Freudian model. Taking the infants innate ability to
engage the mother in projective identification as evidence of a sense of (and concern for) reality
present from birth, Bion suggests an emended version of Freud's pleasure principle theory so
that the reality principle should be considered to operate co-existentially with the pleasure
principle (Bion, 1962b, p. 31). In this model, the tension between K and L/H is seen to exist
throughout life, and is central to what goes on in the consulting room (Fisher, 2006, p. 1222).
The choice to modify frustration through attempting to know and understand emotional pain is
antithetical to the pleasure principle, but essential to learning and growth (Symington &
Symington, 1996, pp. 6-7).
The Truth Drive
In Bions work, K joins L and H as the third great motive force in mental activity
(Meltzer, 1978, p. 313). The human need to know the truth of ones experience is formulated by
Ogden (2008) as Bions first principle of mental functioning, considered the most
fundamental impetus for thinking (p. 16). While in Freuds theory the discharge of instinctual
pressures, the drive for satisfaction, and eventually oedipal strivings all necessitate the need to
perceive and adapt to external reality, Bions model suggests an early and innate need to make
sense and meaning of the internal reality of the lived emotional experience of object relating.
This has led many authors (e.g. Grotstein, 2004b; Ogden, 2008; White, 2011b) to see Bions L,
H, and K links as a recasting of Freuds dual drive theory to include a truth-seeking drive
alongside the libidinal and aggressive impulses.
Freud (1905) makes mention of a Wissentrieb, a drive for knowledge, but saw it as
primarily an expression of infantile sexual curiosity and sexual researches, and a means of
gaining mastery (Fisher, 2006 p. 1223). Arising during the oedipal phase, he did not consider it
as part of the infants basic constitutional equipment (Billow, 1999 p. 632). In Kleins work
with young children she observed their surging curiosity and impulse to explore, and attached
so much importance to it that she called it an epistemophilic instinct, putting it on a par with the
life and death instincts (Segal, 1998, p. 351). Klein (1932) wrote about the childs
epistemophilic impulses as emerging in exploration of the contents of the mothers body in
phantasy,16 operating at first in concert with sadism and envy, and later out of anxiety and guilt
for its feared damages. Nowhere does she, any more than Freud, despite calling it an instinct,
acknowledge the thirst for knowledge as a motive in itself, seeking food for the mind (Meltzer,
1978, p. 302). Contrary to the views of Freud and Klein, Bion felt that truth-seeking could not be
reduced to the interplay of love and hate, and demanded an independent category (Green, 2000,
p. 122).
The psychological primacy of the need for truth was first observed by Bion in his group
work. Despite not feeling prepared to think, not wanting to accept their own immaturity, and not
wanting to face uncertainty, group members are also hopelessly committed to a developmental
procedure (Bion, 1959, p. 89). It is almost as if human beings were aware of the painful and
often fatal consequences of having to act without an adequate grasp of reality, and therefore were
aware of the need for truth as a criterion in the evaluation of their findings (p. 100). The truth
about which Bion speaks is understood not as absolute knowledge but as subjective certainty
(Civitarese, 2008, p. 1125). In this, Bion follows Klein, for whom truth does not belong to an
order of scientifically verifiable knowledge (Rose, 1998, p. 130). Contact with truth is never an
absolute or definitive truth but rather an instantaneous linkage experience of correlation and

16

Bion (1961, p. 162) speculated that these same primitive phantasies are activated by the group setting.

20

coherence (Bianchedi, 1991, p. 10). The sought truth is not the type that is extendable beyond
the immediacy of the moment under investigation. It is a harmonization of conjoined data, the
failure of which induces a mental state of debility in the patient as if starvation of truth was
somehow analogous to alimentary starvation (Bion, 1959, p. 119). Bion considers this sense of
truth or coherence to be a psychic nutrient necessary for the survival and growth of the
personality: A sense of reality matters to the individual in the way that food, drink, air and
excretion of waste products matter (Bion 1962b, p. 42).
Bions emphasis on the emotional link with objects reflects the move within object
relations theory away from Freudian drive theory. Instead of attending only to the content of
patients associations in attempt to reveal repressed aggressive or sexual impulses, attention is
given to the emotional charge underlying (or simultaneous to) verbal exchange (Blandonu,
1994, p. 71) as indicative of unprocessed relational meaning. Freud wrote, we have formulated
our tasks as physicians thus: to bring to the patients knowledge the unconscious, repressed
impulses existing in him, and, for that purpose, to uncover the resistances that oppose this
extension of his knowledge about himself (Freud, 1919, p. 159). From Bions perspective,
instinctual urges and drives are not seen as biological determinants fueling psychic and
emotional events, rather it is the truth of reality itself that stirs the emotional psyche. Emotions
function like sentinels to register and relay truths impact (Grotstein, 2004a, p. 104). Affect
suggests the presence of truth that is both sought as catalyst and feared as catastrophic. Its value
consists in its potential to grow the container of the mind, and acquisition of self knowledge is
secondary gain. It is not knowledge of the drive, but the emotional meaning of the situations
reality which is resisted.
Even though Bions links refer to affects rather than drives, and Bion never explicitly
used the term truth drive, the drive to know (K) is now firmly established in Kleinian/Bionian
thought as a primary drive alongside L (love) and H (hate) (Abel-Hirsch, 2011, p. 1074).
Britton (2003) takes the leap that Freud did not in posing Wissentrieb, the drive for knowledge,
as an innate ego instinct. Fisher (2006) describes what he terms an inherent K-impulse. Katz
(2001) draws from Bion in suggesting the addition of a third primary drive to Freuds dual drive
theory, calling it the interpretive or conceptualizing drive. Grotstein (2004b) places a truth
principle alongside the reality and pleasure principles, and postulates an instinctual truth drive
which seeks emotional truth, as distinct from the epistemophilic component drive, which seeks
knowledge about reality (p. 1082). As Billow (1999, p. 632-633) points out, the K drive has
overarching status in that the content of K can involve L and H, and is necessary to derive
meaning from them.
K
In Bions model, the positive links are associated with reality, truth and growth, while the
negative links are associated with lies, falsehoods, and evacuation processes (Lpez-Corvo,
2006, p. 39). In a conceptual move that swept away the traditional confusing apposition of love
and hate, his schema contrasts L, H and K as the links of relatedness, to minus L, minus H and
minus K as the envious anti-linkage, anti-emotions, anti-knowledge and anti-life (Meltzer,
1986, p. 26). Bion left L and H relatively open to interpretation, but was more explicit about
K in its connection to the formation of the psychotic part of the personality and to his model of
the container contained.
K represents the link constituted by NOT understanding i.e. mis-understanding (Bion,
1962b, p. 52). It is not an absence of K but a perversion of the urge to know (Fisher, 2006, p.

21

1233). Bion uses K to describe the cruel and denuding link of misunderstanding self and
others (OShaughnessy, 1981, p. 184) that forms first between infant and mother in cases of
excessive envy or inadequate nurture, and becomes internalized in the infant as an egodestructive super-ego, which appears to deny development and existence itself to the ego
(Bion 1965, p. 38). This super-ego is different than the Freudian superego: its predominant
characteristic I can only describe as without-nessit is the resultant of an envious stripping or
denudation of all good and is itself destined to continue the process of stripping (Bion, 1962b,
p. 97). Bions writings contain the most detailed portrayals of anti-life tendencies of any
psychological texts to date (Eigen, 1998, p. 33).17 The internal destructive force he describes
can be seen as a more relationally derived and affect oriented re-visioning of Kleins death
instinct. Bion later describes this force as a completely immoral conscienceviolent, greedy
and envious, ruthless, murderous, and predatory, without respect for the truth, persons, or things.
This force is dominated by an envious determination to possess everything that objects that exist
possess including existence itself (Bion, 1965, p. 102). Andr Green (2000, p. 114) refers to it
as a black hole in the mind, which has nothing to do with repression as a censorship but,
rather, with a radical suppression of what happens in the mind. The negative conscience
(Junqueira de Mattos & Braga, 2013), or anti-ego (Billow, 1999) of K defends against
emotional experience by attacking the mental linking processes by which we come to know and
integrate our thoughts and feelings, when such integration threatens to bring mental pain
(Billow, 1999, p. 632).
In clinical practice, a K link can be felt between patient and analyst as an attack effected
through projective identification on the analysts peace of mind, thinking mind, and reverie
function. It operates as a defense against the emotional experience of understanding or being
understood, since either can felt as hostile and threatening. In a K link patients are without
curiosity, and Bion suggests they can benefit from being shown through interpretation that they
have no interest in why they feel as they do (Bion, 1959, p. 314). The K link serves the
conviction that an ability to mis-understand is superior to an ability to understand (Bion,
1962b, p. 95), seen in patients who rely on moral rules for navigating experience as a way of not
having to actually think.
Bion speculated that a K link between infant and caregiver could have an early
damaging role in severely thought-disordered patients who appear deficient in their meaningmaking function and who are unable to abstract and symbolize. Although Bion (1962b) focused
on the role of infantile envy in the initial formation of this link (with his aims set on the Kleinian
line of thought), his statement, I shall consider one factor onlyEnvy (p. 96) suggests the
possibility of other etiological factors. Britton (1989) cites psychic atopia, a hypersensitivity to
psychic differences. Fisher (2006) writes, rather than envy, perhaps we should put fear at the
head of the list of the K factors, the fear that emotional experience is not survivable (p. 1233).
Bion (1965) alludes to the ubiquity of this fear, writing, some consciously believe the curtain of
illusion to be a protection against truth which is essential to the survival of humanity; the
remainder of us believe it unconsciously but no less tenaciously for that (Bion, 1965, p. 147).
Bion (1963) shows how the universal human conflict between wanting to know the truth at all
costs and our fear that this truth will be our doing-in is symbolized in Sophocles Oedipus myth,
the biblical Babel myth (Genesis XI, 19) and the biblical Eden myth (Genesis II, 83 passim).
Each myth captures in symbol elements of the primitive morality of K, preventing contact

17

See Eigens (1996) book Psychic Deadness for a discussion of Bions portrayal of the deadening
processes of the psyche.

22

with truth by usurping the investigative functions of reality by the ego (Junqueira de Mattos &
Braga, 2013, p. 189).
Bions incorporation of philosophy and his focus on human beings relationship to
knowledge and the representation of truth did much to bring the field of psychoanalysis into
concert with western epistemology. Schermer (2003, p. 227) asserts that Bion was first and
foremost an epistemologist, one who asks persistently, deeply, with an admixture of skepticism
and faith, What is the nature of knowledge? What is its subject matter? How do we know what
we know? What are the limits of our knowing? On the subject of Bion the epistemologist,
Bions daughter Parthenope Bion Talamo wrote, the English philosopher Ferrier who coined the
term epistemology in 1854 also coined another term at the same time, which could be thought of
as being more or less its opposite, namely, agnoiology, the study of ignorance or not knowing.
The idea of Bion as an agnoiologist rather than as an epistemologist does appeal to me, given the
emphasis he placed on our not knowing and how we do not know (Talamo, 1997, p. 57). Bion
understood resistance to the truth of ones experience as the root of psychopathology and the
function of the defense mechanisms. Resistance is only manifest when the threat is contact with
what is believed to be real. There is no resistance to anything because it is believed to be false
(Bion, 1975, p. 147). Grotstein (2007) shows how this view of defense departs from Freud,
writing that all the egos defense mechanisms are principally counterposed to the irruption of
unconscious truth rather than of libido and aggression (p. 52). Freuds drives as repressed
unconscious are replaced with eruptions of the unrepresented becoming represented (p. 62).
The psychoanalyst must be vigilant for signs of anxiety indicating unconscious proximity
to a pre-conception of an unwanted idea, or a pre-monition of an unwanted emotion (Bion,
1963, p. 76). In fact, the only emotional states of significance for the analyst are premonitions (p.
75), since emotions felt by the patient are already painfully obvious (p. 74). The same holds
true for ideas already known. In a classic example of a defense mechanism in K, Bion (1963)
describes the tactic of reversible perspective18 where the patient is able to consciously accept
and concur with the analysts interpretation, but remain unimpacted and unchanged by it. As a
way of evading emotional turbulence, the patient finds a way to successfully fit the interpretation
into a safe and pre-written framework, and can thus honestly and loyally agree. But the
framework is based in a set of premises and implications quite different than those of the
interpreting analyst: parallel views that never touch (Lpez-Corvo, 2006, p. 15). After many
months of apparently successful analysis the patient has gained an extensive knowledge of the
analysts theories but no insight (Bion, 1963, p. 55). The patient reverses perspective to make a
dynamic situation static. The work of the analyst is to restore dynamic to a static situation and so
make development possible (p. 60).
Patients come to psychoanalysis for assistance in developing emotional meaning from
inner experience, often unaware of their own repertoire of skills honed in its prevention. It is
important to remember that patients adept at avoiding the pain of reality are in a great deal of
pain nonetheless. But as Bion (1970) points out, there is a difference between feeling pain and
suffering it. There are patients whose contact with reality presents the most difficulty when the
reality is their own mental statepeople exist who are so intolerant of pain (or in whom pain or
frustration is so intolerable) that they feel the pain but will not suffer which is to say, endure and
sustain it and so cannot be said to discover it (p. 9). The intensity of the patients pain

18

Bion also considers reversible perspective, when employed intentionally, to be an essential tool of the
analyst in widening the ways of understanding something. See (Civitarese, 2008) for a discussion of nonpathological uses of reversible perspective.

23

contributes to his fear of suffering pain (p. 19), and it is the analysts job to help patients
broaden that within themselves which they can bear to experience.
The Group and the Proto-mental
It was in Experiences in Groups that Bion first remarked on the hatred of a process of
development and the hatred of having to learn by experience at all, and lack of faith in the
worth of such a kind of learning (1961, p. 89). This hatred he attributed to the groups
allegiance to what he terms basic assumptions. Basic assumptions are primitive beliefs or
orientations to reality that constellate within the group setting and activate within the
unconscious of each of its members. They are assumptions made involuntarily, automatically,
inevitably (p. 165). Stemming from our lineage as herd animals, basic assumptions include the
assumption that the group members are meeting together for one of three purposes, either to fight
or run away from something (fight-flight group), to be saved by the unborn progeny of a pair in
amatory relation (pairing group), or to obtain security from one individual on whom they all
depend (dependent group). On a conscious level, groups usually meet together to accomplish a
common task or solve a common problem, and this requires cooperation and thought. Bion refers
to this level of group functioning as the work group, and explains that the basic assumption of
the group conflicts very sharply with the idea of a group met together to do a creative job (p.
64). Each basic assumption operates against work group progress. The fight-flight basic
assumption can manifest in passive aggressive, sado-masochistic and hostile behavior, basic
assumption dependency can result in the projection of responsibility onto others, and pairing
leads to the erotization of healthy dependency (Grotstein, 2003, p. 11).
To the extent that one identifies with the basic assumption, with the herd, as it were
(Bion, 1961, p. 90), one feels persecuted by the aims and affairs of the conscious. To the extent
that one identifies with the conscious outlook one feels persecuted by the emotions associated
with the basic assumption. Bion writes that the individual is a group animal at war, not simply
with the group, but with himself for being a group animal and with those aspects of his
personality that constitute his groupishness (Bion, 1961, p. 131). In describing this internal
conflict in his later work, Bion (1992, p. 105) presents a bipolarity between narcissism and
social-ism, which he considers to be a more fruitful conceptual division than the competition
described by Freud (1915) between the ego and the sexual and death instincts. Bion writes that
in postulating socialism as the other pole of narcissism, I had in mind the idea that the patients
socialism menaces his primacy as an individual, and the group demands of him subordination to
aims lying outside his personality (1992, p. 105). But as Aristotle said, the human being is a
political animal. We moved to the top of the food chain through our ability to cooperate, and our
very minds are formed within the crucible of relationship. Thus, the individual cannot find
fulfillment outside a group, and cannot satisfy any emotional drive without expression of its
social component (Bion, 1962a, p. 309). Individuals who lack the ability to see what everyone
else sees when subjected to the same stimulus (Bion, 1992, p. 29) are not only denied through
their exclusion avenues for meeting inner needs, but are forced to defend against their fear of the
group (felt as indifferent to the welfare of the individual) by destroying their own awareness of
group pressures. Thus, what appears as narcissism and anti-social acting out must be recognized
as secondary to a fear of socialism (p. 30) and the internal conflicts it presents.
Returning to Experience in Groups, Bion explains that adherence to basic assumption
mentality is both an attempt to preserve group cohesion and prevent learning and development
over time. Group evolutions at the level of conscious thought can stir structural changes felt as

24

chaotic and threatening to the less reality-oriented parts of the mind. Bion suggests that the
emotional drives at play in group dynamics are better accounted for by Kleins primitive
mechanisms than Freuds view of group behavior as a repetition of family group patterns and
neurotic mechanisms (Bion, 1961, p. 165). Bion draws upon Klein in comparing basic
assumption phenomena to defensive reactions to psychotic anxiety associated with phantasies
of primitive part-object relationships (p. 189). But Bions main criticism of Freud was that he
failed to consider what group phenomena reveal about the individual. In my view no new
instinct is brought into playit is always in play. The only point about collecting a group of
people is that it enables us to see just how the political characteristics of the human body
operate (p. 131). Bions choice to use the word body rather than mind or psyche is
intentional, and serves here as a lead-in to a discussion of the proto-mental, a concept
introduced by Bion in Experiences which is foundational to his later psychoanalytic models.
In his group work Bion noticed that only one of the three basic assumptions seemed to
operate at a time, and that they seemed to alternate rather than conflict with each other. So he
posed the question, where do the other two go? To answer this he proposed that they become
confined in some sort of latent phase (p. 105), relegated to what he calls the proto-mental
system, a matrix or substratum in which physical and mental are undifferentiated19 (p. 102).
Parallels can be drawn here to psychoanalytic theories of infant development including Freuds
(1923, p. 27) view that the conscious ego is first and foremost a body-ego, and Hartmanns
(1952, p. 17) description of the undifferentiated stage prior to the differentiation of ego and id.
But Bions proto-mental system is postulated to operate throughout life. As Bion explains,
when distress from this source manifests itself, it can manifest itself just as well in physical
forms as in psychological (1961, p. 102). At the proto-mental level20 emotional experience is
yet to be transformed into mental representation, and if it remains such, it will instead find
expression or discharge through action (including bodily movements, vocal utterances, group
directed behavior, and behavioral symptoms such as substance abuse), or through physical or
psychosomatic illness. At this pre-mental level, decisions for action are made through the use of
signs rather than symbols: a computational mode of extrapolation drawing upon past experience
(Meltzer & Williams, 1988, p. 14) and upon incorporated rather than introjected ideas21 (Bollas,
1987, p. 153).
Bion understood group and individual mentality as merely special instances of one
another (Meltzer, 1978, p. 286). Bion drives home the point that the psycho-analytical situation
is not individual psychology but pair [psychology] (Bion, 1961, p. 131). Its technique
includes not only the investigation of one mind by another, but also the investigation of the

19

Torres (2013a) shows how Bions concept of the proto-mental implies a non-dualistic philosophical
position, avoiding both materialistic reductionism and Cartesian dualism of substances. His view is in
concert with panpsychism, the view that there is a basic mental quality to matter, and may reflect his
familiarity with the work of Bergson. It is a view that is also in harmony with the holistic approach to
psychosomatic medicine favored by Tavistock.
20
In later essays and seminars, Bion (1989, 1994, 2005a) uses the term soma-psychotic in juxtaposition
to psycho-somatic to draw causal directionality into question.
21
Introjection refers to the internalization of the objects personality (or part of it) in a dynamic relation
to some part of the patients self. The patient who incorporates takes in only sense presentations and
keeps them at a non-representational level (Bollas, 1987, p. 153).

25

mentality22 of the pair (p. 62). Approaching the understanding of the psychoanalytic situation
from this perspective anticipates the dawning of the era of two-person psychology,
intersubjectivity, and psychoanalytic field theory. Madeleine Baranger (1993, p. 17), in
describing the concept of field, cites Bions work on groups in explaining how both
transference and countertransference manifestations spring from one and the same source: a
basic unconscious fantasy which, as a creation of the field, is rooted in the unconscious of each
of the participants. The unconscious couple fantasy (Ferro, 2002a, p. 47) does not exist for
either of the participants outside of the two-person group situation, although the proto-mental
part of patients personality in contact with it does.
Dreaming and Alpha-function
Bions work is characterized by his continuous attention to dichotomies and bipolarities.
Some common themes can be observed across those already presented here: the basic
assumption group versus the work group, the psychotic part of the personality versus the nonpsychotic part of the personality, K versus K, evasion versus modification of frustration. In all
of these models the conflict resides in what to do with emotional experience: whether or not to
represent it, symbolize it, think it. Just as the field of neuroscience made its greatest early strides
in understanding brain function through studying cases of localized brain injuries and legions,
Bions work with individuals with thought disorders led him to revolutionize the psychoanalytic
understanding of the thinking mind: the human ability to digest experience and learn from
emotion. Ogden (2008, p. 11) writes that Bions lifework as a psychoanalytic theorist was the
formulation of a theory of thinking. If pressed to draw an outline around what of Bions work
constitutes his theory of thinking, it might begin with his theories relating to the role of realistic
projective identification and the absence of the object, continue through his reconceptualization
of Freuds concept of dream-work, include his models of and PS D, and culminate in
his publication of the Grid.
Freud (1900; 1933, pp. 16-17) defines dream-work as the unconscious process whereby
latent dream-thoughts (repressed or unacceptable unconscious desires or conflicts) are
transformed (through processes such as condensation and displacement) into manifest dream
content.23 The dream serves to both preserve sleep by disguising the potentially rousing latent
dream-thoughts, and appease unconscious conflict through wish fulfillment in service of the
pleasure principle. Through analytic dream interpretation, the dream-work is undone, and the
latent content is revealed (making the unconscious conscious).
Grotstein (2009, p. 734) writes that Bions extension of Freuds theory of dreaming
constitutes one of the more significant paradigm changes that have taken place in psychoanalytic
thinking. In unpublished writings from 1959 (published posthumously in Cogitations), Bion
(1992, p. 43) begins developing his radically reconceptualized view of dreaming and dreamwork, suggesting that conscious material has to be subjected to dream-work to render it fit for
storing, selection, and transformation (making the conscious unconscious), and that preprocessed material arising from the contact of the personality with reality has to be subjected to
dream-work (or dreamed) for the same purpose.

22

Bion defines group mentality as the unanimous expression of the will of the group, contributed to by
the individual in ways of which he is unaware, influencing him disagreeably whenever he thinks or
behaves in a manner at variance with the basic assumptions. It is thus a machinery of intercommunication
that is designed to ensure that group life is in accordance with the basic assumptions (1961, p. 65).
23
Neurotic symptoms are posited by Freud to manifest by the same process (Freud, 1933, p. 18).

26

The process Bion calls dreaming occurs continuously night and day, although more
transparent to ego consciousness during sleep. In both sleep and waking life, dreaming is a
mental digestive process (Bion, 1992, p. 42) which operates on the receipt of stimuli arising
within and without the psyche (p. 63). Dreaming is the mechanism responsible for deriving
meaning from lived emotional experience, lending comprehension to consciousness. Awareness
of experience does not imply its comprehension or usability for thinking or learning. Impressions
of emotional experience need to be rendered durable, (p. 64), suitable for storage and recall
(p. 64), and suitable for unconscious waking thinking (p. 71), and the form best suited for this
function appears to be the pictorial symbol (p. 46), or ideogram (p. 52). Unless
ideogrammaticized (p. 64), experiential facts have nothing to which to be tethered, and cannot
be held in unconscious memory, which is required if they are to be combined, contrasted,
synthesized, and otherwise manipulated in the process of thought and the attribution of meaning.
In Cogitations, Bion (1992, p. 73) debates what term to use to represent his version of the
dream-work. Abandoning that term to distinguish it from Freuds usage, he briefly adopts the
term dream-work- to specify the function of dreaming that effects the transformation of
emotional sense impressions into unconscious ideograms, which he terms -elements. But
Bion felt that dream-work- still carried too many associations to dream-work, and that
reverie, another term he considered, carried an implication of divorce from practicality or
action, which was alien to my purpose. In his (1962a) paper A Theory of Thinking and
(1962b) book Learning from Experience, Bion settles on the term -function, a term
intentionally devoid of meaning (1962b, p. 3), unrestricted by an existing penumbra of
associations (p. 2). Alpha-function is a hypothetical, empty concept (Meltzer, 1986, p. 10);
it is an abstract representation of an unknown mental operation, and a working tool for the
practising psycho-analyst to ease problems of thinking about something that is unknown (Bion,
1962b, p. 89), allowing the analyst to work without having to prematurely propose new theories
(Grinberg, Sor, & Bianchedi, 1975, p. 48).
Emotional linkage experiences, whether occurring during sleep or during waking life,
need to be acted upon by alpha-function in order to be dreamed, thought, integrated and learned
from. Initially lacking its own alpha-function, the infant relies on its caregivers reverie function.
Bion describes reverie as an expression of the mothers love for the infant and the source for the
infants needed love and understanding (1962b, p. 36). Reverie is the loving application of the
mothers own alpha-function to both the emotional impact of their interaction and to the infants
internal states to the extent it can communicate them through projective identification. Its
increased capacity to tolerate frustration and difficult psychic qualities correlates with its gradual
introjection of the mothers alpha-function and the ability to represent emotional reality on its
own.
Alpha-function belongs to the non-psychotic part of the personality, and is one of the
functions that can come under attack in a K relationship for its role in ushering in a sense of
painful reality through the meanings it can illuminate. It is a function of the ego (Bion, 1962b, p.
25), specifically the unconscious ego (Brown, 2009, 2011). Grotstein (2000c, p. 27) interprets
Bions explanation of alpha-function as the psyches ability to link emotional sense impressions
to inherent and acquired preconceptions, that is, archetypes, which are always pressing to
surface but require a sensible experience for a vehicle. This view is consistent with the idea that
alpha-function codifies sense data by linking them to suitable elements selected from the
primitive matrix of ideographs which Bion (1957, p. 268) speculates is available to the psyche
from birth.

27

In so far as alpha-function is successful, alpha-elements are produced, which can be

stored in memory, repressed, or put to use for the purposes of dream-thought and unconscious
waking thinking. The alpha-element is an irreducibly simple object (Bion, 1992, p. 181),
which is supposed to be too simple to correspond to any realization24 (Bion, 1963, p. 22). Alphaelements can comprise visual images, auditory patterns, olfactory patterns (Bion, 1962b, p.
26), thus Ferro (2002a, p. 66; 2003, p. 1057) has distinguished them into emotional pictograms,
audiograms, and olfactograms, also adding the kinaesthesogram and the
coenaestheticgram. Grotstein (2000c, p. 28) has called alpha-elements mythemes, the
building blocks of personal, momentary myth. Although arguably unknowable until linked
together into higher orders of thought, Bion (1992, p. 181) assumes alpha-elements to be
extremely individual, personal, particular, and subjective. Ferro (2003, p. 1057) calls the
formation of alpha-elements poetry of the mind, contrasting them with primal phantasies,
which are more universal than idiosyncratic. Alpha-elements poetically syncretise the sensory
and proto-emotional experience of every instant of relatedness to self and others (Ferro, 2002b,
p. 598).
As alpha-elements proliferate in both sleep and waking life they cohere in continuous
formation of what Bion calls the contact-barrier,25 which marks the point of contact and
separation between conscious and unconscious elements and originates the distinction between
them (Bion, 1962b, p. 17). The contact-barrier is conceived of as a selectively permeable
membrane that governs both storage and selection and determines, according to the nature and
configuration of its constellated alpha-elements, whether mental phenomena will be put to
conscious or unconscious use. Ferro (2002a, pp. 58, 64) uses the analogy of a zip fastener,
continuously opening up between conscious and unconscious territories. Freud (1915, p. 204)
wrote that mental activity moves in two opposite directions, either beginning from an outside
instigation moving from consciousness to the unconscious, or beginning from the instincts and
passing from the unconscious into consciousness. In Bions model of the contact-barrier, alphaelements arise from the unknown work done by alpha-function on proto-mental registrations of
both internal and external origin. Depending on how alpha-elements combine on the contactbarrier they are able to form into dream-thoughts,26 which can be combined sequentially into
narrative, ordered according to personal or collective myth, and otherwise used in the elaboration
of increasingly abstract and specified meanings.
Bion uses the term dreaming in a variety of ways. Although he would say that
dreaming operates night and day, he understands the night dream as an opportunity for
emotional experiences that the personality would not permit itself to have during conscious
waking life to be brought into reach of alpha-function for conversion into -elements and a
narrative form (Bion, 1992, p. 150). But Bions use of the word dreaming generally refers to
the unconscious and inherently creative psychological work required for the processing of any
emotional experience, and includes the formation of alpha-elements, the linking of alphaelements into affect-laden dream-thoughts, and the linking of dream-thoughts into a dream
narrative. Bion also considers all of the above to be forms of thinking. In the literature,

24

Rare exceptions may occur in patients reporting a visual flash (Meltzer, 1983; Ferro, 1993, 2002b,
2005c), the sudden experience of a dream image which, unlike hallucination, yields meaning upon
investigation.
25
a term originally used by Freud (1895) before he replaced it with repressive barrier (1915)
26
Patterns or visual gestalts composed of alpha-elements, Ferro (1999) has called these narremes, which
become organized into dream narrative.

28

dreaming, alpha-function, and reverie are sometimes used interchangeably. Bion intends
dreaming to also include the processes resulting in and resulting from the formation of the
contact-barrier. It can therefore be stated that it is the act of dreaming that forms and maintains
the differentiation between the conscious and unconscious (Bion, 1962b, p. 16). Through the
ability to transform elements of lived experience and their emotional valency into unconscious
representation, the psyche is able to hold or repress out of awareness large amounts of data that
would otherwise overwhelm the conscious mind, while still preserving that datas accessibility
for use and synthesis in activities of thought. Unconscious imagination and phantasy27 are at the
same time protected from interference by the reality-oriented point of view.
In this theory the ability to dream preserves the personality from what is virtually a
psychotic state (Bion, 1962b, p. 16). Psychotic patients lacking in alpha-function cannot digest
their experience, that is, render it unconscious and useable; thus the easy accessibility to the
observer of what should be the psychotics unconscious (Bion, 1992, p. 71). The inability to
repress stimuli into unconsciousness results in hypersensitivity and an inability to discriminate
(Bion, 1962b, p. 8). Such patients cannot go to sleep and cannot wake up (Bion, 1962b, p. 7)
because there is no difference between the two states. They cannot go to sleep because they
cannot dream, and they cannot wake up because, without alpha-function to supply a sense of
reality, there is not enough up to wake up to (Bion, 1992, p. 96).
Bion (1962b) finds it useful to think of the personality as a collection of functions, in
the mathematical sense of the term (equations composed of factors). In patients under sway of
the psychotic part of the personality alpha-function may have been destroyed or prevented from
developing by way of early and repeated deployment of splitting and projective identification. In
such patients, what is left of any dreaming function will include as factors a fear of realitys
emotional impact, a hatred of reality, and an ego-destructive super-ego. Repair of alpha-function
through the process of psychoanalysis will be constantly hampered by a coincidental destructive
procedure (Bion, 1992, p. 97). Dreaming may be opposed or perverted for a number of reasons:
its tendency to invoke murderous super-ego; the belief that if something is made unconscious it
will be lost forever (reciprocal to the neurotics fear that if something is made conscious it will
never be able to be forgotten28); or the fear of depression associated with an integrated view of
reality,29 a synthesis that reveals the enormity of the destruction already done, and the
illimitable vista of the yet unintegrated elements that have not been synthesized (Bion, 1992, p.
113).
Before Bion, the classical analytic view of psychosis saw irruptions of id energy and
excessive primary process30 as overwhelming the egos ability to maintain contact with reality
(Grotstein, 1981, p. 503). Bions work with personalities incapable of true dreaming led him to
the conclusion that Freuds model of primary and secondary process31 was unsatisfactory (Bion,
1962, p. 54), and that psychosis was better understood as a breakdown in the minds ability to
sort and metabolize the emotional sense data of lived experience. A number of authors (e.g.

27

Grotstein (2008, p. 193), following Bion, understands unconscious phantasy as a visually-based mythic
stream of dream-thought.
28
forgotten meaning thought through and integrated into the unconscious
29
known in psychoanalytic terms as the depressive position
30
primary process being unconscious ideation dominated by the pleasure principle with little concern for
logic or reality
31
secondary process being conscious or preconscious inhibition on primary process in service of mental
equilibrium and reality-based aims

29

Talamo, 1997; Grotstein, 2009; Meltzer, 1978) consider the model of alpha-function and the
contact-barrier to subsume or completely replace Freuds primary/secondary process model. It
also reflects a conceptual shift which stresses the movement from disorder to order rather than
from excitation to quiescence (Meltzer & Williams, 1988, p. 228).
Freud (1911) describes unconscious process as dominated by the pleasure principle and
characterized by an entire disregard of reality-testing (p. 225). In Bions model, unconscious
process plays an essential role in generating a sense of reality, not only by rendering conscious
material more usable to thinking, but also by providing an alternate perspective on experience, a
dream-narrative complementary to conscious observation (Grotstein, 2007, p. 275), which
together provide the psyche with greater confidence through the power of correlation, what Bion
calls binocular vision (1962b, pp. 54, 86). It is a concept related to Bions (1962b, p. 50; 1992,
p. 10) definition of common sense, the confidence or certitude in an objects reality gained
when perceived simultaneously by more than one sense, more than one person, or more than one
emotion.32 All of these are mental tools for the psychoanalyst as well. In Experiences in Groups
Bion wrote of the need for the psychiatrist to employ a technique of constantly changing points
of view (1961, p. 86), which he later developed into the concept of multiple vertices33 (1970).
As Bell (2011, p. 86) observes, we do not sharpen observation by attending harder, but by
allowing ourselves to be open to and capable of different ways of seeing things.
Just as psychoanalysis achieves its results through consideration of both conscious and
unconscious vantage points, the dream achieves its results in a similar fashion, which is why
Ogden (2004b, p. 1355) interprets Bions psycho-analytic function of the personality as
referring to the dreaming function. Grotstein (2009, p. 745) explains that through the function of
the dream, the conscious and unconscious are placed in collaboratively oppositional relation,
which is more dialectical than conflictual. The same may be hoped to be achieved between the
mentalities of the psychotic and non-psychotic parts of the personality (Ogden, 2008), or the
competing instinctual pulls of narcissism and socialism (Eigen, 2002). This is Bions picture of
the intrapsychic group, comprised of different aspects of the self engaged in conversation. As
Eigen (2002, p. 11) suggests, conflict between functions is part of the way psychic life prospers.
Having a make-up with many opposite tendencies ensures variability, color, plasticity. For
example, the primitive part of the mind nourishes with liveliness the intellectual part which in
turn finds expression and fulfillment for the primitive. Dreaming allows for the mingling of
different parts of the self: conscious with unconscious, fact with phantasy, concrete with
symbolic, reality with imagination, and present with past and future. Dreaming is thus our
profoundest form of thinking and constitutes the principal medium through which we achieve
human consciousness, psychological growth, and the capacity to create personal, symbolic
meaning from our lived experience (Ogden, 2008, p. 25).
The theory of dreaming and alpha-function have become central to the conceptualization
of both psychopathology and analytic technique for a number of prominent contemporary
contributors including Ogden and Ferro. According to Ogden (2004d, p. 858), A person
consults a psychoanalyst because he is in emotional pain, which, unbeknownst to him, he is

32

the latter of which Bion (1962a, p. 310) specifies as the common emotional view
Employing the abstract concept of an axis meeting a curved surface, Bion adopts from geometry the
term vertex to connote a perspective or point of view. Vertices may have as their approximate
realizations various recognized disciplines such as religion, mathematics, physics, music, painting, and
other arts (Bion, 1970, p. 21). In addition to the psychoanalytic vertex, emotional experience can be
represented from the religious or aesthetic vertex, for example.
33

30

either unable to dream (i.e. unable to do unconscious psychological work) or is so disturbed by

what he is dreaming that his dreaming is disrupted. The role of the analyst is to help the patient
dream their undreamt or interrupted dreams. Ferro (2005b) also distinguishes between
pathologies involving a deficient alpha-function (an inability to generate the material for
dreaming) and pathologies where the deficiency lies in the ability to deal with the generated
material, in the employment of what Bion (1962a, 1962b, 1963) describes as the apparatus for
thinking thoughts.34 Ferro (2005b) also identifies a third type of pathology, that which stems
from trauma, where the intensity of the emotional experience overwhelms the minds alpha
capacities, becoming lodged in the unconscious as unprocessed emotional pain. Grotstein
(1997b) understands trauma as overpowering experiences of externality so unexpected and
incompatible with the self that the moment passes before the individual has the opportunity to
dream it, that is, create it in ones own image. Ogden (2007, p. 577) suspects undreamable
experience may also arise from intrapsychic trauma, being overwhelmed by conscious and
unconscious fantasy, where the help from another failed to be enlisted in the creation of less
harmful narrative constructions.
Bion writes that the analyst must be able to dream the session (1992, p. 120), and
dream the analysis as it is taking place (p. 216). The analyst must dream the patients material,
as well as the transactions between patient and analyst, in order to bring to life that which has yet
to be symbolized, facilitating transformation towards thinkability (Ferro, 2002a, p. 39), a skill
that is over time implicitly transmitted to the patient. In order to get in touch with the emotional
truth at the root of the manifest content, the analyst must be able to observe the transactions in
the consulting room as if they were all a dream and to listen to a patients account of his life in
the outside world as if it were the account of a dream (Melzter, 1978, p. 288). Doing so allows
the analyst to tune in to the patients waking dream-thought, the symbolic work already
performed but yet to be put to use (or dreamed) by the patient. Bion intends to keep the meaning
of dream-thoughts consistent with classical psychoanalytic theory, in that they are
communicated by the dreams manifest content, but require translation to reveal their latent
content (Bion, 1963, p. 23). A dream-thought presents an emotional problem with which the
individual must struggle, thus supplying the impetus for the development of the capacity for
dreaming (Ogden, 2007, p. 577). Ferro considers Bions theory of waking dream-thought (the
continual unconscious sequencing of alpha-elements) to be the most significant and important
of his concepts (2006a, p. 989) because of its implications for analytic technique. Waking
dream-thought provides for the analyst, through its manifestation in narrative derivatives to
which the analyst must attend, continuous signals indicating the emotional text of the session and
the oneiric functioning of the couple (Ferro, 2006b, p. 28).
Grotstein (1979a, p. 484) calls alpha-function the ultimate, irreducible element of
creativity. It takes place at what Ogden (2001) calls the frontier of dreaming: the boundary
between unconscious and preconscious where transformation into symbolization occurs in a
dialectical movement between it-ness and I-ness,35 each creating, negating, preserving, and
vitalizing the other (p. 8). Here resides our most uniquely human impulse, the need to give
voice to the inarticulate (p. 9). It is here that we, in a sense, dream ourselves and other people
into existence (Ogden, 2009, p. 5). We construct self and other as characters engaged in a story
written to fit the emotional present. The dyad also dreams into existence what Ogden (1994a,

34

Addressed later in and PS D sections

Ogden (2001, p. 8) improves the translation of the famous Freudian dictum, Where id was, there ego
shall be, to Where it was, there I shall be becoming.
35

31

1994b, 1997b, 2004c) has described as the intersubjective analytic third, defined as a third
subject created by the unconscious interplay of analyst and analysanda third evolving
subjectivity in dialectical tension with individual subjectivities (1997b, p. 30). Bion was well
aware of the importance of what is today called the analytic third in the interpretive work of
psychoanalysis: it is not a matter of talking about analyst and analysand; it is talking about
something between the two of them (Bion, 1994, p. 256).
Ogden (1996a, 1996b, 1997a, 1997b, 2001) has developed Bions (1962b) concept of
reverie into what he considers a central component of analytic technique and a tool for tuning
in to waking dream-thought. Ogden (1997a, p. 568) defines reverie as the analysts
ruminations, daydreams, fantasies, bodily sensations, fleeting perceptions, images occurring in
his mind during a session with a patient, which are easily and often ignored, but should not be,
since they are important unconscious intersubjective constructions indispensible to the
understanding and interpretation of the transferencecountertransference. He writes, reverie is
a process in which metaphors are created that give shape to the analysts experience of the
unconscious dimensions of the analytic relationshipa principal form of representation of the
unconscious (largely intersubjective) experience of analyst and analysand (Ogden, 2001, p. 38).
Paying attention to reverie experience is therefore viewed not only as a technique for receiving
the patients projective identifications, but also as a way of attuning to the shared waking dream
of which the analytic dialogue bespeaks. In time, the patient and analyst should become better at
dreaming together, which Ferro (2006b) considers the core healing activity.
Beta-elements
If alpha-function is disturbed, undeveloped, or for whatever reason inoperative, the
sense impressions of which the patient is aware and the emotions which he is experiencing
remain unchanged (Bion, 1962a, p. 6). Emotions can thus be nothing more than unassimilated
objects of sense. The emotion may be felt, but it remains nameless, meaningless, inaccessible,
and undreamable. Bion refers to the unassimilated emotional sense impression as a -element.
With the aid of Kantian terminology Bion (1962a, p. 6) explains that beta-elements are not
phenomena (objects of perception), but fall instead within the category of things-inthemselves, the unperceivable elements issuing from the unknowable interface with reality,
which require transformation into representation before they can be apprehended by the mind.36
Put differently, beta-elements are the basic units of unmentalized emotional experience, or as
Bion calls them, undigested facts (1992, p. 52). They are the raw material of psychic life
(Eigen, 1985, p 323) and the stem cells of psychic experience (Wachowski, Wachowski &
Cartwright, 2005, p. 179). They are the most rudimentary impressions that experiences make on
the mindthe most vague and inarticulate registrations of emotional states (Ogden, 2005, p. x).
Beta-elements comprise the earliest matrix from which thoughts can be supposed to
arise (Bion, 1963, p. 22). Bion calls this matrix -space, the domain of thoughts that have no
thinker (Bion, 1992, p. 313). As they are, beta-elements lack a capacity for linkage with each
other (Bion, 1962b, p. 22) and require a mind equipped with alpha-function in order to be

36

It may be argued that Bion is taking liberties with Kants definition of phenomena by excluding
untransformed and meaningless sense impressions from this category. It is not clear if Bion is resolving or
confusing the matter by later qualifying that the concept of beta-element includes only senseimpressions, the sense-impression as if it were a part of the personality experiencing the sense impression,
and the sense-impression as if it were the thing-in-itself to which the sense-impression corresponds
(1962b, p. 26).

32

alpha-betized and used for thought. In the infant-caregiver model, beta-elements are the
infants primitive fantasies, protoemotions and undifferentiated, confused bodily sensations
(Ferro, 2002a, p. 116) which require reception and transformation by way of maternal reverie.
What was near-sensory and somatic becomes transformed into something more mental
(Britton, 1992, p. 105). By themselves beta-elements are suitable only for evacuation. They may
be stored in the mind as concrete objects, sometimes experienced as persecutory, but cannot be
thought or repressed as usable information. If alpha-function is lacking or not yet developed,
realistic projective identification is the required method by which they are communicated to
another psyche (caregiver or analyst) where they can be transformed and returned in usable form.
In pathological projective identification as described in the K situation, the communicative,
introjective component is lost. In contrast to realistic projective identification, it is an
omnipotent phantasy; nothing happens, the situation remains unchanged, the personality remains
unchanged (Bion, 1994, p. 314). Owing to a lack of frustration tolerance, thought cannot be
formed and remain as beta-element, part and parcel of an archaic mentality (Bion, 1994, p.
314), enduring in the unconscious as an absent but haunting bad object: what Bion (1965, 1970)
calls the no-thing. There persists an awareness of a lack of existence that demands an
existence, a thought in search of a meaning (Bion, 1965, p. 109).
A beta-element is like an unpremeditated blow which is related to, but is not, thought
(Bion, 1989, p. 3). It is an emotional experience that has not yet been differentiated from its
representation in the mind (Bion, 1962b, p. 58); it is raw experience that simply is-what-it-is
(Ogden, 2001, p. 8). In this way it is similar to what Freud described as the id (das Es, or, the
it), the difference being that Freuds id was made up of drive impulses from the body, while
Bions beta-elements may also arise from external stimuli in the primordial mind (Green,
1998, p. 653). Beta-elements partake of the quality of inanimate object and psychic object
without any form of distinction between the two (Bion, 1963, p. 22). They cannot be treated
like ordinary thoughts but neither can they be treated as ordinary perceptions of the material
world. They are on the boundary of somatic and psychic experience, of mental and physical
(Britton, 1992, p. 105). Thus beta-elements are in many ways a reformulation of Bions earlier
concept of the proto-mental. Their impact upon the psyche is reacted to in non-thinking ways,
either projected, acted out through mindless group-oriented behavior, or expressed in various
forms of addiction or psychosomatic illness.
Patients whose mentality operates on a currency of beta-elements display varying degrees
of what Hanna Segal (1957) defines as symbolic equation, the inability to distinguish between
the symbol (their own or anothers) and that which the symbol may represent.37 Owing to the
influence of the psychotic part of the personality, emotional meaning is continuously prevented
from developing, thus words intended to convey emotional meanings remain only words,
understood only at the most concrete level. Such patients speech will be markedly onedimensional, with no overtones or undertones of meaningsno capacity to evoke a train of
thought (Bion, 1962b, p. 15-16). Bion writes that the attempt to evade the experience of
contact with live objects by destroying alpha-function leaves the personality unable to have a
relationship with any aspect of itself that does not resemble an automaton (Bion, 1962a, p. 13).
The result is what Duncan Cartwright (2009) refers to as beta-mentality, where thing-like
thinking has taken the place of affective thinking-in-relation to people (Goldberg, 2014, p. 115).

37

Money-Kyrle (1968, p. 694) describes symbolic equation as a primitive form of representational

thought, where a dream image may represent something, but can only be understood by the dreamer
concretely.

33

But patients whose thinking is conducted by means of concrete objects (Bion, 1959, p. 314)
and whose universe is populated by inanimate objects (Bion, 1962b, p. 14) include not only the
psychotic and borderline, but may in fact lead quite functional lives, fitting the description given
by Christopher Bollas (1987, p. 141) of the normotic personality. These are patients who may
strike the analyst as somehow unborn, seeming to lack in subjectivity, with little reflective
function, who often self-medicate and surround themselves with material objects sought for their
functional rather than symbolic value. The ability to relate to the existential facts of life through
a rich medium of idiosyncratic symbols rather than the computational manipulation of
conventional signs marks the difference between a personality capable of emotional growth and
learning from experience and a personality geared towards mere adaptation and survival (Meltzer
& Williams, 1988, p. 14). Without the ability to dream, one is trapped in an endless, unchanging
world of what is (Ogden, 2007, p. 577).
In beta-mentality, thoughts, emotions, words, ideas and even people are treated as
things to be manipulated. Since -elements are characteristic of the personality during the
dominance of the pleasure principle (Bion, 1992, p. 181), unpleasant beta-elements are treated
as any unpleasant stimulus would be: in an evacuatory manner. For certain patients (particularly
those for whom the psychotic part of the personality is obtrusive), their use of words and
language is better described as action than speech, intended to unburden the psyche of
accretions of stimuli (Bion, 1962b, p. 24). Even a smile, in some cases, is better classified as an
evacuatory muscle movement than a communication of feeling (Bion, 1962b, pp. 12-13).
Hallucination, in which beta-elements are evacuated out through the sense organs, is another
example of the psyche unburdening itself, projecting internal states into objects of perception in
a way that ensures no sense, meaning, or associations will be able to be drawn from the
experience. But these examples in which beta-elements consist of evacuated remnants of psychic
experience raise the question, how can a beta-element find a suitable vehicle for its expulsion
without being subjected first to some sort of symbolic transformation? It seems Bion describes
two types of beta-elements, those which arise from sensory experience which have yet to be
mentalized, and those that originate from mental phenomena, transformed into beta-elements for
evacuation.38
Bion (1992) writes that the dream can serve either the pleasure principle or the reality
principle. If the reality principle is dominant, the ideogram serves to make the experience
suitable for storage and recall; if the pleasure-pain principle is dominant, the ideogram serves to
render its object excretable (p. 65), the difference being whether the objective is to effect
changes in the environment (modification of frustration) or to rid the psyche of accumulations of
affect (evasion of frustration). Thus if the ideogram in the form of a smile seems intended to
have an impact on the analyst, it can be assumed that the reality principle is in operation. But
Bion wonders if every dream is not an unsuccessful attempt to satisfy both the pleasure principle
and the reality principle at the same time; It contains and is the manifestation of painful
stresses (p. 95). Dream images have the power to put disturbing emotions at a distance, not for
hallucinatory gratification or ingestion, but for hallucinatory excretion (p. 67). Every dream
image can therefore be treated as either alpha- or beta-element, posing the option to the dreamer
whether to engage with the image through dream-thought (and dream it, digesting the emotional
valency it carries), or whether to reject or abandon it, imprisoned and lifeless in its
ideogrammatic receptacle. The dream employed as a container for projective identification is

38

Grotstein (2007) has attempted to resolve this confusion around the apparent two types of betaelements, as has Ferro (1999) with his concept of balpha elements to describe the latter type.

34

felt to be an artifact, as deficient in life-promoting qualities as a hallucinated breast is felt to be

deficient in food (p. 67).
In Learning from Experience, Bion (1962b, p. 101) introduces the possibility of alphafunction operating in reverse, to account for the second type of beta-element described above.
Even in cases where alpha-function is intact and thoughts can be produced, if the personality
lacks the apparatus that would enable it to think thoughts, that is, cope with the sometimes
difficult or overwhelming meanings and emotional truths that thoughts contain, it will resort to
the stripping of alpha-elements of the characteristics that differentiate them from betaelements. What distinguishes these types of beta-elements from the proto-mental sense
impressions is that, having once been thoughts, they maintain a tincture of the personality
adhering to them (1962b, p. 25), thus bearing close resemblance to Bions formulation of the
bizarre object,39 but described more specifically as objects compounded of things-inthemselves, feelings of depression-persecution and guilt and therefore aspects of personality
linked by a sense of catastrophe (Bion, 1963, p. 40). In cases where alpha-function operates
primarily in reverse, what forms instead of the contact-barrier Bion calls the beta-screen, an
agglomeration or agglutination (Grinberg, Sor, & Bianchedi, 1975, p. 50) of beta-elements
that imprison the psychotic patient (Grotstein, 2007, p. 60). The beta-screen may resemble a
dream or the unconscious mind made visible, in that it is characterized by an outpouring of
disconnected phrases or images, beta-elements, which reveal a deeply confused and disjointed
state. Meltzer and Williams (1988, p. 228) describe the beta-screen as fragmented mythical
constructions and cannibalized symbols expelled through compulsive meaningless speech. But
the beta-screen nevertheless accomplishes a certain rudimentary functionality in service of the
pleasure principle, the psychotic part of the personality, and the basic needs of the individual by
virtue of a quality enabling it to evoke the kind of response the patient desires, or, alternatively,
a response from the analyst which is heavily charged with counter-transference (Bion, 1962b, p.
23).
The beta-screen is a phenomenon encountered in cases of psychosis. But the projection of
beta-elements into the analyst is understood to occur to varying degrees with all patients. Since
Bion, analysts attention to their own countertransference has become an indispensible
component of the work, as a way of identifying and experiencing for themselves those aspects of
the patients experience that the patient is unable to tolerate or digest. Ferro (2002a, p. 1), in
describing the formation of the analytic field, describes the occurrence of an intense emotional
turbulence in the form of vortices of elements, which evoke and activate the functions and
thereby begin their process of transformation into elements. The analyst attempts to allow for
a gradient to arise (p. 64), the success or failure of which will be constantly re-narrated
in derivative by the stories, facts, and characters the patient brings in.40
The Grid
Bions Grid (Figure 1) is central to his 1963 book publication Elements of
Psychoanalysis and the subject of two different papers both titled The Grid, written in the mid

39

Reanimated objects; real internal objects that are killed off and brought back to life in a form suited to
the denial of reality (Wachowski, Wachowski & Cartwright, 2005, p. 183).
40
Ferros (e.g. 2008b, 2009) work draws heavily upon this idea in his development of the concepts of
narrative transformations and transformations in dreaming.

35

A
-elements

B
-elements

C
Dream Thoughts,
Dreams, Myths

D
Pre-conception

E
Conception

F
Concept

Definitory
Hypothesis

Notation

Attention

Inquiry

Action

A1

A2

B1

B2

B3

B4

B5

B6

Bn

C1

C2

C3

C4

C5

C6

Cn

D1

D2

D3

D4

D5

D6

Dn

E1

E2

E3

E4

E5

E6

En

F1

F2

F3

F4

F5

F6

Fn

G
Scientific
Deductive System

n.

A6

G2

H
Algebraic
Calculus

Figure 1. The Grid. First published in Elements of Psychoanalysis (Bion, 1963).

1960s but not published until 198941 and 1997.42 The Grid is also referenced throughout his third
book Transformations (1965) and the beginning of his fourth book Attention and Interpretation
(1970). Referred to by Wisdom (1987, p. 554) as Bions filing system, the Grid is an
extremely compressed summary of all Bions theories about thinking (Talamo, 1997, p. 53).

41

A rather discursive essay published together with a later paper as Grid and Caesura (Bion, 1989).
Written in 1963 (a few years earlier than the other Grid paper was written), this is more directly a
teaching paper on the topic. It was published together with transcripts of two tape recordings made by
Bion in 1977 in preparation for his seminars in Rome under the title Taming Wild Thoughts (Bion,
1997a).
42

36

Often casually compared to Mendeleevs periodic table of elements (Civitarese, 2013; Ferreira,
2001; Lpez-Corvo, 2006; Meltzer, 1978; Torres & Hinshelwood, 2013; Vermote, 2011a), the
Grid is an important part of Bions (1962b, 1963, 1965) efforts to introduce a standardized
system of notation into psychoanalysis that could serve as a theoretical lingua franca
(Civitarese, 2013, p. 92) for practitioners of different psychoanalytic schools (Grotstein, 2002, p.
447).
Inspired by Euclids theory of Elements (Vermote, 2011b, p. 1090), the Grid is also a
product of Bions romance with neo-positivism (Mancia, Longhin, & Mancia, 2000; Sandler,
2006) in which the formalization of variables in mathematical models, of which the Grid is one,
claims to provide a basis for scientific precision and empirical validity in the description of
social phenomena. But the Grid is perhaps best understood within the context of the ongoing
implicit invitation within Bions work to set aside content in order to better understand the
underlying structures and processes (Charles, 2002a, p. 429) by devising abstract models with
no inherent meaning as tools for illuminating essential similarities of form or function, which
are often overshadowed by attention to the specifics of the content of the communication.
The Grid is intended to aid the analyst in categorization of statements43 (Bion, 1997a,
p. 8). By statement, Bion means any event that is part of communication between analyst and
analysand, or any personality and itself. The Grid can be applied to verbal statements such as
patients free associations or analysts interpretations, but can be applied in theory to
thoughts/ideas and feelings at any stage of evolution,44 transformation,45 or publication.46
Bion has called the Grid a mental climbing frame on which the psycho-analyst could exercise
his mental muscles (1989, p. 31). It is an instrument intended for use by the analyst outside of
the session47 as an exercise designed to develop intuition and the capacity for clinical
discrimination (Bion, 1963, p. 103). The Grid can be used by the analyst for meditative
review, applying to it remembered experiential material from sessions as an aid in thinking
about an analytic problem, as an instrument of notation that provides a record of fact and a sign
that can be manipulated in a manner analogous to a number in mathematics (Bion, 1963, p. 71).
It can also be used as more of a psycho-analytic game, an imaginative exercise analogous to a
musician practicing scales, not directly related to any piece of music but to the elements of
which any piece of music is composed (Bion, 1963, p. 101). As with all of Bions models the
intention is to facilitate thinking about analytic work (Bion, 1963, p. 73, italics added), as the
session itself is too precious an opportunity for observation to be jeopardized by preoccupations.
The Grid is a biaxial table classifiable as a matrix (Schermer, 2003) with eight rows
labeled by letter on the vertical axis and seven columns labeled by number on the horizontal axis.
The rows of the vertical axis, also called the genetic axis, represent the genetic or developmental

43
or formulations (Grinberg, Sor & Bianchedi, 1975, p. 61)
44

Bion (1970) uses the term evolution to describe the emergence and growth of representations from
their origins in the realm of the undifferentiated.
45
The title and subject of Bions (1965) third book, transformations refer to the object of experience
being transformed within different forms of representational thought while maintained in the invariance
across the transformation.
46
Publication is a term used by Bion (1962a, 1962b, 1963, 1970, 1992) to represent both the moment
sense data is made available to consciousness, as well as the moment private awareness is made public (in
analysis, made available to both members of the dyad).
47
extra-sessional work (Bion, 1963, p. 73)

37

status of thought, progressing top to bottom from most concrete and undifferentiated (betaelements) to most abstract and sophisticated in representation (algebraic calculus). The columns
of the horizontal axis represent the function that a statement is being made to perform (Bion,
1963, p. 71) and relate to uses to which the elements in the genetic axis are put (Bion, 1997a,
p. 8). As with the vertical axis, the order of the categories on the horizontal axis also suggest a
progression, becoming more directed and active as we move across the axis (Charles, 2002a, p.
433), although Meltzer (1978, p. 327), in his early study of the Grid, considered the order of the
columns utterly arbitrary. The seventh column is marked n. to suggest the possibility of
other functions (uses) yet to be discovered or defined. The biaxial nature of the Grid therefore
allows statements to be categorized according to both stage of thought and use or aim, denoted
by an alphanumeric coordinate pair.48
Column 1, definitory hypothesis, refers to statements that serve the purpose of marking
what is believed, intuited, or deduced to be a constant conjunction, a term Bion frequently
borrows from philosopher David Hume49 meaning the way that a number of facts, features,
events, or experiences seen regularly to occur together (to correlate) can be united and bound
with a name, without the necessity of assuming or locating causality. Statements that fall in this
column serve the purpose of creating boundaries around subject matter imbued with significance
by its perceived coherence, as the initial step prior to the next stage of learning in which the
actual meaning is discovered (Bion, 1997a, p. 9).
Column 2, labeled with the Greek letter psi, includes statements that serve the purpose
of denying the development of psychical truth before its mutative influence can manifest upon
the personality or its present moment outlook. In the movement left-to-right across the Grid, the
psi column represents an attempt to fault, to falsify, and to negate the definitory hypothesis
(Grotstein, 1981, p. 518). Statements of this kind include the lie (Bion, 1970; 1989, p. 5) as
well as expressions of what is classically known as resistance (Bion, 1997a, p. 9) or defense
(Lpez-Corvo, 2006, p. 194). Here a thought or beta-element is being put to use in the prevention
of the encounter with potentially transformative emotional meaning. Often motivated by anxiety
or what Bion has called premonition, the aim is to construct a barrier against ideas and
feelings implicit in the definitory hypothesis (Lpez-Corvo, 2006, p. 194). Operations of this
kind work against learning from experience and take place within a K link (or a L link or H
link if what is sought to be avoided, distorted or nullified is the reality of love or hate). They
include efforts to evade rather than modify frustration, and can be viewed as efforts by the ego
operating under the pleasure principle acting in opposition to the emergent truth of the id
(Grotstein, 2002, p. 448). They serve to protect the patient from the unknown and its
unpredictable impact and are thus directed against psychological turbulence (Bion, 1965, p.
15) and against the inception of any development in his personality involving catastrophic
change (Bion, 1989, p. 6). Column 2 statements are multifarious in operation and motivation,
and Bion (1989, p. 5) considers this column to warrant expansion into a grid of its own.50

48

Each box of the grid contains examples of what Bion (1963) sought to define as elements of
psychoanalysis.
49 A Treatise of Human Nature, 1738; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 1748
50
Bion (1963) also hinted at the formation of a negative grid to describe the genesis of lies, or
misrepresentations of the truth (Meltzer, 1986, p. 93). Meltzer (2000) has created such a LHK grid
with five types of uses in the horizontal axis: Denial of inner reality, Omniscience, Lies &
delusions, Misuses of language, and Hallucinations. In both his LHK and LHK grids, Meltzer

38

Columns 3 and 4 are drawn from Freuds (1911) paper Two Principles of Mental
Functioning. Here Freud implicates the institution of attention in the rise of the reality
principle, which could periodically search the outer world to stay familiar with it should an inner
need arise, thus meeting the sense impressions half-way. Freud writes of the simultaneous
institution of notation for depositing the results of attention in memory, allowing for
discrimination between new and known. Bion assigns notation to column 3 and attention to
column 4.51 Both are factors in alpha-function (Bion, 1962b, p. 5), or, as put by Andr Green,
achievements of alpha-function, conserving [as alpha-elements] and registering the meanings
of emotional experience (1998, p. 657). Column 3 contains statements used for the purpose of
recording facts and holding in mind elements that seem potentially related, so that meaning
might be able to develop either from within the bound elements, or by comparing them with
other previously notated elements. Column 4 implies the negation of column 2, in that, in the
growth of an idea, attention to the relevant elements of the situation indicates the acceptance of
the impact that this new idea is stirring (Grotstein, 2002, p. 449). Bion (1989, p. 6) distinguishes
column 5, labeled inquiry, from column 4 by allocating column 4 to the type of attention
described by Freud as free floating, while column 5 is attention directed to a particular
psychoanalytic object52 and is often imbued with greater intensity or curiosity. In the first
version of the Grid (1997a, p. 7), Bion provided column 5 with a different label, Oedipus,
invoking the sense of obstinacy by which Oedipus pursues his question.53 Bion (1989) regards
columns 3, 4, and 5 as comprising a spectrum of attention: the attention at work in column 3 is
less consciously directed and more susceptible to the influence of unconscious expectations and
desires, whereas column 4 is more evenly hovering, neutral, passive, and receptive, as in
reverie, while column 5 is active and specifically directed.
Bion (1997a, p. 10) also invokes Freuds Two Principles paper in describing column 6,
action, which refers to those phenomena that resemble motor discharge intended to unburden
the mental apparatus of accretions of stimuli. The column does not refer to physical actions
themselves, but is intended to categorize thoughts which are closely related to, or are
transformations into, action (Bion, 1989, p. 6). The moment of what Bion calls publication,
when ones inner experience is made available to the shared analytic space, is an example of
thought being translated into action (Bion, 1992, p. 197). Although originally devised in an
attempt to categorize what is known in psychoanalysis as acting out (Bion, 1989, p. 6), column
6 does not differ from the other columns in that it is still intended to classify statements

replaces the Scientific deductive system and Algebraic calculus rows with Spiritual and Aesthetic,
respectively.
51
Sanders (2006, p. 354) observes that Bions use of attention and notation (originally developed in
infancy for the investigation of external reality) now pertains to the investigation of inner reality.
52
Psychoanalytic objects are objects of psycho-analytic study (Bion, 1997a, p. 15) which Bion (1963)
writes have extension in the domains of sense, myth, and passion, and can be represented (bound,
nominated) by interpretations that employ sense, myth, and psychoanalytic theory (rows B, C, and G).
The psychoanalytic object is also associated in the literature with the leading edge of the patients
unconscious anxiety, returned to later in the O section.
53
Bion (1963) also draws from the Oedipus myth to add pictorial representations to other columns,
linking the oracle to column 1, the character Tiresias to column 2 (representing the false hypothesis
maintained as a barrier against anxiety), the myth as a whole taken as a record of experience to column 3,
the character of the Sphinx (who stimulates curiosity but is at once threatening) to column 4, and the
myths outcome (exile, dispersion) to column 6.

39

embodied in a representation (1963, p. 19). Acting out, or action as a substitute for thought
(Bion, 1989, p. 7), is captured well by the Grid category A6, in which a feeling or idea, treated as
a concrete thing (beta-element), can be evacuated through the action of a statement. But the
categorys usefulness is extended by including statements that, by way of the idea they contain,
are used as actions intended to modify reality, such as the delivery of an interpretation which
carries the capacity to exert an active influence on the patient (F6 on the Grid).
But Bion (1963, pp. 17-21) shows how each of the columns can be used by an analyst in
an interpretation. Column 1: the analyst proposes to the patient the hypothesis that, for example,
the present symptoms fit depression, an oracular pronouncement that may delimit the theme of
the interchange or investigation to follow. Column 2: the analyst, influenced by
countertransference anxiety, makes a false statement intended to uphold the illusion that all is
known and therefore safe from lurking ideas. Column 3: the analyst summarizes and reminds the
patient of previous statements or occurrences, with the intention of bringing together material
that may lead to novel conceptions, meanings, or understandings. Column 4: the analyst draws
the patients attention to a present observation that seems to stand out for its ability to impart
meaning and coherence to previously disparate elements. Column 5: the analyst makes an
interpretation intended to illuminate previously obscure material for the patient that encourages
movement within a specific line of inquiry. Column 6: the analyst makes a provocative statement
that functions as an operator intended as a communication [that] will enable the patient to
effect solutions of his problems of development (Bion, 1963, pp. 19-20). Bion seems to be
saying that a column 6 interpretation is more of a call to action by way of presenting to the
patient a truth that is powerful enough to either initiate a strong defensive reaction, a deflection
or misinterpretation, or, if taken in, a (catastrophic) change or expansion of the personality. As
observed by Joan and Neville Symington (1996, p. 34), the horizontal axis grades interpretations
from left to right in accordance with increased power to elucidate covert material and initiate
change, and increased potential for eliciting resistance to knowing.
The vertical (genetic) axis categorizes the steps of thought as it moves between different
levels of differentiation, abstraction, generalizability and saturation. Lpez-Corvo (2006, p. 98)
suggests it was Bion who first borrowed the term saturated from chemistry, which is now
commonly used in psychoanalytic language to mean fixed with a singular, accepted meaning, in
contrast to unsaturated, where the meaning remains open, preserving an openness of field, of
possibility, being a variable without a value (White, 2011a, p. 220). The Grid itself is an
unsaturated notational system (Grotstein, 2002, p. 448) in that the meaning of each box awaits
determination by the content applied. The definitory hypothesis specifically contains
unsaturated statements (Bion, 1963, p. 48), while the psi column statements are saturated in
that they are closed off to the development of meaning. Bion (1963, p. 26) calls beta-elements
(row A) saturated, in that they are treated as pre-defined, closed objects, or things-inthemselves. But Bions other definition of beta-elements, the raw sense impressions in need of
transformation by alpha-function, could arguably be considered unsaturated as they begin their
path into the evolution of personal meaning. Movement from row A to row B in the formation of
an alpha-element represents the first step in the processes of differentiation and abstraction.
In discussing the genetic axis, Bion (1963, 1989, 1997a) begins with the qualification that
beta-elements and alpha-elements, rows A and B, are not observable and may not even exist, but
are included because of observed facts that cannot be explained without the aid of such
hypothetical elements (Bion, 1963, p. 22). But unlike row B, which Bion (1963, p. 29-30)
doubts will play much of a tangible part in psychoanalytic material, Bion (p. 97) explains how

40

some of the beta-element categories can be seen to correspond to certain psychoanalytic

realizations. Row A finds its usefulness in the categorization of statements expressing thoughts
and feelings in their concrete forms. These would include feelings arising from phantasies felt
to be indistinguishable from facts, and thoughts related to those phantasies which are
indistinguishable from things (p. 97). Because they are not employed in the service of learning,
they cannot be used in notation, attention, or inquiry, as Bion demonstrates by leaving boxes A3,
A4, and A5 empty as null classes (p. 26).
Alpha-elements that have been conjoined into dream-thought find classification in row
C,54 which includes categories of thought which are often expressible in terms of sensuous,
usually visual, images such as those appearing in dreams, myths, narratives, hallucinations
(Bion, 1989, p. 3). Row C statements represent the initial communicable version of an
emotional experience (Mion, 2006, p. 137). For Bion (1963), myths, both social and personal,
are narrative structures that arise in the mind for their as if suitability for binding a set of alphaelements,55 often used as metaphor or analogy to explain or elucidate the emotional experience in
question. The value of myths lies in their communicability and universality, as they contain
patterns applicable to other events of similar configuration (Thorner, 1981, p. 77). Bion calls
myths fact finding tools in the individuals armoury of learning (p. 66), and can be used by
either patient or analyst to facilitate communication and convey understanding. Bion writes that
since [myths] are primitive and pictorial they are vital but lack precision (1963, p. 66), and
represent an early but essential step in model making.56 Myths, dream-thoughts, and dreams
provide a preliminary narrative structure to emotional experiences, although the emotional or
moral meaning still remains to be determined (Meltzer, 1978, p. 387), as does their place
within broader models and interpretive formulations. Like columns 2 and 6, Bion feels that row
C deserves a grid of its own (1989, p. 4).
In row D Bion places the pre-conception, defined in earlier works (1962a, 1962b) for its
role in the genesis of thought in infancy. By definition, both the pre-conception and the premonition include an unsaturated element, a variable, an unconscious which remains
unconscious, a source of speculation and disturbance (Bion, 1990, p. 11), which Bion represents
with the Greek letter (ksi). Bion (1963, p. 23) describes the pre-conception as corresponding to
a state of expectation, a state of mind adapted to receive a restricted range of phenomena. He
provides the example of an analyst who has a hunch that something of which he is not properly
aware is going on in the session (p. 75). In what may be described as the analysts aha
moment, the unborn baby (Bion, 1990) of the pre-conception becomes saturated as it meets up
with an appropriate realization, giving rise to the birth of a conception (row E), an encounter
with a new idea, the quality of which will depend on the vertex from which the pre-conception
was approached. With repeated experiences of related conceptions, these can become united in
the mind (and fixed in memory) in the form of a concept (row F), achieving a greater level of
abstraction (each conception having functioned as a pre-conception awaiting the realization of
the concept). Concepts can then be used for increasingly abstract and generalized levels of
thought, as when a set of concepts is worked into a scientific deductive system (row G). Bion (p.
24) explains row G as a combination of concepts in hypotheses and systems of hypotheses so
that they are logically related to each other. The logical relation of one concept with another and

54

Schermer (2003, p. 321) observes that rows A, B, and C represent Bions subdivisions of what once all
fell under Freuds classification of primary process.
55
Grotstein (1981, p. 515) equates dreaming to the ability to mythify alpha-elements.
56
Bion calls them primitive forms of model (1997a, p. 11).

41

of one hypothesis with another enhances the meaning of each concept and hypothesis thus linked
and expresses a meaning that the concepts and hypotheses and links do not individually possess.
In this respect the meaning of the whole may be said to be greater than the meaning of the sum of
its parts. Row H represents an even further level of abstraction, in which the elements of a
scientific deductive system can become represented by signs ordered by rules of combination in
an algebraic calculus, which in theory could be used to reveal new possibilities (new preconceptions) about the phenomena it describes.57 In each step down the genetic axis new abstract
truths are discovered while context is removed, and Bion (p. 88) states that elements in rows C,
D, E, F, G and H can all function as pre-conceptions in their ability to invite new ways of
understanding experience.
Pre-conceptions need to be able to retain their quality as ever-changing variables rather
than becoming permanently saturated by any of their conceptual offspring. Bion (1963, pp. 8485) explains how learning and growth of the mind result from the ability to alternate between
particularization (concretization) and generalization (abstraction). Movement in the direction of
abstraction (down the genetic axis) involves the naming (formulation) of the conception born of
the mating of a pre-conception and its realization, binding the saturation with a name that
captures the experiences specific meaning in memory: what Bion calls positive growth.
Movement in the opposite direction, what Bion calls negative growth, is essential for
achieving a fresh outlook in the face of saturated material, where familiar experiences are
vivified by allowing the possibility of novel meanings (for example, moving up the Grid to find a
mythical formulation for an experience that has already been fit within a more sophisticated
model).
Bion uses the word pre-conception in a variety of ways, and attempts to distinguish
pre-conception from preconception,58 by assigning the former to a stage in the development
of thinking, and the latter to the analysts knowledge of analytic theory which shapes his
receptivity to experience59 (1963, p. 75). In explaining the pre-conception, Bion (1962a, 1962b,
1963) frequently uses the example of the infants inborn expectation of the breast. He also
compares the pre-conception to Kants concept of empty thoughts (Bion, 1962a, 1962b), an
analogy that has been refuted by Noel-Smith (2013), who explains that Kant would not permit a
theoretical assumption of an innate idea of a specific object: this is precisely the idealism from
which his philosophy represents a departure (p. 131). In his later writing Bion (1965, p. 138)
more accurately relates the pre-conception to Platos Ideal Forms. Money-Kyrle (1968, p. 692)
shows how in the age-old philosophical debate between nominalists (to whom a class is no
more than the common name we give to a number of similar objects or events, or perhaps a
convenient logical fiction) and realists (to whom a class is an ideal laid up in heaven, which we
are reminded of whenever we see an imperfect copy), Bion falls closer to the side of the realists.
Grotstein (2007) and Sullivan (2010) have shown how closely this unites Bions theory of preconceptions with Jungs theory of archetypes. Grotstein, in his enthusiasm, has also equated

57

Bion leaves most of the boxes of rows G and H empty presumably because they apply to phenomena
endowed with a greater degree of sophistication and precision than any to which psycho-analysis attains
at present (Bion, 1965, p. 38). This is difficult to reconcile with Bions (1963) comments on the role of
row G in the interpretation of the analytic object.
58
It appears to the author that Bion is not always disciplined in maintaining this distinction throughout
his work, and the distinction is not held across the literature.
59
The importance that the analyst avoid the influence of preconception, that is, the premature saturation
of new experience by pre-formed meaning, is discussed later in the Memory and Desire section.

42

Bions pre-conceptions with Wordsworths unborn babies and Michelangelos prisoners,

which strive and pray for the experiences that can release them from their immemorial marble
to be born (2000c, p. 28). Grotstein has called pre-conceptions the unborn children who must
await the serendipity of Fate to be evokedbut, once evoked, become peremptory, that quality
which Freud assigned to instinctual drives (1981, p. 506).
But as has been shown, Bion does not limit the pre-conception to the realms of the innate
or transcendental. If pre-conceptions are understood as areas of receptivity to the formation of
new ideas or ways of perceiving or representing future experiences, it can be seen that ones pool
of pre-conceptions is unique to every mind, is always in flux, and is grown through life
experience and the work of psychoanalysis. Bion writes, the object of the Grid is to aid in
developing a pre-conception, in the analyst, that is not directly psycho-analytical so that the
observations made are not such that they are bound to approximate to a psycho-analytical
theory (1997a, p. 15). For some analysts, studying the Grid may help them become more
receptive to new ways of seeing and conceptualizing the events of the session as they are
unfolding by having learned to pay more attention to the interpersonal or intrapsychic uses to
which ideastheir own and the patientsare being put, or the ways in which ideas or emotions
are being transformed over time. But among Bions scholars and readers, ambivalence abounds
towards the infamous, notorious Grid (Civitarese, 2013). Although Bion continued to
reference the Grid in his seminars and throughout his later writing, he himself would fall among
the ambivalent, stating in his New York lectures that as soon as I had got the Grid out of my
system I could see how inadequate it was (Bion, 1980, p. 56). He has also admitted that an
early casualty in trying to use the Grid is the Grid itself (Bion, 1989, p. 6). As Civitarese (2013,
p. 94) has put it, aspiring to compress the complexity of the events of a session into a set of
boxes is an enterprise doomed to failure. But it is not an exercise without its rewards, and Bion
believed that others might find it profitable to invent and apply a grid system of their own
(Bion, 1989, p. 6). The effort to classify the anatomy and physiology of the thinking and
unthinking mind may be an impossible task, but one that is potentially illuminating both in where
it succeeds and where it falls short. As Bion reminds us, There is no intrinsic merit in
establishing the category, but the attempt to do so forces clarification in the analyst's mind of
what it is he is actually observing (Bion, 1965, p. 169).
Thoughts Without a Thinker
Bions idea of pre-conceptions is congruent with his repeated postulate that Thoughts
exist without a thinker (Bion, 1967b, p. 165). Bion (1967b, 1970, 1992, 1997a) suggests that a
thinker is not necessary for the existence of a thought,60 arguing that Descartes61 in his concept
of philosophical doubt failed to doubt the necessity of a thinker (Bion, 1989, p. 7). While the lie
requires a thinker to think it, The truth, or true thought, does not require a thinker he is not
logically necessaryNobody need think the true thought: it awaits the advent of the thinker who
achieves significance through the true thought (Bion, 1970, pp. 102-103). True thought cannot
itself be thought in its absoluteness, requiring some degree of falsification to be held within the
mind. Its origin in absolute truth62 is the source of its transformational power.

60

an idea often interpreted by Buddhist psychoanalysts such as Mark Epstein (1995) as compatible with
the Buddhist doctrine of no-self (anatta in Pali, antman in Sanskrit)
61
whose famous dictum I think, therefore I am first appeared in Discourse on Method in 1637
62
discussed later in O section

43

Bions starting point is emotional experience, initially unformulated but brimming with
pre- (yet-to-be) conceived meaning. Alpha-function takes the early steps toward developing its
representation in the domain of thought or ideawhich Bion (1963) represents with the
notation I. Dream-thoughts begin to accrue as personal, often pictorial reflections of the
impersonal truth of the experience, but as reflections of truth they point and even compel in the
direction of its vastness of meaning awaiting the work of a thinker to approach. Thus Bion
considers thoughts as epistemologically prior to the work of thinking, explaining that thinking is
developed as a method or apparatus for dealing with thoughts (1962b, p. 83), a development
forced on the psyche by the pressure of thoughts and not the other way round (1962a, p. 306).
In order for emotional experience to feed the growth of the mind, the primitive thoughts
emerging at the contact-barrier must be worked with so that I can develop in its richness of
meaning in the direction of true thought, at least to the extent that the individual can grasp and
bear.
For analogy, Bion (1992) compares the thinker to the eye or the radio telescope, a
receiving apparatus that is only receptive to certain wavelengths. Impinging thoughts may be
too powerful in relation to the sensitivity of the receiving apparatus (p. 304). Grotstein writes,
The human beinghas been ordained to be persecuted, according to Bion, by an inexorable
pressure of thoughts without a thinker which demand that the mind give them an audience for
them to be thought about (1981, p. 528). Emotional experience resounds with thoughts awaiting
thinkers, and whether they remain latent as pre-conceptions, disperse out as unclaimed betaelements, or bud into dream-thoughts that capture some helpful truth depends on the mind or
minds available to them. In the analytic setting thoughts are often unclaimed or disowned
through projective identification, and the analyst will often be confronted with thoughts that
seem foreign and unfamiliar, stray thoughts, wild thoughts (Bion, 1997a). Whether belonging
to the patient, the analyst, or the analytic third, they await a thinkers evolution.
Bion (1963, p. 30) writes that patients who suffer from disorders of thought may owe
their disability partly to failures in development of thoughts themselves63 (as in deficient alphafunction where what would become thoughts remain as beta-elements), and partly to failures in
development of an apparatus for dealing with thoughts, considering it important that the analyst
distinguish the two since the analytic work is different for each. The apparatus for thinking
thoughts64 drives the transformation of I across Grid categories. It works with the thoughts that
emerge, drives thoughts further emergence, and grows the mind through the integration of
evolved emotional meaning. It operates according to what Bion calls the psycho-mechanics of
thinking (1963, p. 94), processes of interplay represented by and Ps D.
Container Contained ()
Bion (1956, 1957) first uses the verb to contain in describing the disordered perceptual
apparatus in schizophrenic thought in which expelled particles of the ego either contain or are
contained by external objects (bizarre object phenomena). In a 1959 Cogitations entry he uses
the term missile container to describe projectively identified dream-thoughts, proposing that
dream images can be produced (hallucinated) for the purpose of serving as a container intended
to hold in, imprison, inoculate the emotional experience the person feels too feeble to contain
without danger of rupture (Bion, 1992, p. 66-67). By then, Bion was also considering the ways

63

Bion considers the development of thoughts to be a primitive thinking, distinguished from the
thinking that is required for the use of thoughts (Bion, 1963, p. 35).
64
which Ferro (2002a) points out is also the apparatus for dreaming dreams

44

in which this same function operates on a bi-personal level, between patient and analyst or
between infant and mother.
In his 1958 paper On Arrogance Bion suggests that the patient benefits from the
relationship with the analyst by way of the opportunity to split off parts of his psyche and
project them into meand leave them there long enough for them to be modified by their
sojourn in my psyche (p. 146), a process instrumental to the pursuit of emotional truths too
overwhelming for the patient to experience on their own. He states, the implicit aim of psychoanalysis to pursue the truth at no matter what cost is felt to be synonymous with a claim to a
capacity for containing the discarded, split-off aspects of other personalities while retaining a
balanced outlook (p. 145). In Bions reconceptualization of projective identification the patient
unconsciously projects into the analyst aspects of the self that feel endangered, dangerous,
unwanted or unmanageable. Through the intimacy of the intersubjective link between them, the
analyst feels that he is being manipulated so as to be playing a part, no matter how difficult to
recognize, in [the patients] phantasy, or he would do if it were not for what in recollection I can
only call a temporary loss of insight, a sense of experiencing strong feelings and at the same time
a belief that their existence is quite adequately justified by the objective situation65 (Bion, 1959,
p. 149). The analyst, if sensitive enough to his or her own internal experience, will notice the
pressure exerted from the projective identification (sometimes subtle and peripheral, sometimes
overt) to experience certain thoughts and feelings or behave a certain way in accordance with the
patients disowned elements of subjectivity. Involving the analyst in difficult, often painful
feelings is an unconscious communication from the patient about what those feelings, or the
other side of them, are like. The analyst needs to be able to bring into awareness these difficult
aspects of the patients internal world and transform them into a version that the patient is able to
reclaim and integrate. This view of the analytic process has shown significant implications
regarding the importance of the analysts attention to countertransference66 as a source of
valuable and potentially transformative information.
In his next four papers, Bion (1959, 1962a, 1962b, 1963) shows how fundamental this
process of containment is between infant and mother in the formation of the thinking mind, in
which the emotionally charged proto-mental contents too powerful for the baby to contain are
expelled as beta-elements and received by the caregiver, who is able to experience them within
herself, transform them through her alpha-function, and respond in a way that returns them in
modified, detoxicated form to the infant. Over time this bi-personal activity of projection and
reception becomes introjected by the infant as an internal thinking couple67 (Grotstein, 1981, p.
514). Beta-level experience no longer needs to be projected out into other minds, but can be
received and contained within the babys own mind and used in the development of meaning and
knowledge. If this internalization process fails, hallucinated (artificially produced) containers
may develop as recourse, which lack the ability to generate meaning for the experiences they
contain.

65

Bion was already recognizing the bi-personal, intersubjective and communicative function of projective
identification in his early work with groups, from which this line is cited.
66
Although Bion used the word counter-transference in its original meaning (arousal of the analysts
own unconscious pathology in transference toward the patient), the term is used here in its broader, more
current usage to include all of the analysts emotional responses to the patient, both conscious and
unconscious.
67
Grotstein (1979b, 2000c) terms the members of this internal couple the dreamer who dreams the
dream and the dreamer who understands the dream.

45

From these ideas, Bion (1962b, p. 90) proposes to abstract for use as a psychoanalytic
model the idea of a container into which an object is projected, represented by the symbol ,
and the contained, represented by , which designates the object projected into the container.
describes both the bi-personal, communicative dimension of projective identification, as
well as the intrapsychic process of thinking: dealing with ones own emotional thoughts in a
creative way.
The term container is not to be seen as a static, concrete thing. Ogden (2004b, p. 1356)
explains that it is better understood as a capacity: the capacity for unconscious psychological
work (dreaming), the capacity for preconscious dreamlike thinking (reverie), as well as the
capacity for rational secondary-process thought. Factors in containment include attention and
curiosity, the ability to tolerate uncertainty, doubt, and a sense of the infinite (Bion, 1962b, p.
94), as well as the capacity to allow oneself to be overtaken by experience yet remain
thoughtful (Burka, Sarnat & St. John, 2007, p. 995). The container needs to be strong enough to
withstand the emotional impact of powerful thoughts and feelings, while flexible and malleable
enough to make room for and grow from them. Bion (1963) writes that the container needs to be
able to remain integrated and yet lose rigidity. This is the foundation of the state of mind of the
individual who can retain his knowledge and experience and yet be prepared to reconstrue past
experiences in a manner that enables him to be receptive of a new idea (p. 93).
The contained, like the container, is not a static thing, but a living process that in health
is continuously expanding and changing (Ogden 2004b, p. 1356). It refers to the emotional
meaning of lived experience, the personal significance of its truth, existing as thoughts in the
broadest sense, which are often unconscious or preconscious but can take any form on the
genetic axis of the Grid. But Bion is careful to show that thoughts, myths, concepts, etc. are
containers themselves, containers for the meaning or truth they convey. Bion (1963, p. 31) writes
that is designed to deal with I, but is also manufactured out of I. By this he means that
thoughts operate as either contained or container, and the transformation of one into the other
amounts to the growth of , the capacity for meanings interaction. Pre-conceptions can be
seen as containers awaiting saturation by meaning imparted by lived experience. Their mating
with a realization, the contained, gives rise to a new meaning, a conception that can then function
as a pre-conception receptive to new sets of unrealized meanings, thus growing the container of
the mind. Growing provides the basis for an apparatus for learning by experience (Bion,
1962b, p. 92). As the container grows, so does the depth and range of thoughts that can be
contained, which in turn continue to stretch and expand the container. With the growth of the
container comes an increased capacity for the dreaming of emotional experience, and with the
growth of the contained comes dreams that catch more of lifes penetrating layers of meaning.
Bions use of the male and female symbols evokes the reproductive (Sandler, 2000)
and procreative (Brown, 2011) element of the model, where the mating of container and
contained gives birth to new meaning. and exist in a potentially highly creative, dynamic,
reciprocal relationship, where each exert mutative influence upon the other, often giving rise to
unexpected outcomes. Ogden writes that they are fiercely, muscularly in tension with one
another, coexisting in an uneasy state of mutual dependence (2004b, p. 1362). The contained
gives meaning, relevance, life to the container, while the container gives shape and secure
boundaries to that which it enshrines (Britton, 1992, p. 104), immersing it with personalized
meaning and providing medium for its expression.
Bion identifies three types of relationships between and , commensal, parasitic and
symbiotic. In biology, these terms describe types of interspecies relationships. In commensalism

46

one species benefits from the other without benefiting or harming the other. In parasitism one
species benefits to the harm of the other. Although symbiosis is commonly equated with
mutualism, in which the association is to the benefit of both species, symbiosis technically refers
to any type of interspecies association, including commensalism, parasitism and mutualism
(Symbiosis, n.d.). Bion uses these terms his own way in describing relationships, although
inconsistency in his definitions of commensalism and ambiguity in its differentiation from
symbiosis have led to differing uses and interpretations of these terms in the subsequent
literature. Bion initially describes the projective-receptive link in K as commensal (1962b, p. 96),
and his definition sounds like mutualism: By commensal I mean and are dependent on
each other for mutual benefit and without harm to either. In terms of a model the mother derives
benefit and achieves mental growth from the experience: the infant likewise abstracts benefit and
achieves growth (pp. 90-91). Bion describes the commensal mating (p. 93) of and as
resulting in the extrapolation of ordering abstractions in the processes of learning and mental
growth. In the analytic setting, the commensal relationship can be conceived as a working
through model, with its stress on knowledge gained in the fabric of a bipersonal relationshipa
knowledge that is painful and that, in a different way, does good to both parties (Grinberg,
Langer, Liberman, & De Rodrigu, 1967, p. 499).
In Attention and Interpretation Bion introduces his concept of symbiosis and removes the
emphasis on dependency from commensalism, stressing instead the dependence of one upon the
other in symbiotic relationships. Bion redefines commensal as a relationship in which two
objects share a third to the advantage of all three, while in symbiosis, one depends on another
to mutual advantage (1970, p. 95). Commensal becomes more of a homeostatic relationship in
which the contained (the unconscious thought) and the container (the thinker or thinkers) coexist
independently of each other while benefitting from a co-created object. Potentially
transformative thoughts exist as pre-conceptions living in a pretransformational state
(Grotstein, 1981, p. 511). In symbiosis, by contrast, the thought and the thinker correspond, and
modify each other through the correspondence. The thought proliferates and the thinker
developsThe commensal position changes when thought and thinker approximatea critical
situation arises when a discovery threatens (Bion, 1970, p. 116-117).
Billow (2003) offers a practical interpretation of the difference between commensal and
symbiotic layers of containment in the analytic relationship. He understands the third shared
object in Bions definition of commensal as corresponding to Ogdens analytic third, the
emotional relationship between patient and analyst which is itself an analytic object. The
commensal relationship exists as a shared, dynamic structure, growing in emotional flexibility
and abstraction, while remaining linked to our ongoing, lived-out present (p. 34). Although
projective identification operates, the containers are shared symbols held linguistically, and the
participants strive to find words to contain and communicate emotion (p. 33). In symbiotic
interactions, projective identification operates in service of the patients need to have volatile
internal forces contained by another, relying upon the analysts depth of empathic understanding.
The emotional symbol and the emotionally signified are indistinguishable to the patient,68 who
resorts instead to enactments designed to involve the analyst in a collective defensive reaction to
threatening material. Symbiotic processing requires the analyst to think actively about and
respond strategically to intense emotional reactions that are ambiguously communicated and
evoke the analysts counter-reactions (p. 38). The analysts role is to recognize the need, retain

68

what Bateman and Fonagy (2004) refer to as psychic equivalence

47

a balanced outlook, and help develop into thought that which the patient cannot, specifically
that part of their personality that has insufficiently mastered self-containment.
When symbiotic relations operate on an intrapsychic level there develops a precarious
tension between the familiar, known aspects of the self (the container) and some new, foreign
and uninvited piece of emotional reality (the contained). Bion (1970) borrows from the
vernacular of the times the term establishment, which refers to the well-connected, wealthy and
powerful societal elite. He extends the meaning of the term to describe the ruling body of any
group, including psychoanalytic institutions, whose function is to exercise power and
responsibility, uphold rules or dogma, and maintain stability of the group structure over time. He
extends the meaning further to represent the ruling characteristics of an individual which
function as a container for the emergence of powerful ideas which may pose as threats to ones
view of the world, ones values or expectations, or ones sense of self and internal coherence.
Referring to the establishments internal counterpart, Bion writes that The individual always
displays some aspect of his personality that is stable and constant, which will be maintained
with great tenacity as the only force likely to contain the counterpart of the messianic idea (p.
122). Just as the societal or political establishment functions (ideally) to create conditions
allowing for its emergence while simultaneously assimilating, integrating and containing the
highly disruptive and paradigm shifting vision of the genius, mystic, or messiah, the personality
faces a similar task when approached with highly unsaturated emotional truth. The patients
internal establishment cannot contain it without restructuring. Bion (1965, 1970) terms the
required change catastrophic change,69 a subversion of the order or system of things (Bion,
1965, p. 8) which is feared for its threat to self-continuity and marked by the presence of violent
emotions and feelings of disaster in the participants. Bion considers this essential to the work
of psychoanalysis, writing, Mental evolution or growth is catastrophic (1970, p. 108).
When what was a commensal relationship nears the critical situation of a looming
discovery, containment is felt or feared to be lacking and anxiety builds. If a symbiotic
relationship can be established, catastrophic change can be mediated by the analytic dyad
through a cooperative and dialectical interpretive process of integration in which not too much
life and vitality is squeezed out of the contained with minimal trauma to the container. In
symbiosis a mutually enhancing interaction occurs which proliferates the changing, emerging
parts of the self while nourishing and strengthening the continuous self (Britton, 1992). If a
parasitic relationship takes hold instead as a fearful response to premonitory anxiety heralding
catastrophic change,70 false constructions will be erected as attempts to destroy the potency of
the contained, at the expense of both container and contained, thinker and true thought. Bion
intends the word parasitic to represent a relationship in which one depends on another to
produce a third, which is destructive of all three (1970, p. 95). He uses the example of a patient
stammeringhis emotion dependent upon the container of verbal expression produces
incoherence, the mutually damaging third. The development of an ego-destructive super-ego is
another example of the destructive progeny of a parasitic (or K) relationship in which normal
projective identification fails and becomes excessive and pathological. What is in need of
containment becomes split-off or stripped of its meaning, vitality or goodness, in a relationship
that Bion (1962b) represents as ( ). In some adult patients, the psychotic part of the
personality can be seen attempting to establish parasitic links with the analyst, since true

69

Lpez-Corvo (2003, p. 53) shows the resemblance between Bions concept of catastrophic change and
the catastrophe theory of French mathematician Ren Thom.
70
a fear which Gaddini (1981) considers equivalent to Winnicotts fear of breakdown

48

containment is untrustworthy and threatening: commensal relating is felt as dangerous for its
stimulation of thought and emotional meaning, and symbiotic relating may feel entrapping
(Billow, 2003, p. 40) or out of control. In a parasitic relationship projective identifications may
be intended to numb or confuse the mind of the other, or may be withdrawn in effort to starve the
relationship of emotion. Parasitic relationships include addictive, perverse, corrupt, and
psychotic relationships where true dependency has been replaced by relationships based upon
selfish and/or cruel manipulation (Grotstein, 1982, p. 74). Britton (1992, p. 112) who prefers the
term malignant containment over parasitic, provides the example of the problematic phantasy
of ideal containment, a belief that an absolute fit between container and contained should
exist, whereby discrepancies, which could be the source of growth, cannot be tolerated and are
felt only as persecutory.
Steiner (1993) and Cartwright (2009) explain the importance that the patient and analyst
are together able to mourn the relinquishment of the idealized container. Cartwright also warns
against viewing the container as existing solely within the analysts mind, locating it instead
within the field between patient and analyst (p. 83). He describes the containing function as an
area of mind or a mental connection that attempts to find ways of tolerating undeveloped
psychic content and emotions so they can be held in mind and understood (p. 5), over time
enriching the scope of the experiential field (p. 1). The containing function keeps alive, and in
a sense brings to life, the analysandsprojected aspects of self (Ogden, 1997b, p. 24). It is a
function that entails keen observation, intuition and reverie, a capacity for empathy and
emotional resonance with the patient, a willingness to take the transference (Mitrani, 2001)
without being taken by it, and an ability to think about, modify and transform the patients
projections and disowned parts in a way that puts them back within reach of the patients abilities
to think about, transform and integrate them.
In his book Containing States of Mind, Cartwright (2009), like Billow, develops and
expands upon the clinical manifestations of commensal, symbiotic, and parasitic container
contained configurations, developing additional concepts of autistic, proto- and pseudocontainment. In the autistic configuration there can be no commerce between container and
contained because there is a lack of internal space so projections cannot occur. Instead, the
continuity provided by sensory experience creates a proto-container at the sub-symbolic level,
where rhythms or repetitions in the sound of the conversation, for example, create a secure sense
of internal coherence for the patient. The sub-symbolic patterned flow of beta-elements may
serve a functional role crucial to the nascent sense of having a mind (p. 110), thus acting as a
container in a very basic sense, a container for experience itself. In the analytic setting this type
of containment is more similar to Winnicotts (1960, 1965) concept of environmental holding,
and in its pathological manifestations can work as a defense against the unbounded intimacy of
or replace the felt need for symbolic meaning-making. Cartwrights concept of pseudocontainment, although operating at the symbolic level, is another defensive configuration that
resists the emotional turmoil of by mimicking the relationship in accordance with the
assumed expectations of the other, never supplying the relationship with anything authentic to
the patients true self.
The container contained model is one of Bions most known and accepted concepts,
and has been widely recognized as a helpful tool in schematizing the activity and growth of
thought and emotional meaning within the mind and between minds. Grotstein (1979b, p. 110)
has gone so far as to say, Bions concept of the container and the contained has so wide an
application in psychological and biological phenomena generally that I believe it amounts to a

49

new natural law. The most general and abstract in scope of all Bions models (Civitarese,
2013, p. 103), it has proven conducive to being reinterpreted, developed and integrated into the
ideas of large number of psychoanalytic authors, only some of whom find mention in this
review.
Paranoid-Schizoid and Depressive Positions (Ps D)
Operating in concert with in the psycho-mechanics of thinking and the apparatus
for thinking thoughts is the interaction between the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions
(Ps D). Just as Bion takes the Kleinian theory of projective identification and abstracts it with
the symbol into a broader principle of reciprocal interaction, he does the same with the
Kleinian theory of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions. In one of Kleins (1946) most
influential contributions to psychoanalysis she theorized two modes of infant experience each
characterized by a particular set of anxieties and defenses: the paranoid-schizoid position and the
depressive position. Initially overwhelmed by paranoid and persecutory anxieties, the infant
relies on schizoid defenses (splitting) for the ordering of its world, relating only to parts of
objects (e.g. parts of the mother, parts of the self) and projecting its loving and hating feelings
separately into good and bad part-objects. If development proceeds normally the infant
becomes able to integrate the good parts with the bad parts and come to the recognition that
mother, for example, is a whole object, both good and bad, loved and hated. With this
realization, which marks movement into the depressive position, the concern for the basic
survival of the self becomes replaced with concern for relationship to the primary caregiver upon
which the infant depends. With this shift comes guilt over hateful feelings towards the loved
object, the impulse to make reparations, grief over the loss of the idealized object, and anxiety
stemming from the surrender of omnipotent control over internal reality. The child becomes able
to understand the difference between self and other, develop a more integrated view of the world,
and take greater amounts of personal responsibility. The model is extended to analytic work with
adult patients who continue to rely on splitting mechanisms and part-object relating, helping
them take back projections and achieve greater integration and wholeness in their sense of self
and awareness of the minds of others, a process that often involves the working through of
sadness and new anxieties inherent to the depressive position.
As he did with Freuds pleasure and reality principles, Bion supplements the diachronic
perspective associated with Kleins positions with an emphasis on the synchronic, dynamic
oscillation between them that occurs throughout life and is fundamental to the elaboration and
employment of thoughts (Bion, 1963, p. 44). Klein uses the word positions rather than
phases to suggest fluctuations back and forth between the two organizations often occur over
the course of infancy and throughout life (Spillius, 1994, p. 334), although movements made
from the depressive back to the paranoid-schizoid position are seen by Klein as defensive against
depressive anxiety (Lagos, 2007, p. 192). For Bion, the ability to move with facility back and
forth between Ps and D is a vital mental function established under normal conditions in infancy
(Bion, 1992, p. 200) which is essential to the operation of unconscious waking thought (p. 72)
and the ability to dream lived experience.
Bions reformulation helped Kleinians move past the tendency to pathologize the
paranoid-schizoid position in favor of the attainment of the depressive position (Grotstein, 2007,
p. 308) and attend more to moment-to-moment shifts in consciousness rather than only larger
scale shifts in character (Spillius, 1994, p. 334). In Bions conceptualization, the two positions
are in dialectical relation, each exerting a mediating function on the other, and neither

50

dominates with any degree of completeness or permanence (Steiner, 1987, p. 69). But Ps D,
while related to Kleins positions, should not be taken as simple shorthand for them. As Meltzer
(1978, p. 330) explains, Kleins positions are understood as organizations structured around
value attitudes (goodness and badness) towards the whole or part object with moral
implications for the subject, while Bion, beyond stating that the oscillation occurs within an L, H
or K link (1963, p. 35), does not explicitly speak to the significance of value attitudes in the
movement between positions, focusing instead on the functional and qualitative attributes of
each position as related to their role in the elaboration of thought.
Bion (1963, p. 37) cites Klein and Segals work linking the onset of the depressive
position with the capacity for symbol formation. The infant in the paranoid-schizoid position
initially relies heavily upon the caregivers foothold in the depressive position for providing a
container for unintegrated and split-off elements of experience which it cannot yet symbolize on
its own. The gradual introjection of the containing function attenuates impulses to possess or
expel objects felt to be good or bad, allowing for the toleration of ambivalence and the formation
of signs that unify previously disparate elements into a larger picture (Ps D). From the
standpoint of tolerance of the whole object, the Ps position can start to operate for creative, rather
than purely defensive purposes (Eigen, 1985, p. 321), and assist in the continued growing of the
container. As life experience presents the child with a steady stream of new, inconsistent and
conflicting information, movement from D Ps represents moments of temporary
disintegration of the order of the growing internal establishment which allows for the novel
pieces of experiential knowledge to intermingle with the old until an appropriate new
configuration can be found that makes sense as a whole (Ps D). This movement between Ps
D continues recursively throughout life and takes place at every moment where learning from
experience occurs.
Bion (1963, p. 35) implicates Ps D as the mechanism of transformation between
different vertical axis categories of the Grid: movement from D PS corresponds with
unsaturated experience that demands attention to unlinked elements higher up the axis in the
direction of naivety (p. 96), while movement from Ps D corresponds with their saturation by
newly discovered meaning, represented by movement down the axis in the direction of
sophistication. In the apparatus for thinking thoughts, Ps D (or fragmentation integration)
operates collaboratively with (or expulsion ingestion), and the two mechanisms develop
more or less simultaneously and can assume each others characteristics (for explanation see
Bion, 1963, pp. 42-44). Brown (2012, p. 1206) explains that the existence of a container () is a
necessary presence to gather up the psychic bits of experience () which enables coherence (D)
to emerge out of fragmentation (PS), although Eigen (1985, p. 322) argues that the Ps D
capacity develops prior to the container contained relationship, and that the fall apartcome
together rhythm of the self operates at the most basic and elemental level of experience, often at
odds with the tendency to seek or cling to containment. But an optimal container can tolerate a
certain amount of dissolution, and an optimal containing environment serves to permit regular Ps
D oscillation while adding personal context to the thinking process. Bion (1963, p. 90) writes
that the delineation of the whole object depends on the operation of Ps D, while the emergent
meaning of the whole object and the benignity of the change (p. 35) will depend on the nature
of and the emotional tone of the dynamic link (L, H or K).
In Bions model, Ps is described as a state of fragmentation or disintegration, where
disconnected fragments of potential thought cluster around an emotional experience (Meltzer,
1983, p 69) taking the form of an uncertainty cloud (Bion, 1963, p. 42). It may be experienced

51

as persecutory, as in Kleins description of the paranoid-schizoid position, because something

about the current situation feels at odds with ones current working models. The feeling may also
be one of frustration or desire caused by the feeling of ignorance in the face of novelty (Bion,
1992, p. 291). The sense of urgency and the amount of anxiety depend on the situation and the
emotional meanings at stake, as well as the thinkers reservoir of tolerated doubt (Bion 1962b),
a concept related John Keats notion of negative capability. Bion cites Keats who coined the
term to describe that quality which Shakespeare possessed so enormouslythat is, when a man
is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact
and reason (cited in Bion, 1970, p. 125). Negative capability71 means being able to tolerate the
emotional experience of waiting in a state of not-knowing (French & Simpson, 2000, p. 71)
without rushing into action or tak[ing] refuge in evacuation or omniscience (Green, 1998, p.
657). The word negative in this context is meant to locate the space between impulse and
action in which the mind makes itself available for thinking, allowing sufficient timeeven one
pulsation of an arteryfor the thoughts to germinate (Williams, 2010, pp. 89-90). Negative
capability can be understood as the ability to remain in the uncertain or unintegrated72 state of Ps
long enough to learn from it, allowing difficult or confusing experience to become the source of
change, growth or insight. In analytic work material can emerge that stirs up uncertainty
regarding knowledge of self which can be experienced as threatening to ones self-concept73 or
sense of self continuity, and a common defensive tendency is to cling to what is known and
attempt to fit the current facts with preexisting views. Another tendency is to evacuate through
projective identification that which is emotionally incompatible with the self, rendering it
inaccessible for use in the thinking process (Cartwright, 1998, p. 8). The ability to tolerate doubt
and hold meaning-making in suspension, and the willingness to become temporarily
disorganized74 by a disorganizing situation while retaining the ability to think about what is
happening can be developed by the patient in analysis and are considered by Bion to be essential
working tools of the analyst.
D corresponds a state of integration, coherence, or comprehension, in which a unifying
element emerges to bind the disparate elements into a cohesive whole picture, linking up the
present emotional experience with other snippets and fragments that had not, until that particular
moment, made sense (Talamo, 1997, p. 49). Bion borrows from French mathematician Henri
Poincar the term selected fact75 to refer to that unifying element. Poincar (1952) uses the
term in describing the creation of a mathematical formulation which is able to unite elements
long since known, but till then scattered and seemingly foreign to each other, and suddenly
introduce order where the appearance of disorder reigned. Then it enables us to see at a glance

71

Bion (1992, p. 304) also equates negative capability with the capacity of the unconscious and the
ability to tolerate empty space.
72
Although reference here to Winnicotts (1945) concept of unintegration is unintentional, Eigens
(1992) interpretation of Winnicotts concept as the ability to float between self organizations and dip into
formlessness out of which new organizations arise, appears to the author to fit well with Bions
description of Ps.
73
Falkenstrm (2003) identifies the movement from D Ps as necessary to the Buddhist practitioners
aim of letting go of attachments to old ways of being and fixed images of the self and other, understood as
primary sources of suffering.
74
Stephen Mitchell (1991, 1993) considers it an important part of the therapeutic process that the self be
allowed to temporarily disorganize and unravel.
75
compared by Grotstein (2007) to the strange attractor in chaos theory

52

each of these elements in the place it occupies in the whole (cited in Bion, 1962b, p. 72). The
emergence of the selected fact generates links between previously unlinked thoughts or elements
of thoughts; it is that by which coherence and meaning is given to facts already known but
whose relatedness has not hitherto been seen (Bion, 1963, p. 19). Examples from the Grid
would include the emergence of an alpha-element bringing representation to a cluster of betaelements, the emergence of a personal myth giving order to a series of events, or the abstraction
of a concept from a series of related conceptions. The selected fact itself may be an idea or an
emotion (Bion, 1963, p. 83) and the experience of the selected fact is characterized by the
emotional experience of a sense of discovery of coherence (Bion, 1962b, p. 74), which ushers in
the development of its personal meaning, as influenced by . After a pattern or common
quality is identified and abstracted through nomination in the binding of a constant conjunction
which Money-Kyrle (1978, p. 392) calls the formation of a class and which Bion (1962b, p. 67)
calls the formation theory, not only is a momentary field of information harmonized but the
abstraction becomes a pre-conception that broadens the container by expanding the ways in
which future emotional experiences can be meaningfully linked within the mind.
The emergence of the selected fact initiates the move back into the depressive position
(Bion, 1962b, p. 87) in which there occurs the assignment of meaning and the selection of one
out of many possible perspectives on the whole picture. This can be accompanied by the
emotional experience of depression (Bion, 1992, p. 291) related to the forsaking of all other
potential perspectives and the pain inherent to the one. Just as Ps requires tolerance of the
unknown, D requires tolerance of the known. Bion (1970, p. 102) writes of the spontaneous
bleakness of the genuine Ps D reaction, humbling in that it reveals a whole situation which
seems to belong to a reality that pre-exists the individual who has discovered it. Psychotic
patients fear and attack the movement Ps D because of its role in converting the unknown into
the known (Bion 1992, p. 199), and because movement into D can bring with it synthesis of a
murderous super-ego (p. 105) or lead to the illumination of further ignorance (p. 275). Even
patients with working alpha-function may display varying degrees of narcissistic encapsulation
ensuring any outcomes of Ps D remain delimited within a rigidly held personal system of
potential meanings.
If Ps is regarded as a cloud of particles capable of coming together, D can be thought of
as an object capable of becoming fragmented and dispersed (Bion, 1963, p. 42). The meaning,
or the new whole picture that emerges upon the movement into D can quickly begin to betray its
own inadequacy, requiring movement back into Ps. The process is equated to the Hegelian
dialectic in which the synthesis that resolves the conflict between thesis and antithesis then
becomes the thesis awaiting antithesis in a higher-order triad (Lagos, 2007; Talamo, 1981).
Civitarese writes that Symbolization can be seen only as being in a state of continuous tension
with its own undoing (2008, p. 1134). The same can be said of the establishment in tension with
messianic forces demanding its continual catastrophic restructuring. For Bion, the mind
oscillates between a repairing and preserving function and a destructive or even catastrophic
onewe can see that there is not only a place for a creative movement towards unity, but also an
equally creative tendency to destroy old modes of thought (Skelton, 1995, p. 396). The
movement into Ps is a necessary prerequisite for the integration of new data and the formation of

53

new links, so Ps D is an essential mechanism in the construction of the self from infancy
onward.76
Through attention to premonition, the analyst should attempt to observe the emotions that
give rise to the patient's integrations and disintegrations (Bion, 1963, p. 83), since a major part
of the analysts role involves helping the patient move between the two. The analyst does this by
at times making observations that harmonize incoherence elucidating larger picture perspectives,
while at other times raising questions that provoke a deconstruction of perspectives that have
come to appear inappropriately assembled (Bion, 1963, p. 83). To do this well, analysts
themselves must be adept at Ps D oscillation,77 especially since the analytic material is in
many ways co-created and co-experienced, invested in heavily by both parties. Indeed Bion
devotes the majority of his treatment of Ps D to the elucidation of its role in the analysts own
internal working process.
Connected to his concept of multiple vertices, Bion (1989, p. 46) writes that the analyst
must develop a penchant for non-pathological splitting, the necessary splitting of the whole of
the personality to formulate several possible ideas or interpretations. In listening to the patients
associations, the analyst needs to abide in Ps even when the patient is speaking from the D
position, since The coherence that these facts have in the patient's mind is not relevant to the
analyst's problem. His problemis to ignore that coherence so that he is confronted by the
incoherence and experiences incomprehension of what is presented to him. His own analysis
should have made it possible for him to tolerate this emotional experience though it involves
feelings of doubt and perhaps even persecution. This state must endure, possibly for a short
period but probably longer, until a new coherence emerges (1963, p. 102). Talamo suggests that
when in Ps it is better to be in an L link with oneself characterized by love and charity rather than
a K link, which from the Ps position would constitute a defensive reaching after fact and
reason (Talamo, 1997, p. 55).
In his later work, particularly his fourth book Attention and Interpretation, Bion
increasingly transcended the primacy of K, or the lust for knowledge, or the search for and use
of knowledge (Eigen, 1998, p. 191), focusing instead on the factors involved in negative
capability and the necessity that the analyst remain focused on that which is unknown and
unrepresented. Bion writes that In every session the psycho-analyst should be ableto be aware
of the aspects of the material that, however familiar they may seem to be, relate to what is
unknown both to him and to the analysand. Any attempt to cling to what he knows must be
resisted for the sake of achieving a state of mind analogous to the paranoidschizoid position
(1970, p. 124). Bion then coins the term patience to distinguish this state of mind from the
pathological elements of Kleins description of the paranoid-schizoid position, while intending
that the term retain its association with suffering and tolerance of frustration (p. 124). For the
analogue to the depressive position in which a pattern has evolved and constellated78 in the
synthesis of the selected fact, Bion selects the term security, which he intends to retain its
association of safety and diminished anxiety (p. 124). The mass of evidence which becomes

76

This idea exists in analytical psychology as well, introduced in 1947 by Michael Fordham, in which
deintegration is described as the spontaneous division of the self into parts during the process of ego
formation in childhood (Fordham, 1957, p. 117).
77
Ferro (2005b, 2008a) introduces the terminology NC SF to represent the oscillation between the
state requiring negative capability and the discovery of a selected fact.
78
I use the term constellation to represent the process precipitating a constant conjunction (Bion,
1970, p. 33).

54

available in contact with the personality of the analysand makes it necessary to tolerate the
constant oscillation from paranoid-schizoid to depressive position, or from patience to security
which I suggest as more accurate descriptions of the psycho-analysts fluctuations (Bion, 1989,
p. 15).
Prior to making any interpretation, the analyst can be expected to pass through states of
anxiety and even persecution related first to the period of dwelling in ignorance (requiring
patience), second to the anticipated emotional impact the interpretation will elicit in the patient,
which Bion (1965, p. 168) calls the analysts proto-resistance. Afterwards, a correct
interpretation will be commonly found to be followed almost immediately by a sense of
depression (Bion, 1970, p. 124). Re-integration of split-off parts of the personality cannot be
expected to be a positive emotional experience, since the splits and dissociations are almost
always initially made in the service of avoiding pain.
Transformations
The concept of transformation, the change of form within or across mediums, is another
example of a fundamental and ubiquitous process of life and consciousness brought under fresh
scrutiny by Bions work. Transformations are everywhere, they account for the inexorable
transience of internal and external reality, as well as the communicability of meaning upon
which emotional life depends. Our sense organs transform information about our contact with the
outside world into recognizable neural signal patterns, and our minds transform signals into
meanings in accordance with our memories, knowledge, personality and understanding of
circumstance. We are in many ways defined as humans and as individuals by the way we
transform and are transformed by the meaning of our experience.
Bions study of thinking is a study of transformations. His early work with thought
disordered patients brought him up against the question of why in some people do emotions and
perceptions not become psychic, and he developed the model of alpha-function in order to study
the transformation from the non-psychic to the just-psychic (Vermote, 2011b). He took his
study of transformations further with the development of the Grid, a graphic model of the
transformation of thought, both that of the analyst and that of the patient (Corrao, 1981, p. 690).
and Ps D are described as the operational mechanisms driving transformations of mental
representations (Bion, 1963). In 1965 Bion renders this theme explicit with the publication of his
third metatheoretical book Transformations, in which he presents a theory of transformations.
His aim is not to develop new psychoanalytic theories, but to suggest a method of critical
approach to psycho-analytic practice (Bion, 1965, p. 6). Like the Grid, the theory of
transformations is to aid observation and recording in terms suitable for scientific manipulation
without the presence of the objects (p. 40).
The concept of transformations appears implicitly in Darwin, Planck and Einstein, and
was first used explicitly by Paul Dirac describing the laws of nature in quantum physics (Sandler,
2006). In Freuds thought, affects undergo transformation by way of defense mechanisms, and
latent ideas are transformed by unconscious dreamwork (Riolo, 2007, p. 1375). Jungs book
Psychology of the Unconscious: A Study of the Transformations and Symbolisms of the Libido79
(which initiated his split from Freud by positing libido as psychic energy rather than sexual
energy) views fantasy and dream symbols as transformations of energy arising from the tension

79

Published in 1912 as Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido, the English translation appeared in 1916.
Jung published a revised version in 1952, which was translated into English in 1956 as Symbols of
Transformation.

55

of opposites in the unconscious (Jung, 1916). Without crediting any particular source, Bion was
the first to use [transformations] to refer to a wide-ranging dynamic activity, accomplished by
human beings in numerous tasks (Sandler, 2006, p. 194). Despite its broad definition and Bions
extensive use of analogy to transformations employed in art, math and religious experience, his
theory of transformations refers only to psychoanalysis, particularly the practice of psychoanalytic observation (Bion, 1965, p. 34). He is interested in the ways experience becomes
transformed within the patients mind, the ways it becomes transformed across analytic
observation,80 the way shared analytic material becomes transformed in the analysts mind
leading up to the delivery of an interpretation, and the way the analytic work transforms its
participants (a question developed further in Attention and Interpretation, 1970).
Bion begins Transformations with the example of an artist painting a field of poppies, in
which the actual field is transformed into a two dimensional visual representation.81 He writes,
We can recognize that the latter represents the former, so I shall suppose that despite the
differences between a field of poppies and a piece of canvassomething has remained unaltered
and on this something recognition depends. The elements that go to make up the unaltered aspect
of the transformation I shall call invariants (Bion, 1965, p. 1). The analysts interpretation of the
emotional facts of the session is a transformation that is different than the patients existing
transformation of them, and in the context of that difference as the interpretation is delivered, a
sense of the invariant can emerge for the patient: emotional truth that is better grasped if seen
from multiple vertices. Staying with the painting metaphor, The analyst's position is akin to that
of the painter who by his art adds to his publics experienceVerbal expression must be limited
so that it expresses truth without any implication other than the implication that it is true in the
analysts opinion (Bion, 1965, p. 37). The interpretation cannot intend to be the patients truth,
but what it adds can help the patient arrive there.
For his variables Bion uses T to represent the total transformation experience including
the processes and the end products for both members of the analytic dyad; Tp for the
transformation as it occurs in the patients mind, Ta for the analysts transformation. O
represents the unknowable reality of the original impinging experience undergoing
transformation upon contact with the conscious mind [discussed later in O section]. T
represents the process by which the transformation is effected (examples of which would include
alpha-function, mythification, abstraction, transference, projective identification, alpha-function
in reverse, and acting out), and T signifies the representation resulting from the transformation
(such as an interpretation) and is also sometimes referred to as a transformation. In analytic
practice all statements must be regarded as transformations (Bion, 1997a, p. 13), and as the
horizontal axis of the Grid is intended to demonstrate, transformations can be conducted for all
sorts of purposes, such as notation and record, private and public communication and the
pursuit of knowledge (1965, p. 39). Bion alerts to the necessity of determining whether Tp is
characterized primarily by the need to conceal O or by the need to give as direct a representation
of O as possible in view of its obscurity to him (1965 p. 22).
Bion writes, The psycho-analysts domain is that which lies between the point where a
man receives sense impressions and the point where he gives expression to the transformation
that has taken place (Bion, 1965, p. 46). The analyst must observe the patients techniques of
transformation (Tp ), grasp the meaning and purpose of the transformation (Tp) as a whole, and

80

citing Heisenberg in acknowledging that observed facts are distorted by the very act of observation
(1965, p. 45)
81
According to Grotstein (2007, p. 218), Bion was himself a landscape painter.

56

detect the invariants which convey a sense of the O of the patients experience (p. 15). Through
interpretation The analyst helps the patient to transform the part of his emotional experience of
which he is unconscious into an emotional experience of which he is conscious (Blandonu,
1994, p. 200).
Tp is assumed to be influenced by the emotional disturbance of both LHK82 and the
relative dominance of narcissism versus social-ism (Bion, 1965, p. 80). Transformations of
emotional experience occurring in the patients mind, particularly in cases of heightened
emotionality and disordered thinking, can result in highly concealed invarianceTp bearing
little resemblance to the original experience, and Bion classifies three types of Tp which are
often encountered in practice: rigid motion transformations, projective transformations, and
transformations in hallucinosis.
In Euclidean geometry, figures undergoing rigid motion transformations retain their
shape but are rotated, permutated, inverted or translated within the same plane (Riolo, 2007, p.
1379). Bion uses this term to refer to transformations that bear a high level of invariance and a
negligible coefficient of deformation (Corrao, 1981, p. 688), making them easily recognizable
to the analyst. The primary example is transference as originally defined by Freud, in which
feelings and ideas appropriate to infantile sexuality are transferred to the relationship with the
analyst (Bion, 1965, p. 19). The transformation occurs across different spheres of applicability,
but the invariant persists in the meaning of the emotional relationship. The transformation of a
thought into a word whose commonly accepted meaning matches the meaning of the thought is
another example (Grinberg, Sor & Bianchedi, 1975, p. 74).
Projective geometry is the study of the variant and invariant properties of configurations
across projective transformations. Unlike rigid motion transformations, projective
transformations do not take place within a single plane, rather, a figure is projected into a new
space in the formation of a new figure whose lengths and angles have become distorted
according to the contours of its new container (Riolo, 2007, p. 1380). The psychological
equivalent occurs through the process of projective identification, where an internal emotional
relationship becomes contorted or even split up within its new interpersonal context. Parts of the
personality that cannot be thought about (manipulated within the same internal plane) become
projected into external objects.
Bion asserts that the theory of transformations can make a fresh distinction between
neurosis and psychosis (1965, p. 36). If rigid motion transformations occur at the neurotic level
and are characterized by an as if quality, projective transformations are expressions of the
psychotic part of the personality, characterized by concreteness (Grotstein, 2007, p. 233; Riolo,
2007, p. 1380), and more often observed in borderline patients (Blandonu, 1994, p. 200).
Projective transformations result in a higher degree of deformation and confusion around what
parts of the transformation belong to whom: events far removed from the relationship to the
analyst are actually regarded as aspects of the analysts personality (Bion, 1965, p. 30). It is
harder to tell what the patient is really talking about or responding to (the O of the patient).
Projective transformations may appear to the analyst in reverie (Ferro, 2002a, p. 73), and require
more reconstruction of meaning, more speculation and a deeper familiarity with the patient to
understand the invariants at play.
When projective transformations find a rejecting container, whether internal or external,
Bion noticed in some patients a state of mind where strong emotions become powerfully

82

The analyst is assumed for purposes of this discourse to be free from distortion by L, H (i.e. by
counter-transference) (Bion, 1965, p. 49).

57

projected out, a transformation he terms hyperbole83 (Bion, 1965). Intolerant of neglect, the
emotional problem in need of containment becomes increasingly exaggerated to ensure
attention and the container reacts by more, and still more, violent evacuation, projected
increasingly great distances. Bion later (1970, p. 14) describes another form of disastrous
projective transformation in which the projected emotion finds no container at all. Here Bion
imagines an intense catastrophic emotional explosion (1970, p. 14) of scattered beta-elements
into infinite, unformatted (psychotic) mental space, accompanied by psychotic panic which itself
becomes drained away and lost in the immensity (p. 12). This situation differs from hyperbole
in that it is often accompanied by utter silence as the emotional problem is lost and rendered
virtually inaccessible. The fragments of the exploded link are so dispersed that they may at best
appear, bit by bit, over long periods of timeyears of analysis.
Transformations in hallucinosis, the third84 major class developed in Transformations,
can be either rigid motion or projective (Bion, 1965, p. 133) and correspond with the theorized
reversal of alpha-function in which thought and affect are treated in an evacuatory rather than
representational manner as beta-elements excluded from the symbolic universe (Riolo, 2007, p.
1383) only to manifest in mindless (basic assumption) behavior, soma-psychotic phenomena or
bizarre object and hallucinatory experience. When intolerance of frustration pervades the
formation of the personality, mental representation (required for thinking) is experienced as
equivalent to the absence of its represented object. Every word represents what is not, (Bion,
1965, p. 79) and is rejected as a no-thing. Bions (1965, 1970) no-thing refers to absence in
the face of desire that in normal development the infant learns to tolerate until knowledge of loss
becomes transformed into thought. For personalities traumatized by early K relationships, the
commonly taken-for-granted no-thing continues to be experienced as provocative and
persecutory (Bion, 1965, p. 82). Indistinguishable from the emotion it arouses, the no-thing is not
given time to transform but expelled in favor of the immediacy of hallucination (Bion, 1970, p.
16). In the wake of the evacuated no-thing forms the foundation for a system of hallucinosis
(p. 17).
Bion writes, Ordinarily, constellation, constant conjunction, and binding (by
nomination) are a prelude to exploration of meaning. In the domain of hallucinosis the mental
event is transformed into a sense impression and sense impressions in this domain do not have
meaning; they provide pleasure or pain (1970, p. 37). In hallucinosis reality itself is stripped of
meaning but the patients reality is re-animated by their own evacuations, and thus self-created.
Because the expelled elements do contain shreds of meaning, the subject perceives around her
things which are intrinsically meaningful, without needing, nor being able, to think (Ferro,
1999, p. 104). Omnipotence and a sense of total self-sufficiency preside to the extent that ones
creations appear vital, pleasurable and gratifying (Bion, 1965, p. 137). Pre-conceptions are not

83

a word Bion (1965) also uses for 1) the general technique of exaggerating a problem so that it stands in
relief enough to garner needed clarification (p. 141), for 2) the type of projection associated with rivalry,
ambition, vigor (p. 162), and idealization/denigration (p. 142), and for 3) the classification of observable
projective identification belonging to the system of Theories of Observation as distinguished from
projective identification itself, which belongs to the system of Psycho-Analytic Theory (p. 160).
84
A fourth class of transformations that has emerged in the literature since Bion is Korbivchers (2005,
2013) concept of autistic transformations. Drawing upon Bions (1965) theory of transformations and
Tustins (1986) ideas about autistic phenomena in neurotic patients, autistic transformations are
protomental, autosensual phenomena which the autistic part of the personality produces to prevent an
experience of separateness from the object.

58

saturated by events independent of the personality; instead, the hallucination arises from predeterminations (p. 137) saturated by evacuations. In hallucinosis one is able to remain in a state
that is independent of proximity to an object and of the frustration peculiar to thoughts and their
genetic association with the no-thing (1970, p. 37). From the perspective of the psychotic part
of the personality it is a reality that offers the freedom of immediate gratification, a freedom
that is really an enclosure and a restriction (Grinberg, Sor & Bianchedi, 1975, p. 91).
Hallucinations85 are not representations of external reality but things-in-themselves born
of intolerance of frustration and desire. Their defects are due not to their failure to represent but
to their failure to be. (Bion, 1970, p. 18). The sense of freedom afforded by the ability to
hallucinate is dependent on its success in the evacuation of pain and the artificial production of
pleasure. Enacting through behavior (acting out) is the extroverted equivalent of hallucination.
Even verbal expressions in hallucinosis are better understood by the analyst as self-serving
actions than communications of meaning.86 For some patients the primary transformational
medium is action,87 which can be asserted as superior to the analysts medium of representation,
inciting a sense of rivalry of method with the analyst (Bion, 1965, p. 136). Inevitably, however,
the evidence of his senses belies his pre-determinations; he is not satisfied. Paucity of meaning
and failures of gratification within the narcissistically encapsulated system breed envy and greed,
often projected onto the rival who is felt to be stealing the sustenance from the patients
hallucinations. With pleasure-versus-pain the only internal measure of value, The only
relationship between two objects is that of superior and inferior (p. 133). The analysts tools of
reason and symbolization are of no importance to the patient and no use to the analyst in his
attempts to understand the patients transformations.
Transformations in hallucinosis involve the greatest degree of distortion and the
invariants are hardest to recognize. In order to transform them back into the domain of thought,
the analyst must first become at one with his patients hallucinations by participating in the
state of hallucinosis (Bion, 1970, p. 36). The psychotic part of the personality reacts
(preemptively) to events at the undifferentiated, unrepresented level of experience (the O
domain), so in order to observe transformations in hallucinosis the analyst also needs to be able
to get in touch with this domain. How to do this, and how to initiate transformations in O itself
(which Bion equates with psychic growth) are investigated at the end of Transformations and
throughout Attention and Interpretation.
O
Bion (1962a, 1962b, 1963, 1965, 1970) uses the term realization (as in the preconception mating with a realization) to refer to a real occurrence experienced by an individual:
an external fact (1965, p. 12). In Transformations Bion introduces the signifier O to denote
the realization in so far as it is useful to regard it as a thing-in-itself and unknowable (in Kant's

85

Meltzer (1986, p. 107) distinguishes between hallucination which refers to the perception of nonexistent objects and transformations in hallucinosis, which refers to the perception of non-existent
relationships.
86
They do not, however, have to be meaningless for the analyst and can be received as a communication
from the patient that, though words are used, is more akin to musical or artistic than verbal
communication (Bion, 1965, p. 41). Meaning can be grasped by virtue of an aesthetic rather than a
scientific experience (p. 52)
87
where thinking fails in its role, as described by Freud (1911), in the intervention between impulse and
action

59

sense) (1965, p. 12-13). In Critique of Pure Reason Kant (1781) proposed that knowledge of the
world is limited by cognitive capacities, distinguishing between that which can be known
empirically through sense perception, the phenomenal world, and that which can never be known
directly, the noumenal world composed of things-in-themselves.88 In ancient Platonic philosophy
noumena were understood objects of abstract knowledge such as ideas and concepts (like the
concept of a triangle) conceivable through non-sensible cognition such as intuition and a priori
logic. Kant argued instead that ideas are merely human ways of structuring phenomena, and that
noumena as they really exist are fundamentally unknowable to the mind.89
In Bions view, psychoanalysis does its best to grasp a sense of the noumenal structures
and processes issuing in the phenomena of the session. One method is through the use of
abstraction as a way of approaching noumena through representation. Extrapolated from
constantly conjoined phenomena it is the name given to an observed pattern or organizing
principle, experienced phenomenologically as awareness of a postulate (1963, pp. 7-8), and in
the case of the selected fact, the emotion of discovery. Psychoanalytic noumena include the
functions of the personality and the elements of psycho-analysis (1963, pp. 9-10) as well as
mental space itself (1970, p. 11), all of which are essentially unknowable but capable of being
represented imperfectly in thought. The same holds true for the psycho-analytic object (1962b,
1963) which is a noumenal structure of the patients personality relevant to analytic work for its
role in the events of the session, fundamentally inaccessible but to a certain degree intuitively
discernable in the conjunction of its expressions in the domains of sense, myth and passion.
Traceable through the invariants in its manifestations, psychoanalytic objects express
themselves, become finite, in the session in an ever changing variation of dreams and
transference manifestations (Vermote, 2011b, p. 1093). His grasp of the psychoanalytic object
is as close as the analyst can come to the unknowable psychic reality (O) of the patient, met at
the point where the ultimate truth or O of a personality evolves to a point where it becomes
apprehensible (Vermote, 2011a, p. 350).
O itself is not apprehensible by way of thought because it is non-sensible, unbounded and
always changing. Bion approaches his discourse on O from multiple vertices, most notably the
philosophical (thing-in-itself), mathematical (the infinite), aesthetic (Forms), and spiritual
(Godhead). The psycho-analytic vertex is O (Bion, 1970, p. 27), and from the psychoanalytic
vertex, O denotes the absolute facts of the session which cannot ever be known (Bion, 1965,
p. 17). O can be known about [emphasis added], its presence can be recognized and feltThat
it exists is an essential postulate of science but it cannot be scientifically discovered (Bion,
1970, p. 30). O represents the dimension of anythings reality (Bion, 1965, p. 147), so it can be
said that there is an O of each person, each moment, or each analytic session, all of which are
part of O in its larger sense: ultimate reality represented by terms such as ultimate reality,
absolute truth, the godhead, the infinite, the thing-in-itself (Bion, 1970, p. 26). From the
standpoint of the individual O is bi-polar (Bion, 1965, p. 49), in that one is always connected to
both an internal and external source of non-finite noumenal flow. O stands for the unknowable
Origin of ones experience, reactions and transformations (Bion, 1965, p. 15) and can be
understood as raw, ever-emerging, ever-intersecting Circumstance (Grotstein, 2007, p. 115)

88

Kant interpreter Henry Allison asserts that The difference is not between worlds but between ways of
considering one world (Lynch, 1998, p. 153).
89
Bions epistemology does not maintain this contradiction between Plato and Kant by allowing for the
operation of ideal forms as unknowable noumena.

60

constantly evolving (in flux90), before it has been transformed by alpha-function. Beta-elements91
can be thought of as Os shadow or imprint (Grotstein, 2007, p. 60), or Os messengers
(Schermer, 2003, p. 232). In Grid terms, O can be thought of as located above beta-elements at
the intersection of the axes (Lpez-Corvo, 2003, p. 197), point zero92 on the Reality scale (Bion,
1965, p. 152) measuring distance from O.
Towards the end of Transformations Bion reaches further back from Kant to draw upon
Platos concept of Ideal or Eternal Forms (a concept Kant rejected) as well as the distinction
made by Christian Platonists between God and Godhead to further illustrate what he means by O
and its manifestation in the phenomenal realm. Thorner (1981, p. 78) illustrates Platos concept
of the Idea (which is used interchangeably with the word Form): The idea of a chair has no
sensuous form, but it is contained in every chair but only as a particular chair does it become a
phenomenon and as such recognizable by the senses. Plato proposed that when something
appears beautiful or good, that is because it is serving as a reminder of the ideal form it
approximates. Platos philosophy posits absolute essence: universal and transcendental forms,
ideas, virtuesunknowable save their characteristic manifestations in phenomenal influence,
and Bion understands the root of emotions in this way: noumenal forms or patterns in the flow of
experience whose recognition stirs emotion: the significance of O derives from and inheres in
the Platonic Form (Bion, 1965, p. 138). Internal and external events (realizations) are
transformed by alpha-function until they are recognizable, at which point they are experienced as
significant (beautiful, intolerable, etc.) according to the nature of the individuals preconceptions, both inherent (universal) and acquired (internal objects). By linking pre-conceptions
to the Platonic ideal forms, Bion is suggesting that the unconscious and preconscious should not
be thought of as shaped solely by ones individual psychology and past experience, but that each
individuals unconscious dreamer has some level of access to the infinite range of Ideas (Forms)
that lived experience grants expression. Bion is not saying that O exists in the Platonic realm, but
that the Forms assist in dreaming by functioning as formatting strategies to protect the subject
from being overwhelmed, by granting a sense of the familiar to experience that is actually
always new (Grotstein, 2007, p. 74) and formless.
It has already been noted that Bions inherent pre-conceptions bear a close resemblance
to Jungian archetypes which are also universal, unfixed and unknowable and vary in the extent
that they play a role in each individuals unconscious, and overlap also exists between Bions
concept of O and Jungs93 concept of the collective unconscious: the infinite container of the

90

as in Heraclituss theory of universal flux (Grotstein, 2007, p. 105; Lpez-Corvo, 2006, p. 172)
Because Bion defined beta-elements in contradictory ways as both sense impressions and things-inthemselves, there is confusion in the literature around whether they are considered noumena. It is likely
that Bion understood them as sensory phenomena that in pathology are treated non-symbolically as selfevident truth, believable stand-ins for things-in-themselves (Schermer, 2003, p. 231).
92
Some authors (e.g. Bria, 1981, p. 506; Blandonu, 1994, p. 283) have observed that zero, which
resembles the letter O, represents the point of origin in mathematics. In So Paulo in 1973 Bion was
asked if O was the same thing as zero, to which he responded that they are not the same, but instead that
zero could be a useful way of representing the rest or pause in the rhythm of an analysis (Bion, 1990,
p. 69). At Tavistock in 1977, however, Bion responded to a question about O by stating, I find it useful
to suppose that there is something I dont know but would like to talk about; so I can represent it by an O,
or a zero, or a nought, as a sort of place where something is, but that I am very unlikely ever to get to
understanding (Bion, 2005b, p. 33).
93
Bion was familiar with Jung, and encouraged Samuel Beckett to attend Jungs Tavistock lectures
(Blandonu, 1994, p. 45).
91

61

archetypes (Sullivan, 2010, p. 38. The collective unconscious (also termed objective psyche)
and O are both described by their authors as wholly impersonal, and both concepts fit the
definition of transpersonal.94 The collective unconscious also bears resemblance to what Bion
referred to as the primordial mind,95 which he describes as some fundamental mind,
something that seems to remain unaltered in us all, and when asked in a seminar if this was
similar to Jungs archetypes, Bion said I think we was probably talking about the same thing
(1994, p. 247). Just as the primordial mind and O in the broadest sense are described similarly to
Jungs collective unconscious, what Bion calls the O of the individual can be seen to
correspond to Jungs concept of the Self, which is rooted in the archetypal but both includes
and interacts with the ego or civilized mind, an interaction which leads towards wholeness. Like
Jung, Bion considered it crucial that there be some interchange between [the] civilized
individual, educated and articulate, and a primordial mind (Bion, 1994, p. 247).
With the introduction of O, Bions view of the unconscious is seen to extend beyond
Freuds dynamic (repressed) unconscious to include a non-dynamic (unrepressed),
undifferentiated, infinite96 unconscious, the reservoir of all the possible inherent forms
comprising potential awarenessan inner cosmic vastness with a potential for virtually infinite
realizations (Grotstein, 1981, p. 520). Bion (1965, p. 46) proposed that the differentiation
between finite and infinite might prove a useful alternative for psychoanalytic discourse to the
differentiation between conscious and unconscious. The unconscious field being infinite and
essentially creative, a concern for causality becomes downgraded in the psychoanalytic agenda
(Melzter, 1986, p. 14), and Grotstein (2007, p. 123) believes it was Bions intention to reposition psychoanalytic thinking away from its ontic (deterministic, scientific) roots. Bions
studies at Oxford came at a time when philosophy of science was returning to Humes suspicion
of induction (Torres & Hinshelwood, 2013, p. 3), and Bions view of causation was that only
morality can cause anything. Meaning has no influence outside the psyche and causes nothing
(Bion, 1965, p. 59). Unlike Freuds view of free associations, for Bion the emergence of dreams
or selected facts are not interesting for the repressed drives that cause them but for the nature of
the link they reveal between the mind and the influence of O. Horne, Sowa and Isenman (2000,
p. 115) write that Bion can be considered an aesthetic theorist interested in psychoanalysis as a
study of expression, who likely viewed causality as a dogmatism which evaded the immediacy
and complexity of experience, thus stripping it of aesthetic qualities and denuding meaning
itself. Bions statements on causality suggest that he would not assign the same level of
teleological influence over the psyche that Jung often grants to the archetypal self, although like
Jungs collective unconscious, The unconscious psyche of Bion is older than man and is the

94

Tennes (2007) shows how the transpersonal dimension operates in the psychoanalytic setting, and
demonstrates the growth of the transpersonal perspective within contemporary psychoanalytic literature
citing Bions influence.
95
a word also used by Jung (1923, p. 443) to describe images from the unconscious with an archaic
character
96
Several authors (Bria, 1981; Grotstein 2000a; 2007; Lombardi, 2009) have noted compatibility between
Bions view of the infinite and undifferentiated unconscious and Matte Blancos (1975, 1988) concept of
an infinite unconscious characterized by infinite bivalent sets which become increasingly symmetrical the
deeper into the unconscious. Lombardi (2009) equates O with the deepest, most symmetrical aspect of the
unconscious where everything is everything else and The endless number of things tends to become,
mysteriously, only one thing (Matte Blanco, 1988, p. 54). In Grotsteins view, uniting O with Matte
Blancos conceptualization of the unconscious allows for the prospect of a graded, stratified layering to
O (2000a, p. 140).

62

mysterious source of creativity, imagination, evolution, and development (Grotstein, 1981, p.

506).
Sullivan (2010, p. 52) has also observed similarity in Bion and Jungs use of the concept
of God as a symbol that captures human psychological experience which is inexpressible in any
finite or exact description. Unlike Plato, for whom phenomena served as a reminder of
transcendent truth, for the German Christian mystics Bion cites, including Meister Eckhart,
Blessed John of Ruysbroeck, and Saint John of the Cross, the phenomenal experience enables
the person to achieve union [emphasis added] with an incarnation of the Godhead, or the thingin-itself (Bion, 1965, p. 139). The Godhead, which is formless and infinite containing all
distinctions as yet undeveloped (p. 162) becomes imminent and apprehensible to the human
mind as God or Trinity in felt experiences of numinous connection with that which is greater
than oneself. Bion equates O with the Godhead, and writes that for the analysand to become
more real through the process of analysis, the analysts powers are limited since this to a large
extend depends on the analysands own godheads consent to incarnation in the person of the
analysand (p. 148). In Grotsteins view, Bions analytic stance is to encourage man to allow
himself to become incarnated by his ineffable, infinite reservoir of cosmic being (Grotstein,
2007, p. 52). Truth has its own need to express itself, a need that can be experienced within and
acted upon by the individual. Bion also finds the model of incarnation useful for the analyst in
understanding how the ultimate reality of the analytic hour, O, will become apprehensible to the
analyst only through its momentary incarnations and only when the analyst is able to achieve
union with its incarnations in what Bion (1965, 1970) calls at-one-ment.
Bions idea of incarnation refers to the incarnation of direct truth into subjective
experience, although he does not seem to mind the penumbra of associations cast by the word
godhead. For Bion, O is so basic and all-encompassing that it is worthy of that term. The
Christian mystics Bion mentions believed, heretically, in both a transcendent Godhead and an
immanent God within, union with which could be achieved through inward silence in a mental
state free of representational thought or sensuous experience, which Bion also considered
necessary for union with O in the analytic setting. As Sullivan observes, Bion never sounds as
though he believes in god; he believes in O (2010, p. 41). For Freud, the all-powerful God of
monotheism is a construction suiting unconscious needs: When the growing individual finds
that he is destined to remain a child for ever, that he can never do without protection against
strange superior powers, he lends those powers the features belonging to the figure of his father
(Freud, 1927, p. 24). In Bions view any anthropomorphic attributions to God would reflect an
incapability for direct experience of God (Bion, 1967b, p. 144). The strange and superior
powers that instill a sense of powerlessness would for Bion be O itself and the truth contained in
its thoughts without a thinker. When the human being becomes aware of thoughts with
emotional implications that feel almost too powerful for his receiving apparatus to contain,
they can inspire feelings ranging from terror to religious awe, and the source of their emission
can be felt as external to the self, even God-given (Bion, 1992, pp. 304-305).
Referring to the absolute truth of objective reality, The religious mystics have probably
approximated most closely to expression of experience of it (Bion, 1970, p. 30). But even the
mystic cannot communicate (publish) it without some degree of falsification (Meltzer, 1978, p.
381-382). The fundamental reality is infinity, the unknown, the situation for which there is no
languagenot even that borrowed from the artist or the religiouswhich gets anywhere near to
describing it (Bion, 1992, p. 372). Bion refers to the gap between reality and the personality as
the inaccessibility of O (1965, p. 147), and claims this view compatible with that of Plato,

63

Kant, Berkeley, Klein, and Freud. In The Interpretation of Dreams Freud (1900, p. 613) writes,
The unconscious is the true psychical reality; in its innermost nature it is as much unknown to
us as the reality of the external world, and it is as incompletely presented by the data of
consciousness as is the external world by the communications of our sense organs. Despite this
area of agreement, Bions view of the role of the unconscious in psychic life diverges from
Freuds and even Kleins in that it assumes even less about the factors at play for any given
individual at any given moment. For Freud and Klein, Their starting point is the raw mass of
instinctual impulses, while Bions starting point is O (Symington & Symington, 1996, p. 12).
The life and death drives so central to Kleins theory are replaced by O, the multi-determined
emotional truth of the moment, as first cause (Grotstein, 2007, p. 79). Freuds
neurophysiological model of the mind is not taken up by Bion, who seems to prefer to work from
the assumption of a vitalistic mind, with a capacity for infinite imagination (Grotstein, 1981, p.
523) whose needs extend beyond the biological and the interpersonal to include the apprehension
and expression of truth and beauty.
Bion (1962, p. 57) writes that the apparatus of verbal thought is ill-suited for the task of
self-knowledge, and Derrida (1973) suggests that because our minds are so rooted in language,
we can never grasp the true or full meaning of our experience (Horne, Sowa & Isenman, 2000).
Although the O of any given situation is prior to language or meaning, each persons O evolves
with them and is them, and thus contains a powerful potential for meaning that is simultaneously
deeply personal and entirely impersonal, represented by the term thoughts without a thinker.
Bion observes that The impact of the evolving O domain on the domain of the thinker is
signalized by persecutory feelings of the paranoid-schizoid position (1970, p. 103). The psyche
is pulled into splits not as a primitive defense as in Kleins view, but because of the nature of the
non-dynamic unconscious in which the mental contents required to make sense of the experience
exist as unlinked fragments (White, 2011b, p. 156). The search for ones personal meaning is a
vulnerable endeavor because of what it reveals. Even though O is who we are, Bion describes the
evolving O domain as a non-human system (Bion, 1970, p. 103) and Grotstein refers to its
cosmic indifference (Grotstein, 2004a, 2007). It is impersonal and implacable; no
intentionality is hypothesized for it. It is an unrelated force (Sullivan, 2010 p. 51) and as such
may appear terrifying, chaotic and annihilating (Glover, 2009, p. 119). It takes courage to
recognize and experience the unpredictable, unreliable, uncontrollable and unfamiliar
dimensions of the self beyond the ego.
O is feared for its emotional meaning, although the chaotic openness of Os initially
unspecified (infinite) meaning can be even more threatening. Eigen (1998, p. 78) conveys a
feeling of this when he writes of the awesome shock of being alive, and Grotstein (2004b, p.
1092) writes of the ontological terror that direct contact with reality can inspire, especially for
the infant or psychotic individual lacking in containment function. Grotstein (2007, p. 124)
explains how this mandates the development of the ego as defense: We are O and terrified of
itthus the need for inward-directed sunglasses that allow diminished illumination and
disguise. O is the Real. What we believe we experience is a virtual realitya Reality that has
become virtued (laundered) by the refractions of phantasy, imagination, illusion, and
symbolization, leaving us with a cooked Real (O) suitable for our timid digestion. Eigen
(1998, p. 82) adds to this that Lying, illusion, falsehood help regulate the dosage of O that is
bearable. Although the curtain of illusion separating O from ego consciousness is part of
being human and essential for survival, much of psychopathology in all its variety can be
understood as stemming either from a failure to effectively integrate or repress into

64

unconsciousness Os overwhelming influence, or alternatively from an over-developed set of

defenses against Os impact which strip life of its richness, vitality and potential for authentic
experience. In both extremes problems arise from O failing to be dreamed and integrated with
conscious life.
Although met with skepticism by the London Kleinians,97 the concept of O has had a
powerful impact on psychoanalytic thought, and Lpez-Corvo (2006) considers O comparable in
significance to Freuds notion of transference and Kleins metapsychology of affects (the
positions). According to Grotstein (1997a, p. 77), Bions elaboration of transformations and
evolutions in O [which are discussed in the next section] represents one of the profoundest
paradigm changes within psychoanalysis to date. He locates O as the common denominator of
the first unified field theory for psychoanalysis (p. 87), and states that Bions O along with the
contributions of Matte Blanco (1975, 1988) usher in a new postmodern age of understanding in
which the Unconscious could be linked to infinity, chaos and complexity theory, catastrophe
theory, and spirituality (p. 84). In terms of Os value as a concept, it highlights the central
importance to psychoanalysis that the analyst remain focused on the unknown, it stands as a
humbling warning against reductionist views of the psyche, it is conceptually useful for
developments in psychoanalytic metapsychology,98 it provides a theoretical basis for important
innovations in technique, and it has served as a conceptual bridge linking psychoanalytic
epistemology with philosophy, spirituality and art.99
Psychoanalytic authors have connected O to a number of related concepts, often in other
disciplines, cultures and historical periods, and O has proven an enduringly generative and
saturation-resistant symbol. In the realm of psychoanalytic theory O is most often compared to
Lacans (1966) concept of the Real (Grotstein, 1997a, 2000a, 2004b, 2007; Civitarese, 2008).
Vermote (2011a, p. 352) has compared it to the Il y a of Levinas and der Wille of
Schopenhauer. Symington (2007, p. 1420) likens O to the Substance of Spinoza, as well as the
THAT of the seers of the Upanishads or the World Soul of Plotinus.100 Eigen (1998, p. 78)
compares it to the Kaballahs Ein Soph, and Glover (2009, p. 119) to Huxleys Divine Ground
of Being. Grotstein (2000a, 2000c, 2007, 2008) has called it Fate, the ultimate signified,
Muse, Absolute Circumstance or Happening, and the Ineffable Subject of the Unconscious
who already thinks the thoughts without a thinker. Grotstein (2004b, 2007) also links O to
Heideggers notion of Dasein and Borgess short stories of the infinite Aleph and the Library

97

Bions contemporary Hana Segal interprets Bions O as referring to transcendental truth, and thus
dismisses O as incongruent with the aim of psychoanalysis in knowing and withstanding truth gained
through clinical evidence (Segal, 2006). Grotstein (2007, p. 230) observes that despite widespread
embrace of the concept of O by Kleinians throughout the world, there has remained something of a
moratorium on its use among London Kleinians.
98
Merkur, author of Explorations of the Psychoanalytic Mystics, would likely disagree here on the
grounds that Bions view of O reflects his personally held belief in an impersonal, inaccessible God upon
whom humans project meaning, which renders discussions of O unhelpful departures from
methodological agnosticism (Murker, 2010, p. 253).
99
It has also allowed for a reintegration of some of Jungs insights about the transpersonal dimension of
the psyche into the psychoanalytic literature (allowing psychoanalytic authors to write about the spiritual
without having to read or mention Jung).
100
The philosophy of Plontinus became the basis for Neoplatonism, a philosophical tradition that
influenced some of the Christian mystics Bion cites. Merkur (2010) insists that Bion is a Neoplatonist.
See White (2011a) for an illuminating examination of how Neoplantonic concepts appear in Bions
writings on O.

65

of Babel. Eigen (1998) free associates the letter O to the impact of the Other, as well as
omega, orgasm, oneness, opening, oblivion, the circle as a symbol of life and the zero as a
symbol of the generative void. French and Simpson (2000, p. 56) point out that Bions use of O
echoes the use of the circle in the Zen discipline of painting, regarded as an expression of each
moments completeness. Marjorie Brierley in a letter to Marion Milner suggests that O
symbolises not only the emptied mind and the infants open mouth but also the womb, to
which the psyche must return to and re-emerge from as a prerequisite for both creativity and
mystical experience (Milner, 1987, p. 270).
Transformations in O
Bion relies heavily upon the concept of O in explaining his view of the analytic approach
to observation and interpretation in the facilitation of growth in the analysand. For the purposes
of analysis O is understood as the emotional truth of the session, the central feature of every
situation that the psycho-analyst has to meet (Bion, 1970, p. 89). The analysts job is to focus
his attention on O, the unknown and unknowable (p. 27). What is unknown in a session is what
is evolving between patient and analyst, and what is unknown about a patient is what the patient
is becoming every moment. Bions approach is entirely oriented around the present moment,
since O only exists in the present. Facts about the patients history or life outside the sessions,
even if relevant to the patients current psychology, are not considered relevant to the task at
hand: In psycho-analysis any O not common to analyst and analysand alike, and not available
therefore for transformation by both, may be ignored as irrelevant to psycho-analysis. Any O not
common to both is incapable of psycho-analytic investigation (1965, p. 49). Of particular
interest to the analyst is the patients transformations of the events that are experienced by them
both which reflect the patients evolving relationship to emotional truth: I shall regard only
those aspects of the patient's behaviour which are significant as representing his view of O
(Bion, 1965, p. 15). Interpretations are devised to bring the nature of these transformations into
awareness for the patient, serving as a reflective mirror for the patient and helping to open up
curiosity around the unknown emotional factors at play.
But in order for the analyst to interpret the patients transformations in a way that is not
already obvious to the patient the analyst needs to have some sense of the O from which the
transformations derive. Bion also realized that interpretations that increase knowledge about the
patient or the patients experience do not necessarily lead to change or growth in the patient. To
address these problems Bion found it necessary to distinguish between transformations in K and
transformations in O. He also turned his focus toward the portrayal of an analytic attitude that he
considered prerequisite to the analysts ability to be in contact with O and effect changes in O, an
attitude he labels with the term Faith which employs intuition and the technique of becoming
(or at-one-ment) in a state of mind unhindered by memory, desire or understanding.
Transformations in K, abbreviated T(K), exist in the K domain, the domain of
phenomena and their representations. Perceptions, emotions, thoughts, dreams, memories,
insights, and interpretations all take place in the K domain. Bion adds, The sense of inside and
outside, internal and external objects, introjection and projection, container and contained, all are
associated with K (1965, p. 151). Bion uses the word evolution to refer to the process where
events in the O domain become knowable indirectly to the subject, and everything that is
knowable is so by way of evolution from O into K. The rigid motion and projective
transformations of the patient and the alpha-function of the analyst give rise to transformations
(T) of or from O (O K), and are notated TK (transformations in hallucinosis are exempted

66

because they do not result in representations of O). The term transformations in K, as used by
Bion, seems to include both evolutions into K, as well as the mental manipulation of knowledge
itself. They include all the processes that go into the synthesis, development and communication
of knowledge about the O of the patient. In a K link one may be learning about oneself or the
other, but it is intellectual knowledge gained through reflecting on constellations of remembered
transformations of experience. Bion (1965) observes that L, H and K links are emotional
relationships with representations conjured by the O of experience, but that it is impossible to
have an emotional link to O; O cannot be known, loved, or hated. O can be known about, and
learning about oneself plays an important role in guiding the analytic process and setting the
stage for change, but transformation in K alone does not produce growth, only permits
accretions of knowledge about growth (Bion, 1965, p. 156).
Transformations in K can, however, lead to transformations in O (K O), as in the case
of an insight, moment of awareness, or interpretation leading to a mutative emotional experience
in the patient, one in which the patient accepts and embodies the fluid emotional reality of their
O, transforming with it. Bion calls this being or becoming or being become by O (1965, p. 163),
which essentially means accepting, fully experiencing, and taking responsibility for the part of
ones emotional self that is ripe for expression and transformation. This entails what Bion
describes as catastrophic change, and means that the patients O has evolved (transformed in
the direction O K) to the point where it becomes capable of being met by K capacities (the
patients containing function, which has also matured to the point of being able to receive the
messianic idea evolving from O), the encounter with which elicits transformation in the patient
in the direction K O. Transformations in O, abbreviated T(O) amount to change, growth, and
maturation of the personality, increasing integration within the psyche and increasing ones
range of tolerable self experience and containable emotional meaning. Transformations in K are
feared when they threaten the emergence of transformations in O (1965, p. 130), and resistance
to an interpretation can be resistance against change from K to O (p. 158). In Bions experience,
The emotional state of transformations in O is akin to dread (1970, p. 46).
Becoming
In order for the analysts interpretations to carry the power of speaking to the patients
truth they must be born out of direct contact with the emotional reality they attempt to formulate.
The analyst must experience the psychic reality of the patient, which goes beyond awareness of
the patients conscious reality. Psychic reality is not possible to know consciously except through
being it. Bion writes that Reality has to be been (1965, p. 148) and that the analyst needs to
have the experience of at-one-ment with the patients O by becoming the analysand (1965, p.
146). Bion uses the word becoming (the analyst becoming the patient and the patient becoming
themselves) to describe a changing state that never arrives at a point of completion, since O
changes faster than one can become it. Becoming101 the patient is distinguished from psychotic
subject-object fusion, but is more a partial fusion with the patients presence: a non-Cartesian
mode of knowing the subject without objectifying it (Grotstein, 2004a, p. 110). Becoming is
also linked with Bions understanding of change and growth processes: becoming emotional
truth means allowing oneself to change with it and be changed by it, and in Bions understanding
of the psychoanalytic process both patient and analyst are changed by the experience. Bion

101

Grotstein (2007, p. 55) suspects Bion may be evoking a form of epistemology propounded in Platos
Thaeatetus in which the percipient (perceiver) must become the percept in order for perception to take
place.

67

emphasizes the importance of attending to change processes rather than static aspects of the
patient: We must concern ourselves not with what the patient is like, but with what the patient
is becoming during the session, and we must be able to stand the pressure of watching that
process (Bion, 1990, p. 127).
Becoming the analysand is generally interpreted in the literature to mean experiencing
in a state of reverie the analysts own version of the patients psychic reality. Brown (2007)
understands becoming the patient to mean becoming through introjection the unacceptable part
of the patient, finding symbols within him or herself to represent what the analysand has been
unable to mentalize independently (p. 859). Brown likens this to what Mitrani calls taking the
transference, which requires more than just empathic attunement, but the introjection by the
analyst of certain aspects of the patients inner world and experience, and a resonance with those
elements of the analysts own inner world and experience, such that the latter is able to feel
herself to actually be that unwanted part of the patients self or that unbearable object (Mitrani,
2001, p. 1094).102 Along similar lines Grotstein (2007) writes that the analyst does not really
become the analysand: he becomes his own autochthonously created103 version of the
analysands distress, the components of which have been harvested and summoned from within
the known as well as unknown repertoire of his own emotional experiences (p. 48), and which
become selectively recruited to match those he is experiencing resonantly from the analysands
inductions (p. 54).104 Cartwright (2009, p. 72) notes the link between becoming and
containing. He explains becoming the analysand as the therapists attempts to become
unconscious aspects of himself that are evoked by the patient through identification. Containing
thus involves an internal sense of becoming as the therapist is awakened or exposed to
derivatives of his own unconscious and is thus inevitably involved in a process of becoming
himself, re-invented anew in each session. It is the therapists interest and curiosity in the
novelty of this experience that signifies his attempts to contain something that is alive,
evolving, on the way to being meaningful.
Bion writes that emergent dreams (Bion, 1970, p. 70) and myths (p. 85) are evolutions of
the O of the patient or the session, where O has evolved sufficiently (has been digested by alphafunction) to be represented by terms of sensuous experience105 (C category terms), which
because of their origin in O can be used by the analyst in intuiting something about O. But Bion
(p. 27) writes that in order for the analyst to know the events that are the evolutions of O, the
analyst must first become O. He writes that A relevant constellation will be evoked during the
process of at-one-ment with O (p. 33), and it is from that constellation that a useful abstraction
or selected fact is discovered. Bion (1965, p. 162) quotes the following passage from Miltons
Paradise Lost to convey a sense of what he means by evolution from O K: The rising world
of waters dark and deep/Won from the void and formless infinite. What is won from the void
and formless infinite is the substance from which interpretations are formed, but first the analyst
too must become infinite (Bion, 1970, p. 46). By this Bion could mean the analysts mind must
become open or empty to the point where the analysts own infinite unconscious becomes

102

Mitrani writes, I find that, in order to understand the infantile aspects of my patients, I need to be both
willing and able to feel like a baby (2001, p. 1099).
103
self-generated (see Grotstein, 1994, 1997b, 2001)
104
Grotstein (2008, p. 199) includes empathy and the function of mirror neurons in his explanation of the
factors involved in the act of becoming.
105
Bion (1970, p. 70) distinguishes category C dreams from psychotic dreams, which are not represented
by, but are sensuous experience.

68

receptive to the O of the patient or the session, a view that is reminiscent of Freuds (1912, p.
115) recommendation that the analyst turn his own unconscious like a receptive organ106
towards the transmitting unconscious of the patient.
Sensation and Intuition
Christopher Bollas, in a 2014 talk given at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis,
said that this fundamental technical principle put forward by Freud, to listen to the unconscious
with the unconscious, was an idea so radical that it had been repressed by the field of
psychoanalysis until Bion came along to unearth it (Bollas, 2014). Freuds suggestions for
analytic listening are summarized as follows: Experience soon showed that the attitude which
the analytic physician could most advantageously adopt was to surrender himself to his own
unconscious mental activity, in a state of evenly suspended attention, to avoid so far as possible
reflection and the construction of conscious expectations, not to try to fix anything that he heard
particularly in his memory, and by these means to catch the drift of the patients unconscious
with his own unconscious. It was then found that, except under conditions that were too
unfavourable, the patients associations emerged like allusions, as it were, to one particular
theme and that it was only necessary for the physician to go a step further in order to guess the
material which was concealed from the patient himself and to be able to communicate it to him
(Freud, 1923, p. 239). Freud was advocating the suspension of certain activities of ego
consciousness such as reflection, expectation, and attachment to particular features of awareness,
which could interfere with the power of observation. But little explanation or elaboration upon
these technical suggestions was made by Freud or his followersperhaps an exception being
Reiks (1948) listening with the third ear,until Bion, whose suggestions for the state of mind
most conducive to analytic observation are more specific and arguably more radical than
Freuds, and were initially met with great suspicion and resistance by the field.
Bion believed that it is through the unconscious that our most important processing
occurs, what he called dreaming. This deeper level of processing enables us to take in and
metabolize the facts of our experience, rather than thinking about them through the relatively
less efficient rational mode (Charles, 2002b, p. 80). Emotional truth is inherently intangible,
invisible or ineffable (Eigen, 1981, p. 423), existing as pre-symbolic, pre-verbal, pre-thought
noumena, so rational or conscious thought, which relies on the manipulation of what is already
known, could shed relatively little light on the darkness and formlessness107 at hand. Listening
and attending to experience should instead be an active process of unconscious metabolism, the
products of which reflect emotional reality, the psychoanalytic object. Bion maintains that the
main tool of the analyst is intuition, and that logic, common sense, induction, and deduction
are useful only for bringing an intuition within reach of a realization should one exist (1965,
pp. 109-110). Intuition was described by Jung (1923, p. 453) as a kind of instinctive
apprehensionits contents have the character of being given...possess[ing] an intrinsic
certainty and conviction. Intuition can be defined as the direct and immediate understanding of
a truth, without intermediate elements (Bianchedi, 1991, p. 12) and without interference by
rational thinking (Sandler, 2006, p. 186). Thus intuition is not amenable to scientific
corroboration, although Bion did likely regard it as an empirical observational sensibility
facilitated by unconscious and pre-conscious registrations of small, early signals of emotional
data (Taylor, 2011, pp. 103-104).

106
107

Bion (1962a, p. 309) uses the term receptor organ in describing the reverie function.
a phrase used by Meister Eckhart to refer to the Godhead, borrowed by Bion (1965, 1967a, 1970)

69

Intuition is the apprehension of a truth that arises from within as a natural and
spontaneous response to experience, and the more openly experience is received and given room
for internal resonance, the more useful intuition will become to the analyst in grasping in its
fullness the psychic and emotional reality of the patient and the session. Intuition is closely tied
to alpha-function and dreaming, and is sometimes equated to reverie (Sor & Senet de Gazzano,
1993; Stitzman, 2004; Wright, 1987). Grotstein writes that the analysts reverie and alphafunction constitute his intuition (1997c, p. 203), and he calls intuition the sense organ that is
receptive to inner qualities108 (1997a, p. 84)the analysts internal reality being rich with
informative countersubjective responsivity to the patients interactive subjectivity (Grotstein,
1997c, p. 203). Returning briefly to the Grid, it was noted that attention and notation are factors
in alpha-function (Bion, 1962b, p. 5), and Bion (1967b, p. 138) links pre-conception, definition,
notation, attention together as the intuitive psycho-analytic background. Pre-conception,
understood as the receptivity of the unconscious, is allied with alpha-function in the production
of definitive hypotheses (column 1), emergent ideas that are then plumbed for meaning and
submitted to correlation and validation (Grotstein, 2000b) in the movement into K activity,
which is essential to the linking process of psychoanalysis, but never clung to in favor of the
faithful return to not-knowing.
Bion shares with Socrates and Plato a faith in and devotion to Absolute Truth. Like
Socrates and Plato, he believes that the world as presented to the senses is more obscured and
less knowable than the world as experienced by intuition, a view that is also strongly defended in
the philosophy of Schelling (Horne, Sowa & Isenman, 2000). Throughout his writing Bion is
repetitively insistent on making clear that although the encounter between patient and analyst is
superficially mediated by sensory information (seeing each other, hearing each other, etc.),
psychoanalytic objects are non-sensuous, only apprehensible through the use of intuition. Jung
viewed intuition as perception via the unconscious, as opposed to perception via the senses
(Williams, 2006, p. 86) and in Jungs study of psychological types (1923), sensation and
intuition are presented as different types of primitive, irrational functions, dichotomous as
sources of perceptual information relied on to differing degrees by different people. In Bions
later work this same dichotomy is emphasized in the form of a suggestion to analysts to let go of
reliance on their sensation function and give themselves over to their intuitive function. Bions
rationale is that there are no sense data directly related to psychic quality, as there are sense data
directly related to concrete objects (Bion, 1962a, p. 53). The central phenomena of
psychoanalysis have no background in sense data (Bion, 1970, p. 57), thus psychoanalytic
observation is not concerned with sense impressions or objects of sense, and even awareness
of the sensuous accompaniments of emotional experience are a hindrance to the psychoanalysts
intuition of the reality with which he must be at one (Bion, 1967a, p. 271). Bion (1970, p. 82)
felt that obtrusions of sense hinder the development of the analysts intuitive power,109 and in

108

In The Interpretation of Dreams Freud suggested consciousness to be the sense organ for the
apprehension of psychical qualities (Freud, 1900, p. 574), to which Bion (1992, p. 222) replies, I do not
accept Freuds description of the conscious as comprehending psychical qualities, but do accept his
description of the conscious as perceiving them. For Bion, alpha-function is needed to make sense of the
psychical qualities that consciousness perceives.
109
Otto Kernberg finds serious flaw in this repeated assertion of Bions: This viewpoint is now
contradicted by our growing knowledge about affective communication through facial and other perfectly
observable channels of communication (Kernberg, 1997, p. 306). It should also be noted that Ogdens
concept of analytic reverie considers sensate experience an important potential source of intersubjectively

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seminars given at Tavistock he expressed, I think one is a prisoner of the information ones
senses bring (Bion, 2005b, p. 33).
The vertex of sensible reality looks only at the events as they unfold in immediacy before
the eyes and ears, and is not the psychoanalytic vertex. In order to sharpen psychoanalytic
listening and observation and maximize the power of reverie, openness and intuitive receptivity,
Bion suggests that the analysts mind become free from occupation with the objects of sense, but
also free from interference by ego functions that were designed specifically to deal with sense
impressions, since during infancy when these functions developed, the sorting of the data of the
external world relied on the rubric of the pleasure principle. The sense organs were originally
discovered by the infant from the vertices of pain, pleasure, and unpleasure. Thus, all data
perceived by the sense organs is contaminated by the ancestry of the pleasure-unpleasure
principle (Grotstein, 1981, p. 517). The containing function of the mind, central to the adults
ability to process emotional experience, was originally formed through the workings of
projective-introjective operations designed to help the baby maintain emotional equilibrium in
the face of sensory-emotional experiences highly charged with valences of good or bad, pleasure
or displeasure. Thus even today, the mind as container is more concerned with regulating the
balance of pleasure and pain than with emotional truthOne cannot regulate the movement of
truth The containing function, at bottom, seeks to influence the movement of O in ego
desirable directions (Eigen, 1981, p. 424). Even the analysts containing function is not without
unconscious influence by the pleasure principle when dealing with the manifest (sensory level)
events of the session. The natural attitude, however supportive and useful, is not the analytic
attitude and can interfere with the most far-reaching kinds of therapeutic encounters (Eigen,
1981, p. 424).
Bion observes that C category elements, developed from experience gained by the
senses, all have gratificatory quality associated with dominance of the pleasure-pain principle
(1970, p. 34), which means that it is not just sensation itself, but our internal representations of
sensory-level events that are tinged with positive and negative quality. For the analyst, this
means that the more he depends on actual events the more he relies on thinking that depends on
a background of sense impression (p. 28). Of course the containing function and the symbolic
function are indispensible and essential to the processing of emotional experience and the work
of the analyst, and the actual events of the session speak at least in derivative of the emotional
reality of interest. But Bions point is that in O there is no intermediate symbol, and
containment only applies upon ones return to K. In K one must be wary of all the ways that the
pleasure principle can operate in the disservice of intuition by jeopardizing evenly hovering
attention.
Memory and Desire
In 1967 Bion published in the Los Angeles based journal The Psychoanalytic Forum a
short paper titled Notes on Memory and Desire, in which he states, in a rather
uncharacteristically peremptory tone (Talamo, 1997, p. 48), that the analyst must at all times
avoid desire and resist the impulse to remember or to understand. One reason is that Memory

relevant information. A paradox exists in Bions later work in which his denigration of obtrusions of
sense stands in apparent contradiction to his suggestion of the possibility of a re-integration of early, splitoff soma-psychotic experience, which would seem to require analytic reverie deeply attuned to subtle
somatic experience, so as to allow the analyst to reap the productions of her psychosomatic associational
networks (Alfano, 2005, p. 227).

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and Desire exercise and intensify those aspects of the mind that derive from sensuous
experience. They thus promote capacity derived from sense impressions and designed to serve
impressions of sense. They deal, respectively, with sense impressions of what is supposed to
have happened and sense impressions of what has not yet happened (Bion, 1967a, p. 271).
In Attention and Interpretation Bion theorizes that the mental function of memory has its
origins, before the infant had the capacity to think, in projective identification as modeled by
. The nascent internal container, which either evacuates or retains emotional experience felt
to be pleasant or unpleasant, is the prototype of a forgetful or retentive memory (1970, p. 29).
Retention can develop in collusion with unconscious greed and possessiveness, and evacuation
can develop in service of the satisfaction of being contained. Because of the pleasure principles
influence in determining which components of experience are remembered, ones memories are
fallacious as representations of past experience. Memory is always misleading as a record of
fact since it is distorted by the influence of unconscious forces (Bion, 1967a, p. 271).
Another problem is that the more robustly the memory function develops in adulthood,
the better one becomes at seeking out replications of pleasurable experience and ignoring the
unsatisfactory qualities of reality, damaging the power of observation. The memory of the
experience of satisfaction acquired in a previous session might induce both analyst and patient to
reproduce consciously or unconsciously the conditions that evoked that satisfaction, and
psychoanalysts must be cautious not to develop the tendency to hold on to the memory of what
they have discovered and wait for the words that confirm what they expect to hear (Faimberg,
2000, pp. 82-84).
Flight into memory can also be used defensively to evade contact with the present and the
feared experience of ignorance in the face of the unknown. The attempt to remember is an
anxiety-driven use of the mind that interferes with the analysts capacity to be receptive to what
is true to the emotional experience, the O of that experience, as lived in the present moment
(Ogden, 2004a, p. 294). Bion writes, We exist in the present; we can do nothing about the past.
It is, therefore, seriously misleading to think as if we dealt with the past (Bion, 1989, p. 47).
When material from the past becomes relevant, the task becomes bringing ones experiences
from the past constantly into the present to link up with the perceptions of the present (Harris,
1987a, p. 343).
The original publication of Notes on Memory and Desire included a discussion by five
psychoanalysts, two of whom expressed bewilderment with the idea of abandoning all memory
of ones analysands, to which Bion responded by distinguishing between two types of
phenomena involving memory, a distinction elaborated in Attention and Interpretation. Bion
(1970, p. 70) wishes to reserve the term memory for experience related to conscious attempts
at recall, distinguishing it from dream-like memory, which is the memory of psychic reality
and is the stuff of analysis. Dream-like memories include dreams that float into the mind
unbidden and unsought and float away again as mysteriously and thoughts that come
unbidden, sharply, distinctly, with what appears to be unforgettable clarity, and then disappear
leaving no trace by which they can be recaptured (p. 70). They emerge in the analysts reverie
(Ogden, 1996a, 1996b, 1997a, 1997b, 2001) and are the product of alpha-functions use of
storage and recall in the creative act of symbolization (Bion, 1992, p. 222). They are memories
in that they may appear in the form of representations of past experience, but as evolutions of the
O of the moment their significance inheres in the emotional reality of the present.
As to what avoiding memory means to the analyst in practice Bion suggests being as
forgetful as we can of the various facts in order that our intuition, however feeble, can have a

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chance of seeing something, however faint and however obscure, in what the patient is saying to
us (1990, p. 105). He writes, I make no notes. When I am tempted to remember the events of
any particular session I resist the temptation. If I find myself wandering mentally into the domain
of memory I desistIf I find that I am without any clue to what the patient is doing and am
tempted to feel that the secret lies hidden in something I have forgotten, I resist any impulse to
remember what happened or how I interpreted what happened on some previous occasion. If I
find that some half-memory is beginning to obtrude I resist its recall no matter how pressing or
desirable its recall may seem to be (1970, p. 56). Notes are sometimes recorded out of
attachment to a certain understanding or fear of forgetting something in the, reflecting lack of
confidence in the availability of unconscious or implicit memory to intuition. They may serve to
commit to memory formulations that became irrelevant the moment they were formulated (p.
71), and now only act to narrow the observing mind with saturated preconceptions. Bion
suggests forgetting the previous sessions because what has happened has already undergone
innumerous transformations, and the same can be said of ones conceptions of the patient: The
patient you see today is not the same as the one you saw yesterday; nor is the one who started
speaking a sentence still the same as the one who finishes it (Bion, 2005b, p. 44).
Desire, as memory, is a sensuously derived mental function rooted in the pleasure
principle. For Freud, desires (or wishes) are mnemic traces of earlier satisfactions which strive
for fulfillment in the future (Bianchedi, 1991), therefore, If memory could be dispensed with,
desire would likewise disappear and vice versa (Bion, 1970, p. 30). Bion understands memory
and desire as the past and future of the same impulse (1967b, p 137); in memory The
object is past, internal and possessed and in desire The object is future, external and coveted
(Bion, 1992, p. 294). One is past-oriented attachment, the other is future-oriented attachment,
and both serve the compulsion to leave or change ones current experience into something other
than what it is, pulling attention in directions away from O and interfering with contact and
discovery in the present. Bion explains that Desires interfere, by absence of mind when
observation is essential, with the operation of judgment. Desires distort judgment by selection
and suppression of material to be judged (1967a, p. 271). More generally, they erode the
analysts power to analyse and lead to progressive deterioration of his intuition (Bion, 1970, p.
56).
To understand Bions injunction that the analyst eschew desire, we can begin with a
quote from Elements of Psychoanalysis where Bion puts into his own terms the classical
Freudian analytic attitude of abstinence: The dictum that an analysis must be conducted in an
atmosphere of deprivation is usually understood to mean that the analyst must resist any impulse
in himself to gratify the desires of his analysands or to crave gratification for his ownat no
time must either analyst or analysand lose the sense of isolation within the intimate relationship
of analysis (1963, p. 15). Of the patients many desires that enter the consulting room, usually
the hardest for the analyst to resist attempting to gratify is the patients desire to feel better:
become less sad, less angry, less anxious, more loved, etc. Making the patient feel better is not
the aim of psychoanalysis, despite how naturally that basic assumption can tend to slip into the
dyadic field. The only objective of psychoanalysis is to assist patients in learning to see and
experience themselves more clearly for who they really are. Feeling better is secondary gain.
Sullivan (2010, p. 217) observes that although most therapists entered into the field motivated by
a wish to help people, it is usually not helpful to try to help. Trying to understand the patient as
he is generally loosens his character structure and begins or reinforces a growth process inside
him that leads to positive (helpful) developments in his inner world.

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In terms of the analysts desires that must not be entertained, Bion (1967a, 1970)
specifically implicates the desire for the end of the session, week or term; the desire for results,
improvement, cure, or welfare of the patient; the desire for retention of the patient; and the desire
for understanding and security. Bianchedi also lists the desire that the analysand would express
himself more fluently or talk about something he is not talking about (1991, p. 11). Not
included in this prohibitory list is the desire to get in touch with psychic reality (Bahia, 1977,
p. 348), although this must be distinguished from the desire for knowledge, which, although not
necessarily problematic, can be motivated by unconscious forces such as greed, fear of
ignorance, or the need for security, power, control or mastery. The therapist who, even with the
best intentions, is caught up in a subtle controlling or mastery stance toward the emotional reality
of a session, is in danger of stunting perceptive listening and shutting out subtle currents of
creative movement (Eigen, 1981, p. 424)
Not only do the analysts desires interfere with observation and intuition, they can be
sensed, internalized and adapted and conformed to by the patient in a way that invites collusion
(Faimberg, 2000). Despite the asymmetry of the relationship, patients can intuitively learn a
great deal about the analyst and develop an implicit understanding of what the analyst wants to
hear. This risk exists in working with both neurotic and psychotic level populations, and Bion
seems to be referring to the latter when he writes, A certain class of patient feels possessed by
or imprisoned in the mind of the analyst if he considers the analyst desires something relative
to him his presence, or his cure, or his welfare (Bion, 1970, p. 42).
Desires can be more or less conscious, and more or less easily delineated, making Bions
advice difficult to follow. Bion (1970, p. 56) writes, I avoid entertaining desires and attempt to
dismiss them from my mind. (It is not enough to try to do this in the session because that is too
late: the habit of desiring must not be allowed to grow.) Here it sounds as though Bion is
suggesting that analysts learn to recognize and defuse desire in their own lives outside of the
session in order to become better at their chosen career. It is also a clear example of Bions belief
that desires should be dismissed from the analysts mind upon their emergence in session, a view
that has generated both criticism and reframing in the subsequent literature. Vermote has noted
that repressing desire can make desire stronger (cited in Tobias, 2013), and Sullivan (2010, p.
217) remarks that to split off emerging desires would only be an invitation to unconsciousness.
Rubin (1985, 1996), a Buddhist psychoanalyst, raises the objection that any attempt to control
ones internal state through active suppression or denial results in the kind of reflective state of
mind that Freuds evenly hovering attention aims to avoid.
From a contemporary intersubjective perspective, desires that arise in the analysts mind
could potentially be viewed the same way as evolutions of O and the dream-like thoughts and
memories described above: as reflective and informative of the nature of the analytic field and
the intersubjective third. Accordingly, the consensus among most interpreters of Bion is that
what is most important is that analysts be able to notice the many types of desires, no matter how
subtle, that may take hold of them in their work with patients, since Bions main objection was to
the damaging effect of unchecked or unconscious desires. Once a desire has been identified, it
can be taken as information and wondered about, and the mere noticing of it should help it to
transform or dissolve. The short list of desires that Bion explicitly calls out are quite natural for
therapists to unknowingly harbor given the nature of the work regardless of the patient, and his
aim was to draw attention to their defensive origins and harmful effects. But Bion was also
writing about the effect of desire in general, and as Bianchedi (1991, p. 11) points out, whether

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springing from the intrasubjective, intersubjective or transsubjective110 space, desires,

unchecked, will interfere with the possibility of a discovery.
In Attention and Interpretation Bion adds to memory and desire the abandonment of
understanding, which includes the desire to understand and the memory of what has already
been understood. The urge for understanding is a particular instance of the obtrusion of desire
which is liable to rationalization by psycho-analysts (Bion, 1989, p. 15), but The opacity of
understanding and its plausibility as an aim of the psycho-analyst tend to hide the danger of
precocity and prematurity (p. 12). The hasty achievement of understanding reflects a lack of
negative capability, the capacity to tolerate the unknown and listen in a way that does not force
coherence. Not understanding, or listening from a position of not knowing, for Bion means being
open to experience in its fullness by resisting the impulse to focus on specific aspects that feel
more familiar or make more sense logically or causally. Precocious or premature understanding
results in suppression of the novel elements of experience in favor of the selection of elements
that match with what is already known, and fresh perception becomes foreclosed unconsciously
in favor of our sedimented certainties and presuppositions (Adams, 1995, p. 477), effectively
closing down the investigation rather than opening it up. Bion (2005b, p. 8; 1994, pp. 286, 286,
307) often quotes a line by Maurice Blanchot, la reponse est le malheur de la question, which
translates to the answer is the misfortune of the question. Arriving at understanding is like
settling on an answer to a question, putting an end to curiosity (Bion, 1994, p. 266). The
question breathes life into clinical material, imbuing it with wonder and potential meaning, and
Waddell (1988, p. 198), also citing Keats, adds to negative capability the capacity to live in the
question.
Bion (1965, p. 171) observes that Confronted with the unknown, the void and formless
infinite, the personality of whatever age fills the void (saturates the element), provides a form
(names and binds a constant conjunction) and gives boundaries to the infinite (number and
position). This is the minds natural process which reflects an innate drive to transform
experience into something understandable, a process that can be rushed under the influence of
anxiety. When the present moment becomes affectively charged, it becomes both more difficult
and more crucial that the therapist be able to avoid the internal and intersubjective pressure to
rush towards meaning (Stern, 2004, p. 140). When used defensively in this way, the pairs
achievement of understanding is better termed a collusion (Grotstein, 2000b, p. 692), and
understanding may be one of the more sophisticated ways of avoiding the Truth while believing
at the same time that one has arrived at it (Grotstein, 1981, p. 529). Grotstein posits that because
it is volitional, the left-brain, secondary-process understanding ego is actually more influenced
by desire than the unconscious pure thinker to whom the true meaning and significance of
emotion is evident (1981, p. 530).
The effort to understand can get in the way of the work of the unconscious and the
receptivity of analytic observation: While the analyst is trying to understand, more freeassociations occur and he has failed to hear them (Bion, 1990, p. 202). But in the absence of
understanding, the feeling of ones ignorance obtrudes. Bion (1977, p. 3) links the dislike of
being ignorant with intolerance for frustration and the painful absence of the fulfillment of desire
for understanding, an absence which may take on the qualities of the persecutory no-thing or
lead to the production of space-filling elaborations indistinguishable from what Freud called
paramnesias. If it is true that the human being, like nature, abhors a vacuum, cannot tolerate

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referring to the effect of ones relationship with a social or cultural group, such as the analysts
relationship to the psychoanalytic community

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empty space, then he will try to fill it by finding something that will go into that space presented
by his ignorance (Bion, 1977, p. 3). Bion (1994, p. 317) warns that analysts are just as
susceptible to this as their patients, and goes as far as to wonder, What if the whole of psychoanalysis turned out to be one vast elaboration of a paramnesia, something intended to fill the
gapthe gap of our frightful ignorance?
Knowledge has a natural tendency to fill the space needed for alpha-function to operate,
flooding experience with imposed meaning and prejudicing the familiar to the obfuscation of the
new and authentic. For Bion knowledge is of no use to intuition: If it is known by patient and
analyst, it is obsoleteThe only point of importance in any session is the unknown. Nothing
must be allowed to distract from intuiting that (Bion, 1967b, p. 271). The analyst should be able
to be aware of the aspects of the material that, however familiar they may seem to be, relate to
what is unknown both to him and to the analysand. Any attempt to cling to what he knows must
be resisted (Bion, 1970, p. 124). Alluding to Reiks (1948) idea of listening with the third ear,
Kurtz (1989, p. 6) states that Knowledge screens the sounds the third ear hears, so we hear only
what we already know. Eigen (1998, p. 174) refers to the protective coating that knowledge
provides against the raw and unpredictable nature of experience, and elsewhere he links this to
unconscious omniscience, writing, It is difficult to overestimate the role unconscious
omniscience plays in deadening the capacity to experience. If one knows what is going to happen
ahead of time, one does not have to experience it (Eigen, 1993, p. 245). Negative capability and
the willingness to abide in unassuming uncertainty are the preconditions for learning from
experience, for being surprised, and for being genuinely impacted by the present moment, where
the fallibility of ones omniscient preconceptions are constantly revealed (Harris, 1987b, p.
227).
A certain class of Bions pre-conceptions (Grid row D) is formed by the memories of past
conceptions, which help us navigate the world by allowing us to quickly categorize experience
so that we are able to make important judgments on the fly. But they are a hazard to
psychoanalysis where the aim is to see things in their fullness and freshness. This is why the
colloquial use of the word preconception or preconceived notion has acquired a negative
connotation: it is recognized as an expression of unconscious omniscience, the belief that one
knows simply because a pre-conception has become activated, regardless of how well it
matches the present experience. These types of pre-conceptions are understood as resistanceformations, categorized D2, and are sometimes termed presuppositions (Sor & Senet de
Gazzano, 1993; Stitzman, 2004). A presupposition is a rigid container full of strong
expectations of somethingan intellectual desire, which serves to control the anxiety awakened
by intolerance to doubt and to the sensation of infinitythe demarcation of a possible spectrum
within which all facts can vibrate: what remains outside is incapable of being conjugated
(Stitzman, 2004, p. 1144).
For the analyst, what is learned and known about the patient will only increasingly serve
to limit the analysts perceptivity of the patients evolving complexity. Fixed ideas about ones
patient stultify the appreciation of the patient as a non-unified subject, the subject of the
unconscious (Faimberg, 2000, p. 87). Bion (1994, p. 284) begins one of his Los Angeles
discussions saying, Seeing patients many times as we usually do, it is difficult to achieve that
degree of naivet in which we can see them each time as if we have never seen them beforeWe
should get as near as possible to feeling that it is the first time we have ever seen that patient.
Later at Tavistock he said, I feel that most people reach an age where they have so much
knowledge that they cant penetrate through to the wisdomI find it very hard to resist falling

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back on what I already know about the patient, resisting having to think afresh, having to tackle
the situation as if it is an entirely new one to which I have to bring a fresh mind (2005, pp. 4244). Bringing a fresh mind free of preconceptions and presuppositions is in large part what is
meant by becoming infinite, and several authors have related this to the Zen Buddhist notion of
no mind (Schermer, 2003, p. 253) or beginners mind (e.g. Alfano, 2005; Georgescu, 2011).
As Shunryu Suzuki writes in Zen Mind, Beginners Mind (1970, p. 21), If your mind is empty, it
is always ready for anything; it is open to everything. In the beginners mind there are many
possibilities; in the experts mind there are few.
Knowledge of psychoanalytic theory poses the same kinds of risks to the analysts
receptivity to thoughts without a thinker, since it can function as a limit to the possible ways of
receiving and interpreting the patient and the material of the session. When an analyst is at work
in the office, theory must be forgotten. When Bion recommended that the analyst function
without memory or desire, he meant exactly this: that we should put between parentheses all
our theorizing and seek with the other an original emotional union, one that might be
transformative (Ferro, 2005c, p. 423). Throughout his career Bion became increasingly wary of
theory, a feeling frequently expressed in his seminars. In So Paulo he said, Thanks to psychoanalytic theory, everybody knows all about psycho-analysis. I myself create just such difficulties;
every lecture I give increases the supply of theories about psycho-analysis. One hopes that it is of
some use to analysts, but in fact over and again it makes things more difficultCan you still find
a patient buried somewhere amongst all this rubbish? (Bion, 1994, p. 159). Bions view of
psychoanalytic theories was that they need to have wide enough application that they can always
be seen operating in everyday life, and general enough so as not to be forced upon the precise
and particular, with which analysts must grapple on their own (Bion, 1994, p. 291).
The state of mind that Bion is attempting to describe in the eschewal of memory, desire
and understanding involves an internal attitude of respect for the aliveness and emotional
character of the present moment. Bion is very clear that Psychoanalytic observation is
concerned neither with what has happened, nor what is going to happen, but with what is
happening (1967a p. 271), and that Every session attended by the psychoanalyst must have no
history and no future (1967a, p. 272). The conscious, volitional ego has achieved a certain
freedom from the grips of the present through the power of memory and imagination, and is very
adept at transforming the present into something different than what it is for all kinds of desired
purposes, whether personal or interpersonal. Even when motivated by the most therapeutic and
analytically sound intentions in the necessary activity of purposive thinking, there is always the
cost to pay of no longer being with what is and allowing it to germinate naturally in the fertile
unconscious. Parthenope Bion Talamo states it quite simply that on a practical levelBion is
referring to the state of mind which best furthers the appearance of -elements (Talamo, 1997,
p. 49). Bions strictures can be understood in this light, since Everything that interferes with the
rich perception of the emotional experience weakens the capability of alpha-function to
produce dream-thoughts suitable for thinking. Attention to, longing for, interest in, dwelling on,
clinging to, ruminating overall the many modes of preoccupation with past and future detract
from the intensity of the experience of the moment and its perception (Meltzer, 1978, p. 372).
Experience needs to be guarded from memory and desire in order to be apprehended
in its uniqueness (Meltzer, 1978, p. 275). Their banishment is doubtless in order to allow us to
be permeated by the patients state as fully as possible (Green, 1975, p. 8); to be invaded by
the patients non-verbal and verbal communications (Kerberg & Ahumada, 2000, p. 991). The
transformation O K depends on ridding K of memory and desire (Bion, 1970, p. 30) because

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the obtrusion of memories and desires occupies space that should remain open for the mind to
interact naturally with the object in promoting its evolution into knowable representation.
Although it is impossible to prevent the emergence of memories and desires, Eigen (1981, p.
429) suggests it is possible to prevent their interference with the analysts focus on O through
proper discernment: All aspects of his psychic life (in the strict sense, anything that implies
possession: i.e. ones knowledge, desires, habits, pleasures) are distinguished from realizations
that grow from the evolution of O.
Bion admits that The suspension of memory, desire, understanding, and sense
impressions may seem to be impossible without a complete denial of reality; but the psychoanalyst is seeking something that differs from what is normally known as reality (Bion, 1970, p.
43). Bions method is designed to strengthen the analysts ability selectively filter and selectively
magnify particular aspects of reality in order to compensate for obscurity when the object
investigated [is] peculiarly obscure (p. 43). When one becomes practiced in the suppression of
the faculties in question, this may lead to an ability to suppress one or other according to need,
so that suspension of one might enhance the effect of domination by the other in a manner
analogous to the use of alternate eyes (p. 44), what Bion calls mental binocular visionone
eye blind, the other eye with good enough sight (1990, p. 105). To help explain this, Bion
(1970, 1989, 1990) often refers to the following quote by Freud (1916, p. 312) in a letter to Lou
Andreas-Salom: I know that in writing I have to blind myself artificially in order to focus all
the light on one dark spot, renouncing cohesion, harmony, edifying effects and everything which
you call the symbolic element. Bion advocates a similar type of artificial blinding where
Instead of trying to bring a brilliant, intelligent, knowledgeable light to bear on obscure
problems, I suggest we bring to bear a diminution of the lighta penetrating beam of darkness:
a reciprocal of the searchlightif any object existed, however faint, it would show up very
clearlya very faint light would become visible in maximum conditions of darkness (Bion,
1990, pp. 20-21).
Bion is concerned with developing a mode of thought which is such that a correct
clinical observation can be made, for if that is achieved there is always hope of the evolution of
the appropriate theory (Bion, 1970, p. 44). He condenses into a single descriptor the mode of
thought he is describing with the word faith, or act of faith, (F). It may be wondered what
state of mind is welcome if desires and memories are not. A term that would express
approximately what I need to express is faith faith that there is an ultimate reality and truth
the unknown, unknowable, formless infinite. This must be believed of every object of which
the personality can be aware (p. 31). Bion explains that faith must be distinguished from the
religious meaning with which it is invested in conversational usage (p. 35) because it is in fact
a scientific state of mind (p. 32) in that it is maximally objective in its avoidance of memory
and desire. It is also the state most conducive to experiencing the hallucinosis of the psychotic
part of the personality (Bion, 1970). The particular difficulty of working with the destructive
force of the psychotic personality is its ability to proliferate memories and desires in the mind of
the analyst (Bion, 1992), but from a place of faith where the mind is stripped down to naked
intuition, there is nothing for the destructive force to feed on (Eigen, 1998, p. 75). The same
holds true for contact with O, which can be intense and chaotic and arouse greed, envy, violence
and fragmentation, to which memories and desires respond as manifestations of resistance
(White, 2011a).
The act of faith does not belong to the K system but to the O system, and unlike the
K system with its background in knowledge, the act of faith has as its background something

78

that is unconscious and unknown because it has not happened (Bion, 1970, p. 35). Civitarese
(2013, p. 95-96) sums up faith as another name for the patience required of the analyst in
waiting for a selected fact (an image, idea or emotion) to present itself and confer order on chaos,
as well as for the trust that it will sooner or later present itself. Having Faith during a session
means trusting the binocular (conscious/unconscious) vision of the psychoanalytic function of
the personality. Eigen (1981, 1985, 1993, 1998) writes eloquently about Bions concept of faith.
He explains that in terms of the faith-mastery polarity, Bion opts for a primacy of perception
and attention over memory and knowledge as the analysts most basic working orientation. In
[Bions] view, the intention to attend and perceive rather than remember and know or impose a
helpful scenario, is the more fruitful attitude for creative unfolding (Eigen, 1981, p. 424).
Eigen considers faith Bions primary methodological principle (1981, p. 423) and the
essential quality of the psychoanalytic attitude (1985, p. 326), in which one does not hold on to
either what one knows or ones formulations, but is more deeply anchored (better, freely
floating) in hopeful contact with the thing itself (Eigen 1981, p. 424).
A view of faith reminiscent of Bions is found in the writing of Alan Watts: Faith is
openness to truth, to reality, whatever it may turn out to be (Watts, 1983, p. 40). Eigen (1998, p.
63) similarly calls faith the radical openness of the psychoanalytic attitude. It involves the
devotion to emotional reality even when it is not visible, the full acceptance of it when it
becomes visible, and the discipline to let go of what is learned about it in a continual return to the
affective core of experience (Eigen, 1998, p. 63). Elsewhere Eigen writes that F in O
approaches an attitude of pure receptiveness. It is an alert readiness, an alive waiting. Bion
describes how uncomfortable one may be in this open state. One must tolerate fragmentation,
whirls of bits and pieces of meaning and meaninglessness, chaotic blankness, dry periods and
psychic dust storms (1985, pp. 326-327). Faith in the eventual evolution of O is required to bear
the insecurity of artificial blinding and the choice to remain patiently in the Ps state.
Bion warns that The more the analyst becomes expert in excluding memory, desire, and
understanding from his mental activity, the more he is likely, at least in the early stages, to
experience painful emotions that are usually excluded or screened by the conventional apparatus
of memory of the session, analytical theories, often disguised desires or denials of ignorance,
and understanding (which consists more often than not of column 2 elements) (1970, p. 48).
There will be an Increase of anxiety because there is no barrier against fears of acknowledged
dangers, and with the abandonment of the desire for cure there will be No barrier against guilt
because of no known substitute for acknowledged and conventional therapeutic aims (Bion,
1992, p. 296). But some analysts implicitly convey their desire for the patients improvement as
a reflection of the human, empathic bond between them, and Parsons (1986, p. 485) observes
that divesting oneself of memories and desires which are part of the shared ground on which the
analytic relationship is builtmight be a retreat from personal relationship with the patient to a
psychological crows-nest which allows exact observation but little in the way of shared
experience. Despite this warning, Parsons goes on to demonstrate with clinical examples how
intimacy is not necessarily sacrificed, and can actually be enhanced.
The suppression of memory, desire and understanding also undermines sense-based
experience which is the reality with which the individual is familiar (Bion, 1970, p. 46). The
result is a greater permeability between conscious and unconscious, leaving the analyst less well
defended against attacks on his mental stability and more at the mercy of unconscious thought,
and the latter is not always a merciful companion (Talamo, 1997, p. 54). Analysts attempting
his approach may find that the intuitions achieved by it cause them to feel the need for further

79

analysis (Bion, 1970, p. 67). Bion suggests that the procedure here adumbrated is advocated
only for the psycho-analyst whose own analysis has been carried at least far enough for the
recognition of paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions (p. 47).
Bion (1970) acknowledges that the separation from conventional reality bears a certain
resemblance to psychotic states, sleep, or stupor. Unlike psychotic states, however, the technique
only implies a partial and temporary exclusion of reality, followed by a conscious, disciplined
and deliberate process of transformation of intuition into speechWhere the psychotic aims to
break links, the analyst aims at establishing and strengthening them (Blandonu, 1994, p. 224).
It does not mean the abandonment of such mental equipment as our experience has enabled us
to cultivate (Harris, 1987a, p. 343). A number of authors (e.g. Bobrow, 2010; Markman, 2006;
Meltzer, 1978; Pariser, 2013) suggest that suspension of the functions in question is not actually
possible, but is more of an internal orientation and an ideal to be worked towards. More
realistically, the analyst is aware of a dialectic and tension between the past and present, between
what he/she knows or doesnt know, between feeling comfortable or lost (Markman, 2006, p.
21). Memories and desires, at once peremptory, are learned to be bracketed and allowed to fall
into the background (Eaton, 2007, p. 32). Awareness of sense-based reality cannot be turned off
and remains and important source of analytic information,111 but one can become better at
adjusting the magnification and focus between external and internal lenses.
Bions disturbing and cryptic injunction (Bianchedi, 1991, p. 11) to abandon memory
and desire, along with the implication that such a feat may require personal work or practice
outside the session, is one of the aspects of Bions work that the psychoanalytic institution
found most intolerable (Blandonu, 1994, p. 221). By drawing heavily from the language of
mysticism and suggesting the achievement of an altered state of consciousness in the analyst, it
appeared to some that Bion was proposing a radically different approach to psychoanalysis. But
in reality Bion practiced a rigorously psychoanalytic method with its roots in the Kleinian model
of technique, centered on the immediacy of the transference and countertransference (Mawson,
2011, p. 4), as Grotstein (2007) attests from his own analysis with Bion.
Despite this, Grotstein has called Bion a mystic, but a psychoanalytic and epistemological
mystic rather than a religious one (2007, p. 2), by which he means an analyst capable of entering
mystery with equanimity, becoming infused with O without the need to conquer it intellectually.
Keatss negative capability is often referred to as the stance of the mystic (Milner, 1987). The
state of mind Bion describes that is without memory or desire, in which attention cathexis is
withdrawn from external stimuli to increase sensitivity to projections from the inner world
(Grotstein, 2000b), can also be understood as a spiritual or mystical stance. Bions writings on O
suggest that what we have called the Unconscious, when released from its positivistic strictures,
is, as the Gnostics and mystics [and Neoplatonists] have long believed, the inner presence of the
Immanent or Incarnate God (Grotstein, 1997a, p. 86), and that God (not the Godhead) and
the Unconscious are the same phenomenon as seen from different vertices. The religious and
mystical quest for Godliness and the analytic quest for the Unconscious thus converge (pp.
83-84).
In Merkurs (2010, p. 228) view, Bion conceptualized the very procedures of clinical
psychoanalysis as a mystical practice. The analyst serves implicitly as the analysands spiritual
director. Joan and Neville Symington also believe that Bions approach is to approximate as
closely as possible to the mystics. He focuses attention on those defenses we put up against

111

Dithrich (2001, p. 33) reminds that Bion advocated allowing access to all senses, maintaining that an
illuminating interpretation must have extension into the domains of sense, myth, and passion.

80

entering such an experiencethose elements that block the two individuals from that experience.
The conclusion is unavoidable: that Bions thinking is geared to facilitating mystical experience
(Symington & Symington, 1996, pp. 177-178). White (2011a, p. 235) compares Bions writings
to the mystical writings of Meister Eckhart to show that like the mystic, the analyst aims to
clear himself of all attachments, preoccupations, and identifications in order to hear the silent
language of the unconscious. For the analyst, the purpose is not to achieve union with God but
to become empty, a pure container for the reception of beta elements. In reverie, these fractured
shards of experience have a chance of reuniting with the Forms, and By restoring this original
unity the mind can begin to heal (White, 2011a, p. 235).
Bion asserts that his knowledge of mysticism is through hearsay (Bion, 1990, p. 68),
but related in communication to Grotstein his understanding of mysticism as seeing things as
they really arewithout the disguise of the senses or preconceptions (Grotstein, 1997a, p. 83).
This view of mysticism reveals the basic isomorphism between mysticism and science and how
they contribute to each other (in some sense, how they are one, yet distinct) (Eigen, 1984, p.
347). Bions attempt to demonstrate this on epistemologically sound terms may turn out be the
aspect of his work to affect mainstream psychoanalysis last, yet be most transformative (Eigen,
1984, p. 347).
Bion (1970) writes about the mystic, messiah or genius on the societal level as someone
who is strong and open enough to become the vehicle for the natural and necessary emergence of
the new, transformative, catastrophic idea, and the ways that the influential ideas in Bions
work have transformed psychoanalysis leads Grotstein (1981, p. 510) to apply that designation to
Bion. But Grotstein also reads Bion as saying that there is a potential mystic in everyone,
Nietzsches bermench, and that the non-linear, non-rational emotionally turbulent nature of the
work demands that psychoanalysts in particular tap into this higher self, the part of the self
uniquely capable of tolerating doubt, frustration, uncertainty, as well as the cosmic meaningless
of being (Grotstein, 2007, pp. 2-3). Since Bion, analysts are now mandated to tap into their
mystical core. Psychoanalytic training forever afterwards must constitute in part the honing of
ones mystical receptivity (Grotstein, 2007, p. 3). For Bianchedi (2001, p. 23) as well,
psychoanalysis is, more and more, a mystical discipline.
The gap between phenonema and the thing-in-itself (Bion, 1965, p. 347) in Bions view
applies to everyone with the possible exception of the religious mystics, and since the aim of
psychoanalysis according to Bion is to come closer to the thing-in-itself, there is a natural rapport
between psychoanalysis and mysticism. Cooper (2001b) demonstrates that the same could be
said about psychoanalysis and Zen Buddhism. In a state of at-one-ment with emotional truth,
knowing truth is the same as becoming it; it is not a knowing about, but a knowing-throughbeing. In both Zen Buddhism and Bions later work there is a favoring of being over knowing
and a warning about the potential for symbolization to reify and thus destroy the actuality of
emotional experiencing. With the idea of at-one-ment Bion is talking about non-dual experience,
the essence of Zen, in which the separation between subject and object dissolves and one is ones
experience rather than one who attempts to conceptualize or control experience.112
A number of psychoanalytic authors have explored overlaps between Bions ideas and
Buddhist principles (e.g. Alfano, 2005; Bobrow, 2002, 2010; Cooper, 2001a, 2001b, 2002, 2010;

112

In a lecture comparing Bion, Eckhart, Heidegger and Dgen, White (2009) shows how the state of
mind described by Bion entails a certain amount of surrender, related to what Heidegger calls
gelassenheit (translated as releasement), in which meditative thinking, which is without will or
expectation, is privileged over calculative thinking, which is goal-directed and rational.

81

Eaton, 2007; Epstein, 1995; Falkenstrm, 2003; Georgescu, 2011; Mendoza, 2010; Miller, 2009;
Rubin, 1985, 1996; White, 2009). Parallels can be found in a common emphasis placed on
attention to the present moment; the importance that suffering be experienced and moved
through rather than bypassed; the crowding and damaging effects of attachment (memory, desire,
understanding) upon pure seeing; the value of non-dual experience; and the ultimate nature of
reality which is conceptualized similarly from the vantage point of O and the Buddhist notion of
emptiness.
Dithrich compares the paradoxes inherent in Bions method (the desire not to desire; the
minds focus on that which the mind cannot know) to the use of paradox in the Zen kan
(Dithrich, 2001, p. 33), the contemplation of which challenges in the practitioner the cultivation
of forms of receptivity alternate to rational understanding. Bions entire late periodin the ideas
he offers up in such ambiguously suggestive waysseems designed through omission of his
own definitive understanding to invite his readers to wonder about their own O, or wander closer
to its edges.113 This period of his work has paved the way for clinicians such as Nina Coltart,
William Meissner, Mark Epstein, [Michael Eigen], and James Grotstein, all with traditional
backgrounds, to write daringly about the spiritual dimension of psychoanalysis (Shermer, 2003,
p. 238).

113

It is no good anyone trying to tell you how you look at things, or from where you look at thingsno
one will ever know except you (Bion, 1994, p. 318).

82
Chapter III: Methodology

Exploratory Questions
Interpreting Bion and applying his ideas to ones clinical work is a deeply personal,
idiosyncratic and multilayered process. This project aims to study that process in order to shed
light on the role Bions ideas can take within the personal and clinical development of a
psychoanalyst. Exploring participants subjective experience of engaging with Bions ideas will
illuminate questions such as what are common experiences in the process of studying this thinker
and what might be the personal or professional value of these experiences? How do different
readers of Bion think about and interpret their own relationship with his ideas and what does that
reveal? Which aspects of Bions work emerge from the interviews appearing to be the most
useful or stimulating to practitioners of psychoanalysis and why? What are some commonly
endorsed benefits or downsides of devoting ones self to the study of Bion? What commonalities
emerge regarding the way Bions ideas are incorporated within participants existing
understanding of psychoanalysis and the human psyche, and the way that his ideas can come to
life in practice? What lessons can be learned about how best to approach Bion, and how best to
use or apply his ideas?
Recruitment
Because this study is interested in the experience of a particular set of people
(psychoanalysts who have studied Bion extensively), purposive rather than random sampling was
used. Participants were sought who meet the following criteria: They must be clinical
psychologists, psychiatrists, marriage and family therapists or licensed clinical social workers
and certified and currently practicing psychoanalysts who personally endorse 1) having studied
in depth Bions ideas across different periods of his work, and 2) having been significantly
influenced by at least one of Bions main ideas in their own work. Potential participants will be
located by way of their reputation in the field as psychoanalysts interested in Bion. The
researcher generated a list of potential participants to whom he has no personal affiliation but
whose reputation as potentially influenced by Bion he was made aware of by people more
familiar with the members of the local psychoanalytic community.
The researcher contacted potential participants by phone or by email, identifying himself,
explaining that he is conducting a study exploring the experience of learning and applying the
ideas of Wilfred Bion, asking them if they would be willing to be interviewed, and verifying that
they meet the selection criteria. A total of eight to ten participants were sought for the study. No
monetary compensation was offered. Participants were informed that their contributions will
remain anonymous, as detailed in the Human Subjects Protocol (Appendix A). They were asked
to meet for a maximum of two hours for the interview. Upon meeting they were provided with an
Informed Consent Form (Appendix B) describing the purpose of the study and the nature of the
interview, and delineating potential risks and their right to discontinue at any time. Each
participant was required to sign and submit the Informed Consent Form prior to the
commencement of the interview.
Several measures were taken to uphold ethical standards. It was conveyed to participants
in the consent form that since this is a phenomenological study, the researcher will be asking
them about their inner world, and that there is always the risk for emotional discomfort in the
contemplation and sharing of personal material. It was also conveyed in the consent form that
requests that the interview or any part of it be omitted from the project or destroyed would be

83

honored. Participants were made aware that although their identities would be concealed, the
content of the interviews will become available in the ProQuest dissertation database.
Participants were asked to make efforts to conceal the identities of any patients they may wish to
discuss as clinical examples in their responses to the interview questions, and were told that the
researcher will also make sure to conceal any and all identifying patient information. Following
the interviews, participants were given the opportunity to offer feedback regarding their
experience of being interviewed.
Qualitative Method
Pursuant to the objectives of this study, a phenomenological approach was utilized to
explore the question, what is the experience of putting Bions ideas to use in practice, and what
does this reveal about the potential clinical value of those ideas? In order to answer that
question, semi-structured interviews were conducted with each participant. The semi-structured
interview, as well as the analysis of the data, was conducted in accordance with the tenants of
Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) (Smith, Flowers & Larkin, 2009; Smith &
Osborn, 2007).
The IPA approach to the interview process makes use of a semi-structured interview
schedule, which is a loose outline of question topics. This process employs open-ended
questions which place the participant in the position of the experiential expert, allowing them
maximum opportunity to tell their own story. The open-ended question format is designed to
inquire into given topic areas, and the interviewer attempts to keep the conversation mostly
within those areas, while remaining open to the emergence of new, potentially unanticipated
issues. Follow-up questions can be used spontaneously by the interviewer to inquire further into
emergent areas of subjective experience relevant to the dissertation topic. The order of the
questions on the interview schedule does not need to be rigidly adhered to, as the flow of the
conversation may dictate the order in which topics become addressed, yet the interviewer will
make sure all of the same questions are addressed at some point to each participant. This
approach allows greater flexibility, facilitates rapport, and allows for the interview to enter into
novel and unexpected areas, all of which result in the production of richer data. (Smith &
Osborn, 2007).
During the interviews the researcher attempted to establish a positive and empathic
alliance and uphold a stance of nonjudgmental curiosity, to the best of his ability bracketing his
expectations and presuppositions, all of which were intended to result in the solicitation of data
maximally authentic to the participants experience. Following the completion of each interview,
the interviewer reflected upon and documented any impressions of the interaction (Smith,
Flowers & Larkin, 2009). In accordance with suggested procedure in IPA, the initial interview
was transcribed and reviewed prior to conducting the second interview in order to determine
whether the semi-structured interview schedule needed any modification (Smith, Flowers &
Larkin, 2009).
After all interviews were conducted, transcribed, and reviewed for fidelity, analysis of the
data proceeded. The data was analyzed according to IPA procedures as outlined by Smith and
Osborn (2007). The first transcript to be reviewed was read over several times and annotated in
the left-hand margin. Annotations made note of anything that appeared interesting or significant
about what the respondent said, often in the form of summary or paraphrase. Annotations also
included any associations, connections, or interpretations that came to the researchers mind, or
commentary on the nature or meaning of the responses. Annotations also made note of areas of

84

repetition, amplification, or contradiction over the course of the transcript. (Smith & Osborn,
2007).
When the annotation process was complete, the right hand margin was then used to
document emerging theme titles, transforming annotations into concise phrases that convey the
essential quality of what has been located in the transcript, often at a more abstract and
generalized level. The emergent themes were then listed on a separate sheet, studied for
connections between them and clustered around emerging superordinate concepts. A table of
themes was constructed portraying the identified themes clustered by superordinate themes, with
page numbers linking each theme to relevant parts of the transcript that provide good examples.
(Smith & Osborn, 2007).
This procedure was then repeated with all the other transcripts, and the tables of themes
from each transcript were compared and contrasted with one another, looking for patterns,
similarities, convergences and divergences. All of the tables were then merged into a final table
of nine superordinate themes, one of which contained five sub-themes. The themes were written
up into a narrative account using a large amount of direct quotations from participants, revealing
differences and similarities across the perspectives of different participants responses pertaining
to each theme. In the Discussion section, conclusions are drawn from the data pertaining but
not limited to the exploratory questions.

85
Chapter IV: Results

A total of nine interviews were conducted for the purposes of this study. The interviews
were carried out in the analysts private offices during weekday business hours, either in one
two-hour time period, or if necessitated by scheduling restraints two separate one-hour blocks.
Of the nine psychoanalysts that were interviewed, one was not able to meet for the second half of
the interview due to external events, so the results of that partial interview were excluded from
the results.
Of the eight participants included in the study, five were male and three were female. All
reside in the San Francisco Bay area with private practices in San Francisco, Oakland or
Berkeley. All participants see patients ranging from once a week to multiple times per week,
either on the couch or face-to-face. All work primarily with individual adults; roughly half also
treat children or adolescents, and about half work with couples or families. All participants
described their patients as ranging from high-functioning to low-functioning, and all are open to
working with patients with psychotic symptomology. Two of the eight participants made the
qualification that they do not take patients with severe and untreated substance abuse problems.
All participants had received their analytic training in San Francisco at one of the two
psychoanalytic training institutes, either the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis (SFCP),
previously the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute, or the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern
California (PINC). Six of the participants received their analytic training in the mid-90s, one in
the mid-80s, and one recently graduated. Five of the eight participants teach courses or seminars
on Bion on a regular basis.
Pseudonyms have been assigned and identifying information has been removed to
conceal participants identities. Participant demographics are displayed in Table 1 below.
Table 1. Participant demographics
Participant
number
1

Pseudonym

Patient Psychopathology

Carol

Greg

Jeff

Adam

Steve

Richard

Kathleen

Trudy

Low to high functioning,

psychotic symptoms okay
Low to high functioning,
psychotic symptoms okay,
no severe substance abuse
Low to high functioning,
psychotic symptoms okay
Low to high functioning,
psychotic symptoms okay,
no severe substance abuse
Low to high functioning,
psychotic symptoms okay
Low to high functioning,
psychotic symptoms okay
Low to high functioning,
psychotic symptoms okay
Low to high functioning,
psychotic symptoms okay

Individual
Adults?
Yes

Children or
Adolescents?

Yes

Both

Yes

No

Couples

Critical Pluralist; Psychoanalytic

Yes

No

No

Yes

Late
adolescents
Both

Couples

Psychoanalytic; Laplanche,
Winnicott, Bion, Freud, and other
influences
Psychoanalytic; British Middle
School and Neo-Kleinian
Psychoanalytic (Object Relations)
and Cognitive Behavioral
Psychoanalytic; Object Relations
with some Relational influence
Psychoanalytic; Neo-Kleinian and
Bionian

Yes
Yes
Yes

Couples or
Families?

Psychoanalytic; British Middle

School with other influences
Psychoanalytic; Bion, Winnicott,
Fairbairn, and other influences

Both
Couples

Adolescents

Theoretical Orientation

Participants Theoretical Orientation

Each participant was asked how they might characterize their theoretical orientation.
Since each endorses significant Bionian influence, this section speaks to the types of larger
theoretical frameworks people who use Bions ideas and models work within. As will be seen,
each analyst fielded the question in a very different way.

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Carol has come to the place of feeling really stymied by the question of her theoretical
orientation because I hold and know and value so many theories that speak to different levels of
this complex thing which is human consciousness. There are Winnicottian moments, there are
Brombergian moments, there are Bionian moments, there are Meltzer moments. And I value
having access to so many. They speak to different levels of our psychological organization, offer
different ways of thinking about these different levels. Carol was raised on the British
independent school: Winnicott and Marion Milner were sort of my founding mother and
father. She has also studied the Kleinian perspective a great deal, and has since integrated a bit
of the American Relational perspective from Adrienne Harris and more recently the affective
developmental neuroscience perspective from Alan Schore, but overall she has spent the most
time deeply immersed in Winnicott and Bion, whom she finds mutually complementary in some
ways, and interestingly divergent in others. She adds, I no longer look for compatibility or a
theory of everything. And I think we have to carry contradictions. We do and we must.
Greg describes his orientation as a mixture of Bion, Winnicott and Fairbairn, but then
broadened that to include the perspectives imparted by his two main teachers, and then
broadened from there to include the influence of years of sampling of a wide range of authors
and ideas, and then finding what feels right for me, both in terms of my personality, my personal
experience, my intellectual curiosity, and what seems to work, with my patients and also in the
supervisions that I do.
When asked about his theoretical orientation, Jeff responded that I deliberately describe
myself as a critical pluralist. And Im adamantly opposed to orthodoxy. He explained critical
pluralism as the ability to look at the same thing through different lenses, comparing it to an MRI
machine which circles and tries to get a more three dimensional picture. If all thats in your
mind is that people have drives and anxieties and defenses, you can have a pretty simple picture
of everythingway too simple. If you start giving in to other theories you get a more complex
portrait, and a complex portrait allows you to think more complexly.
Adam explained that he doesnt think what he does fits neatly into any theory, but that
over time certain theories have become more convincing to him because of what he sees
happening in his work and his own analysis. These are the psychoanalytic theories that tend to
more explicitly map the analytic relationship onto the caring parent-child relationship, as well as
theories that pay respect to the depth and stubbornness of unconscious phantasy, especially as
understood to be a consequence of trauma and early relationships. The theorists that he finds
really good at these things and inspiring to him are Winnicott, in some ways Bionas much as
I understand Bion, Jean Laplanche, and Freud, especially early Freud. He also mentions some
contemporary theorists that he likes who include Christopher Bollas, Tom Ogden, Adam
Phillips, Antonino Ferro, Donald Meltzer, and Judith Mitrani. Similar to Carols view, Adam
finds that there are patients and then there are moments in treatment or moments in an hour
where different theories make more sense to inform how to understand whats happening or what
to do.
Steve locates his theoretical home in British Object Relations, which includes for him
both the British middle school and the neo-Kleinian school. He explains that the major players
there would be Winnicott and Klein, but that for most neo-Kleinians, himself included, Bion has
really supplanted Klein and overtaken the landscape. Steve adds that he has been influenced by
the Relationalist perspective to some extent, although unable to find their theory of the
unconscious, he sticks to British Object Relations as a way of making sense of psychic reality.

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Richard, when asked about his theoretical orientation, first remarked that he doesnt go
by any particular theoreticians or people, then jokingly quoted Grotstein: Ive never seen an
idea I didnt like. He describes himself as psychoanalytic, but also cognitive behavioral, adding,
I dont think theyre as incompatible as either school wants us to believe.
Kathleen started studying Object Relations after Self Psychology was not helping her
with certain patients who needed more than mirroring and empathy. Object Relations theory has
since become the foundation of her work, the basis for understanding her patients, and the way
that I process their emotional life, their inner world, their psychodynamics. What Object
Relations means more specifically for her is Ferenczi, Fairbairn, Winnicott, Bion, Balint, Ogden,
Ferro, and Civitarese. She adds that she also carries within her certain key concepts from Klein
that she finds quite useful. Kathleen is also interested in intersubjectivity and Relational analysis,
finding that theory of mind needs to be supplemented with theory of interaction. She explains
that although her orientation is Object Relations theory, in the room she may look like a
Relational analyst because she is more free with what she says and doesnt limit herself to
interpretation.
When asked how she might describe her theoretical orientation, Trudy remarked, Ive
got very mixed feelings about describing it. I sort of hate the idea. She recalled Melanie Kleins
adverse reaction to being called a Kleinian: I am what I am! Trudy has been influenced by
field theory, but most influenced by the students of Melanie Klein, including Bion and Betty
Joseph, but probably Bion the most, because Bion is so powerful conceptually and
theoretically. When asked if she would go so far as calling herself a Bionian, she replied, I
might after a glass of wine.
The Interview
The interview was designed to investigate how Bions ideas fit into and play a role in
each participants approach to the practice of psychoanalysis. This was researched in three ways.
The first was by asking participants about their approach to the work without making any
mention of Bion. Questions 1, 2, 12 and 23 on the interview schedule (Appendix C) included
asking them about the role of theory in general in their work, about their theoretical orientation,
about what psychoanalysis means to them, and about how they conceptualize the processes of
change and growth in patients. This was intended to reveal whether aspects of Bions ideas might
be visible within their fundamental ways of thinking about clinical situations, and to see what
might emerge as common in terms of orientation and approach to psychoanalysis among analysts
within whom Bions ideas find resonance.
The second mode of investigation involved asking participants in an open-ended way
about the value that Bions ideas and models have had for them in their work with their patients.
Questions 7 through 11 on the interview schedule (Appendix C) were each designed to get at this
essential question in different ways, allowing the interviewer to ask it from different angles or in
different terms, depending on what worked with each participant and fit the flow of the
interview. This part of the interview was intended to reveal what comes to mind first for each
participant when thinking about the impact of Bion on their work.
The third mode of investigation, which comprised questions 13-22 on the interview
schedule (Appendix C), involved asking participants more pointedly about a set of specific
Bionian topics and theoretical models. Participants were asked for their personal thoughts and
perspectives on the topics of truth and psychotic process, and were asked about Bionian models
and ideas such as the psychotic part of the personality, containment, and being without memory

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and desire, to investigate what each of these models and ideas mean to them personally, whether
they find them to be clinically useful, and if so, in what ways have they been useful.
Thematic Analysis
Each interview was transcribed, and the data was analyzed in accordance with the
procedure outlined by Smith and Osborn (2007). What emerged from the interviews were nine
overarching themes, one of which contained five sub-themes. The emergent themes are displayed
in Table 2 below. Following Table 2, each theme is discussed in depth. In an attempt to stay as
faithful to participants experiences of those themes, numerous quotations are included (Smith,
Flowers & Larkin, 2009).
Table 2: Emergent Themes
Theme
number
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
8A
8B
8C
8D
8E
9

Theme name
The influence of Melanie Klein
Theory is useful to an extent
Reading Bion is an emotional experience with potential
benefits
Advice on how to learn Bion
The internalization and development of functions
Different ways of thinking about psychosis
The role of truth in clinical practice
Relative usefulness of Bions concepts and models
Projective identification as communication
Containment and the mother-infant analogy
Alpha-function
The concept of O
Without memory, desire or understanding
Other related areas of interest

Number of
participants
with that theme
5
8
8
8
8
8
8
8
8
8
8
8
8
8

1. The influence of Melanie Klein. Melanie Klein was mentioned frequently by the
participants, from one stating hes not a huge fan of Klein, to another who lauded her as an
absolute clinical master and savant of the infants mind. Three participants who had been
originally trained as ego psychologists spoke at length about the benefit that the Kleinian
perspective had brought not only to their own clinical thinking, but to the intellectual atmosphere
of a city previously dominated by the ego psychology perspective.
Trudy appreciated the added dimension it brought to ways of understanding the
unconscious, specifically the more primitive anxieties and primitive defenses, which greatly
expanded the field of what she was able to notice happening with her patients.
Steve described his discovery of Klein as the experience of driving past an orchard when
suddenly the trees all line up. He appreciated Kleins mythopoeic view of the unconscious. She
wasnt afraid to talk about it in the most horrific terms imaginable in terms of aggression and
primitive mental states. This view, and her theories of infantile experience opened up for him

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the possibility of considering a much wider range of psychic phenomena and a broader view of
psychopathology than Freuds life starts at the Oedipus complex.
Jeff, the critical pluralist, appreciated how radically different the Kleinian view of
technique and therapeutic rapport was from the Freudian ego psychology view that had been his
training, in which the goal is to build an alliance with patients egos and gently work with their
defenses. The Kleinian approach, which couldnt give a good goddamn about the observing
ego involved, by contrast, making deep interpretations directly to the patients unconscious, so
that the unconscious finally felt understood. They didnt care whether the patient agreed with
your interpretation consciously, they didnt think the ego knew what it was talking about, so why
would you speak to it? This alternate perspective allowed Jeff to begin to question the primacy
of ego-based insight as the aim of the work.
Criticisms also emerged from participants with regard to Kleinian theory and technique.
Adam considers Kleins view that babies are psychotic to be a terrible conceptual mistake that
has resulted in an unfortunate conflation in the literature of psychosis with primary process. Both
Carol and Jeff spoke to what seems to be a lack of appreciation among Kleinians for the
intersubjective, and the effect that the personality and unconscious of the analyst can have upon
the nature of the material that emerges from the patient. Kathleen also remarked that among the
contemporary Kleinians she has studied with overseas, there isnt that sense of timing, tact and
dosage that is in American treatments.
2. Learning theory is useful to an extent. All eight participants showed a real passion
for psychoanalytic theory. All have studied theory on their own, well beyond that which is
assigned and taught in analytic training, in particular those participants who also teach and write.
The consensus among the participants seemed to be that gaining a solid background knowledge
of theory is an important aspect of becoming a clinician because it broadens ones receptivity to
the material, facilitates the formation of hypotheses, helps to organize the material and keep the
clinician grounded, and helps the clinician think about what to do and how to best engage with
the patient. However, a number of participants also spoke to the limits of theorys clinical utility.
Carol remarked that studying theory has been extremely important in her development as
a psychoanalyst, giving me access to possible ways of thinking, possible ways of describing,
possible ways of thinking about the purpose of psychoanalysis, the goal of psychoanalysis.
Richard described theories as functioning like conceptual containers for receiving ideas, like
neurotransmitters fitting into the receptor. Jeff finds that theories are useful as models of what
could be happening, which help anchor you and give you a place to start with in a complicated
encounter with a person. Greg said that theory is very important because it provides various
models about the development and functions of the personality and the ways relational
experiences shape a person, and that the technical ideas associated with these models lend
themselves to ways of engaging that optimize access to parts of the personality that are asking
for attention and engagement.
Despite the fact that many theories also imply a technique, both Adam and Carol
commented on the vast difference between ones theories and what actually happens in the room
with patients. Carol remarked that as we all discover, sometimes to our chagrin, there is no
direct route from theory to practice at all, and Adam doubts whether theory actually describes
what he does, other than in an after-the-fact way. Jeff expressed his view that theories are
developed by clinicians to explain what they see happening with patients which doesnt already
have a good explanation, but he remarked that the longer I was in practice the more I realized

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that these theories werent true. So I dont regard any of them as true. He finds that some of
them turn out to be kind of useful as models of what could be happeningif you use them as
models with some humility, but he sees their only function as an aid in the formation of
hypotheses, and feels prepared to discard them at all times.
For a number of participants, the usefulness of theory has changed and evolved for them
over time. Adam described this evolution in detail: I think that earlier on, I hoped that theory
would be sort of, almost a kind of set of instructions for how to do psychoanalysis or
psychoanalytic psychotherapy, that if I read it and grasped it and maybe had a few theories at my
fingertips I would have a clear sense of what to do with my patients, understand them,
understand the process, what to say at times, which I think is not terribly unusual for a lot of
people who are starting out earlier in their career, especially when you see people who seem
very, very facile with theory and discuss clinical material and bring theory into their
understanding of it, almost as if they have these theories at the tip of their tongue, top of their
mind when theyre with patients, and some of their writing suggests that too, some of the writing
I have read. So I would say for a few years when I was a graduate studentI probably wouldnt
have admitted it then, but thats probably what I was kind of hoping theory would do, to help
with really having no clue what I was doing with my patients, the anxiety of doing
psychotherapy, let alone psychoanalytic psychotherapyI got very interested in theory for some
years and I wrote a theoretical dissertation, and then I was quite interested in theory as a
psychoanalytic candidate. And I remain interested in theory although not quite as intensely as I
was earlier on and I dont spend nearly as much time reading theory as I used to. And as I moved
along in my experience, I think that the theories that have been most interesting to me, useful to
me, have receded to the background of my mind. Its almost like a sedimentary thing, they sort
of become part of my equipment, and sort of merge with other thoughts and experiences and
feelings, hopefully, that Ive had, and become part of my own frame of reference.
Adams experience of becoming less interested in reading theory over time was common
to several participants, which suggests that studying theory and applying it to cases in
supervision is a process that is most important for the purposes of ones development as a
clinician and the shaping of ones clinical mind, but becomes less needed after a certain point.
Carol stated that since my most intense formal study of theory, Ive been in an ongoing process
of divesting myself of theory. A number of participants remarked that a large part of being
without memory, desire, or understanding means being free of theory in any kind of intentional
way in the room, and being free from the pressure to fit the unknown to the known or settle on an
interpretation prematurely. According to Jeff, the trick is to know many theories, know them
well to the point where you can explain them to your grandmother, but at the same time know
that they are not truth, they are tools, and they are disposable. Both he and Richard were also
explicit about freeing themselves from psychoanalytic dogma. Beyond the rigidity of ethics and
the frame, Richard explained that every person and I create our own rules of engagement.
Adams sense that the most useful theories receded into the background of his mind was
also a commonly reported experience. Greg explained that different versions of theory are
always running in the background for him, and only come to the foreground in a spontaneous
kind of way, whether with a patient or in supervision or even teaching. All the participants feel
that theory has had a shaping effect upon their receptivity to the material and the ways they think
about the patient both inside and outside of the consulting room, but several participants,
particularly those who endorsed some relational influence, made it a point to state that theory is
less important in their actual relationship with the patient. This seemed to be another example of

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theory not translating to technique, as half of the participants mentioned the importance of
adapting to the particular needs of each individual patient and connecting with their experience
as a process that has little to do with theory and everything to do with intuition. But as Steve
explained, citing a paper by Ron Britton (1989), having theory running as a kind of operating
system in the background does not in his experience pull him away from his patient, but instead
functions as an analytic third position that frees up the dyad by opening up triangular space.
In general what emerged from the interviews is that psychoanalytic theories and models,
once internalized and assimilated into ones own way of thinking and observing, are indeed
extremely useful but in a completely implicit, personalized, and often unconscious way, and that
the internalized theories that tend to be of the most use are those which broaden ones receptivity
to the material and ability to think, rather than narrow it, something that many of the participants
appreciated as unique to Bions ideas and models in particular. As Steve put it, the brilliance of
Bion is that his theory was so open-ended, and that to be Bionian is to take his open-ended
theory and to make it your own in a very personal way. Richard remarked upon the enormity of
applications towards which Bions ideas are geared: Theyre so nascent, theyre like the bare
bones ideas, and you can expand out from there. Its very expansive. For Jeff, Bions ideas are
so elegant and practical because they allow you to think about thinking, since they are not about
the contents of the mind, but how the mind handles its contents. He doesnt care about what
youre thinking, he cares about how youre thinkingThats the beauty, nobody else had done
that. Its radically different!
3. Reading Bion is an emotional experience with potential benefits. Participants
varied widely in terms of their subjective experience reading Bion; all had emotional reactions to
it, and many found value in their emotional engagement with the texts. Half of the participants
reported initially feeling intrigued by Bions written works because of how different his way of
writing was. Trudys first reflection when asked about reading Bion was that, It is like nothing
Ive ever experienced, and similarly Kathleen reported, I never read anything like it. Two
participants reported sensing something mysteriously profound in Bions writing, even if it
initially eluded their conscious grasp. As Kathleen described her first reading of Experiences in
Groups, I had no idea what it said. I did not understand a word of it. And I knew it was
brilliantI didnt understand anything but it went through me, it resonated with meAnd it was
like, it kind of went into my cellsI was changed by it. Jeffs first impressions of reading Bion
were: I found it pretty difficult, though very intriguing, cause he didnt talk like other analysts,
and he seemed in some ways just more profound, although I wasnt really always sure why.
Four of the eight participants reported that they found reading Bion difficult or
experienced it as a struggle. Kathleen, who entered analytic training having only read Experience
in Groups, recalled the confusion she felt upon her introduction to Bions metapsychology: the
first class on Bion is, what is K and what is O and what is minus K andit was almost like
learning algebra. Steve, who teaches Bion, sometimes jokes with his students that if they dont
at some point shatter their screen or throw the book across the room, theyre not really reading
Bion. The following quote captures the emotion of Steves struggle with the concepts in
Transformations: What the f... is he saying? Mathematical points and lines are missiles to
annihilate thingsWhat is he talking about? Why is he so obtuse? The experience has also
brought him to the point of questioning his own intelligence: how smart am I? Steve only
attempted to read Transformations once and concluded it was just too dense for my puny
intellect. Carol found that she could not read Transformations and has given herself permission

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never to try again. Steve has also granted himself this type of permission, confessing that he
sometimes admits to his students that there are some paragraphs I just take and I just set aside.
Jeffs emotional reactions were less related to Bions writing style, more related to Bions
ideas. He described an attitude he takes towards reading theory that seemed to benefit him when
it came to the potentially frustrating aspects of reading Bion: My approach has never been to
attempt to understand the theorist, or figure out if they are right, or if I like the ideas, or if its
well written. What I care about is whether theres something in there which triggers the
expansion of my ability to think about things in new ways. And so probably if I couldnt
understand three quarters of what Bion was saying, what I took away was whatever that quarter
was. One example is when Jeff came across Bions idea that thoughts are not the result of
thinking, but vice versa: You mean the mind doesnt generate thoughts, it arises to manage
thoughts? Thats incredible! I dont know whether its true or not, I dont care! Its justits one
of the most incredible thoughts Ive ever encountered.
Although Jeff found Bions writing difficult, the demand he places on his readers did not
irritate him the way it did at times for Scott. Jeff explained that he had already dealt with Lacan,
who he found much harder than Bion, and I didnt expect him to take care of his readers since
that was just obviously not Bions personality, which was intriguingI forgave him for being
obtuse. If that was a limitation of his writing style or if he was a British eccentric Adam was
slightly less forgiving of Bions writing style, but made similar attempts to understand it from a
cultural context: some of the language was a little, um, at times it felt sort of unnecessarily
abstruseit might of just been a British way of writingit might have just been like his time
and his place and he would use certain terms that maybe in that context were just totally normal,
but for me it was like, why use this forty-five dollar word when you could maybe use a, you
know, one-dollar word? But I mean a lot of analysts do that.
Adam reported his first encounter with Bions writing as interesting and very
stimulating, although I dont think I had any idea what I would do with it clinically at the
time. He liked and appreciated that it was very rigorous, philosophically rigorous, as if written
by a philosopher. At the same time Adam felt kind of turned off by something like the tone, I
find it pretty dry. And I know people said Bion has a good sense of humor but I didnt see it in
what I read, so I preferred, just personally, writers that had a little bit more play in their voice,
you know like Winnicott. Steve also took issue with Bions writing style. He referred to
Ogdens (2004a) paper on reading Bion, where Ogden asserts that Bion is a difficult writer, but
not a bad writer. I disagree, some of the writing is really bad. The question of whether Bion
was deliberately making his writing hard to understand also came up for some of the participants.
Scott and Trudy thought so, but Kathleen had a different view: a lot of people dismiss Bion
because you cant understand it at first, and so I think he made life harder on himself in terms of
being well known and easily accepted, but thats how his mind worked. Thats just the way his
minds worked. Its kind of like when you read a novel and you say this person needed an
editor. But thats how his mind worked.
Three of the participants also described emotional reactions to the experience of Bion in
the seminar setting. Steve was intrigued by the contrast between the theory-heavy quality of his
metapsychological texts and his seminars, which are almost atheoretical. But even in his
seminars Steve found Bion frustrating. In response to a video of a seminar Steve watched, my
feeling is often dude, get to the point! What is your point? Yah know? Cause hell talk around
things a great deal. Greg reported liking the spontaneity of the seminars, and appreciated getting
a feel for the different ways he engages. Carol reported finding the seminars enjoyable and

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fascinating to read, appreciating the way that Bion demonstrates his process and seems to be
transferring on a legacy of his ways of thinking about the work which have clearly sustained him
throughout his career.
Greg was unique among the participants in reporting that his initial experience of reading
Bion was that it felt applicable and relevant. He also expressed more sheer pleasure and
fulfillment in the reading of Bion than any other participant. Ill read Bion just because I just
enjoy, I just enjoy it. And I can read something ten or twenty times and theres something about
it that stands out for me. And its like listening to music, theres[sic] certain things you dont get
tired of. And then that will open up more ideas for me. And so Ill read Bion for five minutes, or
read before going to bed, or if I have a specific thing in mind that I want to research. Greg
explains that his thirst for reading Bion is motivated by genuine curiosity. He also spoke to a
quality he experiences in the text, a certain richness and openness to interpretation that lends
itself to multiple reads. Steve also spoke to this quality, a way that Bions work becomes O for
the reader, then you have to make sense of it from the formless infinity of his mind.
Not being able to understand with any certainty what Bion means was the most
commonly reported experience among the eight participants, and several of them commented on
the function they feel this has served for them. Trudy recalled a colleague once say, I disagree
with Bion, and Trudys response was, What? Bion doesnt want you to agree with him. Thats
not the point, he wants you to think for yourself, and I think his writing, in part, is designed for
that purposeI feel you can never know what Bion means, so in a sense you have to, through
your own experience, sort of come to an understanding in yourself. Steve also reported that
after a while, with ones patients, something begins to emerge that I think you can call your
personal Bion, because everyonehe kind of takes shape in different ways.
Two participants explained that part of what invites the process of constructing their own
personal Bion is an initial deconstruction of their usual ways of thinking which his writing
promotes. As Carol explained it, he can drive you crazy, and he did me. But it was an
interesting kind of driven crazy. I understood my distress as being potentially productive towards
breaking down comfortable thinking, and opening up to discovery. Jeff, perhaps speaking less
for himself but more generally, felt like psychoanalysis had generated too many ideas to the
point where it was too easy for analysts to always think they know whats going on, which
means you cant learn anything. So you read him and you feel yourself being disassembled. And
then you have to reassemble in a new way, so the point is to evoke your thinking rather than
attain new ideas.
4. Advice on how to learn Bion. All of the participants offered thoughts or suggestions
about how someone new to Bion might go about approaching his work.
Three participants (the three female participants) suggested reading about Bions personal
life, whether Bions autobiography The Long Weekend, or his biography by Blandonu (1994).
As Kathleen reported, I came to appreciate Bion more because I read his biography. She found
that reading about his life and how his theories sort of reflect the experiences he had in his life
made his theories more real for her and allowed her to accept his eccentricities a little better.
Carol would encourage anyone who is new to Bion to begin with The Long Weekend as well as
Lawrence Browns (2012) paper Bions Discovery of Alpha Function, which juxtaposes
Bions theoretical developments against the timeline of his personal work processing his trauma.
Carol encourages that students take the risk of not starting with the canon [Bions formal
theoretical publications] but of starting with, who is Bion? What did he go through? What was

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the inward necessity inside Bion to find ways of making sense of his very difficult complex
traumatic experience, developmental and external traumatic experience. Complex trauma. He
was moved to try to make sense of it in order to try and heal enough to have a life. He was a
walking zombie for many years. In his own words, you know. And when you understand that,
this gives you an entree into why his at first off-putting, exotic, weird sounding words like betaelements, alpha-elements, et cetera, are so valuable and so important in our thinking and practice
as analysts.
Trudy suggested reading Bion in chronological order, starting with Experiences in
Groups, because Bion does assume that youve read Bion. Trudy also suggested reading The
Long Weekend, as well as Second Thoughts, Learning from Experience, and Attention and
Interpretation, prior to attempting to read Bions fiction novel A Memoir of the Future, which
she recommends, but warns that it is not only intellectually challenging, but emotionally, its a
killerits very psychotic.
Three participants suggested beginning with secondary source material before diving into
the primary source material. Richard reported, reading Bion directly wasnt for me. That didnt
really hook me in so much. It was reading other peoples take on Bion, and then I could go back
and really read Bion. Although Richard read most of Bions formal works during his analytic
training, he feels it was the disciples of Bion that were a stronger influence, when I saw how
they applied these ideas. Kathleen also thinks that students might have an easier time beginning
with books that describe and provide some basic background to Bions ideas, such as the
Symingtons (1996) book, The Clinical Thinking of Wilfred Bion, saying, I think it really helps
to have somebody else who has kind of put it together. Although Carol places a high value on
struggling through the canon, in her teaching she has recently found it helpful to begin by
introducing students to what contemporary writers, who are easier to access than Bion is, were
making of Bion, on the understanding that some people would be induced to then back up into
reading Bion, and thinking in terms of finding their own way to understand and make use of
Bion. She lists Ogden and Ferro as authors who make lively contemporary uses of Bion,
which can serve as a bridge for students.
Greg encouraged reading both the primary and secondary texts, and commented on the
differences between each type of experience: My own feeling is theres something about having
contact with Bion and his words and his writing style, it does different things to different people,
that if you just read something thats a secondary text, it engages your ego. But reading him
engages much more of you. So you can get angry, you can be confused, you can be inspired, you
can think hes crazy, you can think hes brilliant, you can think he has a thought disorder. You
can think all sorts of things!
Four participants suggested reading the primary texts multiple times, either in one sitting
or with long stretches of time in between. Greg suggested when reading Bions articles, to read
them three times in a row. Steve, Trudy and Carol all spoke to the value of returning to the texts
after several years have passed. Steves experience has been that once youre through about five
or six iterations of a text, you then begin to be able to put your feeling of irritation to one side
and be able to sit with the textI just really feel like Ive just begun to crack openand this is
like, maybe fifteen years of pretty strong interest in Bionjust now beginning to look behind the
curtain at the man, and his way of thinking and writing.
Four participants suggested reading Bion in a group environment, either with the
guidance of a teacher or privately with friends or colleagues. Kathleen and Trudy both suggested
reading it out loud in a group, word by word. For Kathleen, doing it that way was really when it

95

made the most sense, actually. It was kind of like reading poetry, where you have to say it, you
cant just read it, you have to say it to get the nuance, or see how one thing leads to another. It
became much more alive when we read it out loud, that was the best experience Ive had reading
Bion actually.
Steve warned not to be in a hurry to make use of Bions ideas clinically, or to expect
immediate results in your practice. Trudy and Adam added that it is important to remember that
reading Bion, or reading theory in general, is never enough on its own. Adam finds that it can
be reassuring, especially for people who are learning to be therapists, to be seduced by the magic
of the text, or the authority of the text, or the mystical powers of the text, and to feel like I did
that they could understand what psychoanalysts have to offer just by reading and trying to
understand their writings. And I think its a good thing to do but I dont think its ever
enoughthe more you can be exposed to hearing peoples clinical material or case conference
presentations from a Bionian point of view, for example, the more it can become something real,
and something clinically useful, as opposed to a bunch of abstract concepts that I think can get
people kind of carried away.
5. The internalization and development of functions. A major theme that emerged
from participants was the idea that it is not the discovery or accumulation of insight or
knowledge of self in the patient that is the primary goal, but rather the growth of certain
functions of the mind, sometimes also referred to as capacities or abilities, which are internalized
and developed in the patient through the experience in analysis.
Trudy expressed her view that psychoanalysis is no longer just about making the
unconscious conscious, but about the development of the patients ability to think about and
process emotional experience. So its about growth and development, not archeology, she said,
referring to the Freudian metaphor of digging for and excavating unconscious truths. Adam and
Greg both see this shift in focus towards the development of functions in patients as having
allowed analysts today to work with much lower functioning, even psychotic patients, and Adam
stated that Bion has a lot to do with what used to be called unanalyzable patients now becoming
quite analyzable. Kathleen also attributes the increased focus on building functions to Bion: So
hes adding functions, and its sort of comparable to what the ego-psychologists would say is
building structure, or ego strength.
All eight participants spoke in one way or another about the central importance that
patients develop their capacity to tolerate, use, process, think creatively about, or learn from their
ongoing emotional experience. Carol, Jeff, Adam and Steve all emphasized that the development
of these functions in the patient often involves an internalization process, where the functions in
question are internalized by the patient from the analytic process or from the analyst. Carol views
psychic growth as very much connected with the establishment of a novel relationship that one
has that provides certain functions, many of which the patient can internalize, that have not been
provided in previous relationships, so that the patient can leave the treatment more able to
manage his or her life, and the ongoing challenges of being alive in a human body with feelings
and relationships without you. She understands the primary goal of psychoanalysis for the
patient is to learn how to process his own ongoing emotional life, and she went on add that this
involves building the capacity to manage your ongoing challenges of being human and in
relationships in the social world. Its the capacity to connect with your own feelings, know your
own vulnerabilities, your own tendencies, remember how you have brought yourself through,

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have been helped bring yourself through to a better place in the past, and checking whether
youre able to do it on this occasion.
Jeff also views an internalization process taking place, and also emphasizes the growth in
the patients capacity to manage or live with, which he attributes to the internalization and
growth of alpha-function. Jeff sees his role as container as one who processes patients difficult
experience with his own alpha-function in a way that makes it more usable to them, and over
time as patients are able to experience that containing process in him, they gradually become
able to internalize more of that for themselves so that they can, you know, analyze themselves
even after we dont know each other anymore. For Jeff, increased alpha-function capacity
allows you to tolerate more of the things that are difficult to tolerate in yourself and in
lifebeing less undone by themwith a greater capacity to deal with that which comes your
way in its totality. Growth of the patients alpha-function is fundamental to his view of the task
of psychoanalysis, which he calls a discipline by which people try to accept the unacceptable
more gracefully, and help patients reckon with and become better able to handle more of the
mystery of life and more of the sheer burden of suffering in life.
Adam considers the internalization of certain abilities or functions of the analyst by the
patient over time to be one of the major avenues of change and growth through psychoanalysis
by which patients become better able to cope with the challenges of life. To him, the
psychoanalytic relationship serves two main functions for patients. The first is helping one
human being develop certain psychological capacities that are lacking or deficient in the
beginning of the relationship that will enable them to live with their emotions, perhaps discover
their emotions, maybe in some cases for the first time, in ways that will be morefirst of all less
miserable, and hopefully more fulfilling, interesting, gratifying, bearable, later adding an
increased capacity to live with feeling and thoughts as they arise in relationship to other people
and relationship with ones own experience. The second is less related to building functions,
and Adam was unique among participants in stating that some patients already come in to
analysis with these functions, or develop them sufficiently through analysis, and for those
patients the goal is more about making the unconscious conscious through a gradual illumination
and deconstruction of the deeply rooted and problematic effects of early relational experience
(unconscious phantasy).
Like Jeff, Steve also used the term alpha-function to represent the capacities being
developed within the patients psyche, and he also thinks of it as a transfer of alpha-function
from analyst to patient. Steve emphasized a particular role of this function in the burgeoning
mental health of his patients, which is the ability to withdraw your projections from the world,
and think about them yourself. Both Steve and Jeff talked about the growth in alpha-function as
correlating with the growth in ones ability to tolerate things internally so that they dont need to
be projected out.
Kathleen also talked about the increased ability to tolerate things internally, accepting
things about yourself that you didnt want to knowthat you have either denied, repressed, split
off, projected out. For Kathleen, this increased ability comes through the internalization of
safety from the providing environment of the analytic relationship. She says, Youre just not
gonna go there if you feel judged, you feel criticized, you feel hit over the head with
interpretation. So that comes first, really, is providing an environment of safety, and from there
they can come to internalize the curiosity, and internalize the lack of judgment, thats a
modification of a harsh superego, which is very hard to do. Adam also talked about the
internalization of a certain freedom or bravery that derives from the quality of the relationship,

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which is experienced as grounding, and as ultimately real and specific and loving and caring by
both parties, and thats the platform for the patient, with the analyst, to start taking chances and
doing things that theyve been too afraid to do all their lives, especially internally. That ability,
and that feeling like someones got their back can then begin to stay with them outside of the
consulting room and end up having external manifestations relationally.
Other terms that were used by participants to describe the functions being developed
within the patient were thinking and dreaming. Jeff makes heavy use of the term alphafunction, but also talked about the growth of the patients thinking function, a term which for
Jeff, following Bion, means the creative response to the moment; thinking and feeling
reflexively. Trudy also uses the term thinking to describe the main ability being developed in
the patient, and she defines the thinking function as the capacity to think symbolically about
emotional experience. She emphasizes that it is not just mental and the ability to mentalize, but
that it is the growth in ones ability to process affect.
Thinking is a function that both Steve and Kathleen attempt to actively promote and
develop in their patients. Steve finds it important to remember that thinking is a creative act,
and draws heavily from Bions idea that real thinking comes into existence to cope with
thoughts. He is constantly attending to the quality of his patients thinking, differentiating
between rumination or what Betty Joseph talked about as chuntering, and real thinking, which
is better described as suffering thoughts. Steve will sometimes say to a patient, you think
youre thinking, youre not thinking. Kathleen also attends to this difference, which she thinks
of as the difference between K and K. She described a patient who was not thinking, who had
become stuck in a certain way of seeing things, and her way of taking action in these situations is
to draw attention to it for the patient by saying something like, youre reiterating, or you seem
stuck there. Five participants mentioned that they pay attention for ways that patients might be
actively suppressing their own thinking function, sometimes termed an attack on linking,
sometimes termed an act of not-thinking.
Two participants spoke to the development of the patients dreaming function. Carol
expressed, I believe the capacity to dream is a major marker of mental health. But of course,
what do we mean by dreaming? Here I follow Ogden pretty much, that dreaming is the capacity
to process our lived emotional experience. Although Adam doesnt tend to use the term
dreaming much himself to describe this function, he explained that he considers what authors
such as Grotstein, Ogden and Ferro seem to be referring to as dreaming to be a necessary
foundation for what I think of as a good human life, and I think people who cantare living
quite impoverished if not miserable lives. Adam would include within the concept of the
dreaming function the ability to work creativity with whatever is coming up for you and
metabolize psychic pain. He would also include in this the ability to free associate, mentioning
what Christopher Bollas has written on the subject. Adam finds Bions concept of dreaming
very compatible with what I think Freud was talking about when he talked about free
associationIts making links, its being able to relax, psychically, allowing your mind to
wander. So, I think that theres a both a constructive dimension to itmaking linksand I think
theres also a deconstructive element to it, when you relax links or bonds dissolve and loosen up.
The meaning of analysisand now I sound like a teacher or something, but the meaning of
analysis in Greek is loosen. So the real translation of psychoanalysis from Greek would be
loosening your soul. So I think free association is a loosening up of what I normally think are
connections between my beliefs or my feelings. So thats part of dreaming too.

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Greg talked about the process of internalization in a different way than the other
participants, making use of the container-contained model: over time the patient will have
internalized their [sic] own version of container-contained. So, they have you in them as analyst
and they have themselves as patient. They have you as a mother, father, brother, sister, partner,
whatever. For Greg, what is also internalized is the quality of the linking relationships between
those different internal objects, characterized by permeability, respect, generativity. In Gregs
view, the function being internalized is the linking function, and you know, the model of linking
is a model about generativity. For Greg, what develops in the patient are creative, lively, and
mutually beneficial linking relationships between different parts of the psyche, allowing the socalled civilized parts of the mind to be in contact with the uncivilized parts. So now weve got
like a group therapy situation, but its just one person. And can all of these different aspects,
primitive aspects, instinctual aspects, be in relation to more, say, mature aspects in terms of ego
function, and so on. And its like, you can just range all over the place. What develops in the
patient is the freedom to take multiple points of view and the ability to tolerate uncertainty, and
actually go in that direction, or go in a direction of fear or anxiety with the feeling of faith that
theres truth there that will actually nourish and benefit you.
Kathleen also spoke to that kind of internalized freedom: nothing is verboten, and Jeff
also talked about the importance that the patient develop the freedom to take multiple points of
view, explaining that having different lenses and different angles, more becomes available to
you in terms of what you can do with any given situation. He considers growth in the patient to
correspond with an increased ability to process experience more generatively, with less
certainty, more maturity, more multiple vertices, and including all the complications of knowing
that other people exist separate from you, et cetera.
Richard mentioned two other functions that he considers important markers of psychic
growth through the analytic process, which is the patients ability to play with ideas, and the
patients ability to re-establish contact with the sense of well-being that they were born with.
6. Different ways of thinking about psychosis. Another major theme emerged around
the topic of psychosis and psychotic process, and whether there is a psychotic part in everyones
mind. Most participants described psychotic processes as types of defenses against painful
experience. But there was a great amount of variety in terms of how psychotic processes were
defined and described, and how their conceptualization plays a role in each analysts clinical
thinking. Six of the eight participants found it useful to consider there to be a psychotic part of
the personality in everyone, and five of those six understood that part of the mind as a system
that operates to carry out defensive functions.
For Kathleen, Bions differentiation between the psychotic and non-psychotic parts of the
personality is the first thing that came to mind for her when asked generally about which of
Bions ideas have impacted her work. That really is like bedrock for me, because its clear that
everybody has both, that a psychotic person knows how to get dressed in the morning, and a
mostly non-psychotic person has psychotic pockets. And so its really helped me clinically to not
over-value rationality, ego functioning, because that can lead you to ignore or overlook or not be
sensitized to the psychotic pockets in people. Clinically, it has given her a way to notice and
appreciate anything thats irrational, and any place in the patients mind that doesnt work the
same. Learning to be sensitive to psychotic pockets has helped Kathleen to get curious when
she notices illogical thinking rather than jumping to correct the patient: I kind I get excited
when people are irrational, because I know that thats a signpost to something.

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Although irrational thinking may be the most obvious sign she is in the presence of
psychotic thinking, she thinks of the psychotic part of the personality as against dependency,
against vulnerability, against growth, and psychotic process as anti-growth, anti-thinking, antilove, anti-relational, all of that. Certainly its irrational. She added that she thinks of psychotic
process as very rigid, and includes in her definition extreme and rigid uses of projection. She also
includes certain types of experiences sometimes described as leaking and melting and
dissolving, as well as experiences of merger, symbiosis, or the inability to see the other as
separate from the self. She added that psychotic process is also the extremes of K, of a
tremendous amount of denial or not thinking. But Kathleen draws more upon the idea of minus
K when it comes to noticing patients stuckness or areas where there is a refusal or inability to
think differently or learn.
Of all the participants, Kathleens definition of psychotic process was the most broad and
inclusive. Trudy focused her definition of psychotic thinking, whether occurring in herself or the
patient, as resulting from the inability to tolerate some aspect of psychic reality. And what you
see in the face of that are all kinds of thingsconcreteness, omnipotence, splitting, projection,
expulsiona numbing sense of reality, where you just sort of cant get underneath anything, and
youre just sort of stuck in the external and the realThose to me would be indications that Im
in the company of psychotic thinking, of someone whose thinking is psychotic, or mine is
psychotic, at that moment. She talked about how it can happen to her as the therapist through
the process of projective identification: your mind is taken over. And you can only see things in
the way that the patient at that moment is talking about them. Theres no other way. For Trudy,
it is the psychotic part of the personality that performs these defenses.
Richard was unique
among the participants in his view of the psychotic part as normal and potentially quite healthy.
He spoke about experiences that have the quality of merger and union, which can become active
when falling in love, and pre-ego states that are an essential part of the infants experience. For
Richard, psychotic experience is only pathological if accompanied by a sense of certainty. He
also played with the idea that psychosis is only pathological to the outside observer who is
unable to understand the mind of the psychotic: thats been my experience clinically, that once I
understand, or the two of us really understand what the person is going through, then the
psychosis kind of evaporates. Both Richard and Kathleen include in their definitions of
psychotic those types of unbounded experiences where the ego is no longer maintaining a
separation between inside and outside, or self and other. Gregs definition of psychosis addresses
this, with the help of Winnicott, who in Gregs words, says that the actual moment of psychosis
is so brief, its like a microsecond, and instantly defenses show up to protect from that
catastrophic anxiety. And then its thosethats what we call psychosis, is really a set of
defenses. The implication is that if those boundless or ego-less states were not experienced as
terrifying, the defenses would not need to form. The defenses take form in response to a
moment of uncontained fear, anxiety, danger and then continue to arise in that persons life
whenever something in their experience signals a similar lack of safety. As the alpha-function
interprets reality, the psychotic part of the personality can attack the alpha-function in an attempt
to attack reality. This way of seeing it fits with Carols definition of psychotic process as an
attack on the mind that dares bring you reality.
To Steve, psychotic processes are fixed delusions and hallucinations. Yeah. But in more
Bionian terms, or Kleinian terms, psychotic process are mental capacities built on projection as
the mode of operationso the heart of psychotic process I think is excessive, forceful projective
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virulence that there is no longer the feeling of being contained by your mind and skin. Steve
encountered this level of psychosis a great deal earlier in his career when he worked with
schizophrenic patients, but still encounters it occasionally when doing forensic work
interviewing inmates. When it comes to his analytic practice, the idea of the psychotic part of the
personality doesnt have much of an influence on his thinking. He does, however, find it
extremely useful to pay attention to what patients cant tolerate internally or process on their own
and thus need to externalize or project into the other for help, and he attributes this to Bions
influence on his thinking.
Jeff resonates with the British view of the psychotic core, the idea that every human has
some limit as to what they can handle through internal processingcalled alpha-function by the
way. For Jeff, this is that part of self that deals with O through evacuation. Jeff then went into
describing all the many ways people are capable of evacuating, the most common being
projection of something thats internal into something thats external. This also suggests a very
broad and inclusive conceptualization of psychotic process: everybody does it. The only
question is how much you do it. And the more you do it, or the more you do it differently than
everybody else, the crazier you look to everybody else. Jeff finds this way of thinking
extremely useful in his work, and he and Steve both consider helping patients withdraw their
projections to their proper place inside their psyches a major component of the work of
psychoanalysis. Jeff uses a real estate metaphor with one of his patients: I say its like,
location, location, location. So analysis tries to return things to their proper location.
Adam was unique among the participants in taking issue with the use of the word
psychotic in Kleinian, and by extension Bionian language. He does not think it is appropriate to
say there is a psychotic level of mental functioning in everyone, and considers psychosis a kind
of a dysfunction, a form of psychopathology, a very serious form of psychopathology, that
unfortunately was conflated with what I would call primary process. I dont think theyre the
same thing. Adam prefers to reserve the word psychosis for a kind of disaster where
secondary process, consciousness, some people call it the ego, is overwhelmed, overrun by
internal stimulimental painand sort of knocked out of commission. Adam says he has
encountered this with patients but doesnt assume it happens in every patient. I assume that
patients have primary process, plenty of unconscious things going on, I just dont use the word
psychotic to describe that part of the mind.
7. The role of truth in clinical practice. The concept of truth was a theme that emerged
at different points across the interviews, not limited to participants answers to the interview
question about truth. Locating emotional truth, as distinguished from absolute truth, is
considered by most participants to be a core activity of the psychoanalytic process.
To Carol, truth is essential. There is a truth about what is happening, in the
intersubjective unconscious relationship, but this doesnt mean that there is a truth with a capital
T, as a permanently installed insight. Truth like everything else is transitive, transient, like the
transference should be transient. You dont want to leave your patients forever in a transference
with you, but in a changing possible truthful relationship with you. And to connect with your
patient about something truthful in the moment or in a particular series of sessions is
exceptionally valuable, but as soon as it has been had, it should not become ossified. Bion is very
definite of how we can ossify beliefs, we find them in the depressive position so relieving:
Wow, we havent known where the hell were going, we have found ourselves, wow! This is it.
We are so relieved when we find it, that we can become a little calcified and not open to the next

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iteration where we need to fall apart again, back into the state of unknowing, or the Ps D
uncertainty, and be open for another possible truthful encounter. That I find really wonderful
thinking. Harder to practice for many of us, but it is a discipline to keep practicing it.
Carol also spoke about the danger that certain truths can be felt to present to patients who
have never experienced a safe enough container to be able to tolerate, and who resist
experiencing the truth of their emotions for fear of more psychosis. In her experience guilt and
shame are the unbearables, and the hardest to allow in and work with and integrate in some
way. Greg also spoke about unbearable truth that a person is having difficulty linking with and
actually being with, and patients who will do anything they can to protect themselves from
experiencing that truth. Paradoxically, maybe contact with that truth will allow them to integrate,
become a fuller person, and in Bions terms, evolve. But they feel that contact with that is gonna
be a disaster. Greg agrees with Bion that without truth the personality withers. This is where
what we call psychopathology has its origins. He also agrees that the personality thrives on
truth, and can repair itself with truth.
Greg feels that truth is absolutely central to any theoretical and technical approach to
who would use Bions ideas. And I feel like the truth is always emotional truth. Greg finds less
clinical relevance in Bions concept of Absolute Truth. Is there an absolute truth? I mean
personally I think yeah, there is. There is something about reality that is definitely reality. Will I
ever get to a point where I can actually appreciate it and know it? I dont know. Id like to, I
think that would be really amazing. But in terms of subjective emotional truth, I think thats what
we follow moment to moment with our patients and within ourselves. And its allowing the
experience of whatever emotional truth that is, even if it turns out that it was like, mistaken, or it
wasnt real, but it feels true. And being able to welcome that into a relational context where it can
be safely experienced and, maybe eventually thought about and maybe eventually understood.
But the experiencing isthat has to happen. Thats fundamental. Thats basic.
Steve also assumes there is such a thing as absolute truth, but its probably on the
elemental level or on the atomic level. That would be material truth. Everything else that we call
truth I think is relative. But when it comes to the work, what matters to Steve is emotional truth,
and he sees his role as the therapist as being receptive to emotional truth in a way that allows
the patient to begin to discover their own emotional truth. So I think theres kind of a need for a
receptivity before a patient can be truthful with their own reality. Using the analogy of an
electrical circuit, the current of the emotional truth goes from patient to therapist, and the
therapist receives it and can give something backthis is what Bion calls alpha-function right?
That circuit is necessary in order for there to be a flow of emotional truth. And thats dependent
upon the therapists receptivity. And a lot of people come in and theyre just shorted out, theyre
just shorted out, because they havent had anyone ready to receive their emotions.
Kathleen feels that philosophically there is not one truth. She doubts whether there is
such a thing as objective truth, and also doubts whether there is even a way to determine
subjective truth. She does not believe in theoretical truth when it comes to psychoanalysis,
finding that there are many different ways of looking at and speaking about the same thing. As
far as absolute truth, Kathleen explained, I dont think of truth with a capital T. But I do think
theres authentic experience. So emotional truth I think of as more like authentic experience.
This is your emotional truth, meaning this is your authentic emotional experience, if nobody else
can see it it doesnt matter, this is your emotional truth, now, at this moment. Thats why it
doesnt have a capital t because it moves all the time. She doesnt find any traction with words
like Godhead, but speaks to a purity of experience and it feels like the truth at that moment.

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But even if something feels true to her and the patient, it always remains in the realm of
hypothesis.
Trudy did not speculate on whether there is such a thing as absolute truth, although she
has been playing lately with the question of is reality fundamentally random? And is it only
through our minds that it seems to have any order or meaning? When it comes to the work of
psychoanalysis, however, it is all about emotional truth: you know it when you experience it.
Common sense: all your senses working, in a sense, can help you, can help you reachand its
the emotional truth at a given momentits never absolute, once and for all. Speaking further
about emotional truth, its not only that its true, but it feels, it somehow feels so right. And by
that I mean, its not just, yes, its like, ohhh! And you can get it looking at a wonderful
painting, you get that kind of a feeling, or a performance, or hearing a piece of music.
In Richards view, reality is fundamentally chaotic, so everything that is manmade,
including all of psychoanalytic theory, in an attempt to bring order to chaos. He likes the idea,
seen in Bions later writing as well as the ideas of Krishnamurti that thinking interferes with
truth, that everything that goes through our mind is subject to distortion, although Richard
doesnt think that this is true for an infant: they dont have enough left brain language, logical
asymmetrical thinking to allow them to do that. So they just are tuned in to perception and
emotional truth. Relative to the rest of the participants, Richard seemed less determined to draw
a distinction between absolute truth and emotional truth. He accepts the concept of absolute
truth, but in the context of the uncertainty principle. Everythings paradoxical. But he went on
to express that the word absolute is not a good one for this conceptualization of truth because
its only absolute in the sense that it preexists the thinker. Thats all, and there are many possible
of these a priori truths that are there. Richard draws upon Keats attitude of negative capability
as the technique for opening up to a priori knowledge, which would be no different than opening
up to a priori emotional truth. I think this idea of emotional truth is not the emotional truth, its
the many emotional truths that are in any given session that happen. Referring to the many
different selves or internal objects within, each with their own truth, Richard considers himself
a privileged listener who gets to be invited in to hear each different persons story.
One of the most useful Bionian concepts for Richard in his work has been the idea of the
K link and the drive for truth, which Bion considered as fundamental to the energy of the
relational psyche as love and hate. Richard believes that the K instinct actually begins in utero,
that L develops shortly after birth, and that H appears last, once attachments have formed and
disappointments have been experienced. This is clinically relevant for Richard because he
considers a major aspect of the work to be helping the patient reconnect with their K instinct,
which to him is what drives us to learn, to play, and to explore, and is part of the life instinct, the
dialectical opposite being fear. Like Bion, Richard thinks K is fueled by relationships, so his
view of the clinical process is one that encourages the development of the patients K instinct
through curiosity, exploration and play. Richard also considers curiosity the central instinct of
the analyst.
Despite the importance of the drive to know and learn from experience, Richard finds
that Bion doesnt privilege the idea of having to make sense of it. If it does make sense, its a
temporary condition, its going to move on to something else. Part of why Bions perspective
resonated so much with Jeff is that Jeff always had the inkling that life wasnt about making
sense of things. It was about getting it. And theyre not the same thing. For Jeff, the work of
psychoanalysis is not about aiming at the truth, as if you could do such a thing, but its about
the capacity to keep searchingto keep working the material in a way that increasingly seems to

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approximateseems to be useful for thinking about the situation. Jeff does find it useful to
draw the distinction between Truth with a capital T, and little t truth. Capital T Truth is
whatever exists whether were paying attention to it or not, whether were there or not. And what
it is I have no idea. But I presume such a thing exists. Little t truth is your current truth,
affectively, cognitively, your experiential truth, which is not permanent, it changes, and has
nothing to do with reality. Truth with a capital T is something that we cant possibly know:
were not equipped for it, weve got five bodily little senses thatI cant even perceive half of
what my cat perceives. Truth with a little t is interpretation, the result of alpha-function, and
shouldnt be confused with arriving at the truth. Thats something that Bion I believe
abandoned. Now you can arrive at truth about whether your airplane will fly or not, but probably
not about whats in your patients mind. Jeff related an anecdote that Grotstein used to tell
about an experience in his analysis with Bion: one time Bion gave this very lengthy
interpretation about my unconscious anxiety that was beautifully Kleinian, then he followed it up
with a very Bionian remark which was, of course Dr. Grotstein, well never really know what
you are anxious about. Jeff commented that he likes the humility in that approach. I find it
very relieving not to have to be the owner of truth.
Like Jeff, Adam also noticed that Bion seemed at a certain point to abandon the primacy
he used to place on the search for truth in analysis. I get the feeling later that hes not so much
interested in prioritizing getting to the truth but in helping the mind develop, be able to think at
all and feel and use emotional experience. So that seems like an important shift in psychoanalysis
more broadly that he had a lot to do with. Adam assumes that there probably is such a thing as
truth but I think most of the time its beyond the grasp of human apprehension. I think there are
some things that seem awfully true to me, but what do I know? As far as absolute truth, and he
doesnt think psychoanalysis has a lot to do with it or say about it, and that the type of truth that
analysis should be focused on is not the truth of the cosmos but the truth of the internal world, a
particular aspect of the internal world, which is what I keep calling unconscious phantasy,
which in my view is the consequence of usually early relational experience. For Adam,
psychoanalysis is more a method than a system of knowledge, and he feels it is not its place to
theorize about anything universal or biological such as archetypes or the psychical apparatus or
even human development.
8. Relative usefulness of Bions concepts and models. The largest theme to emerge
from the interviews was commentary on the relative clinical usefulness of Bions concepts and
models. Projective identification, containment, and being without memory and desire were all
found to have widespread and significant clinical applications, the concept of O showed a
moderate amount of clinical usefulness, while the concepts of beta-elements, Ps D, faith, and
the Grid showed less clinical usefulness. The concept of alpha-function is an extremely
important concept to the majority of the participants, but as seen in Theme 5, it is not a concept
that is contained within that term alone, and many participants used other language to speak
about that function.
8A. Projective identification as communication. All eight participants use Bions
concept of projective identification as communication as a way of thinking about what goes on in
their work. Richard did not speak about it much except to suggest that it may be the mechanism
behind what he describes as his resonance with the patient, by which he receives non-verbal
and body-based information about their sense of well-being at a very basic, core level. Kathleen
did not use the words projective identification in the interview, but she did at one point say

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about her patients, the only way you know something is because theyve let you know it.
Kathleen also spoke at length about the importance of the concept of containment in her view of
the work, and the importance of being able to pick up and experience for herself the deep anxiety
of her patients.
The rest of the participants spoke directly to the important role that the concept of
realistic/normal/interpersonal/communicative projective identification has in their understanding
of and approach to the work. When asked which Bionian concepts most inform his work,
Adams first response was, any time I think about, so-to-speakI dont like talking this way, I
dont like thinking this way too, but its just for shorthand, whatquote, what the patient is
doing to me, unquote, Im thinking about Bion, one way or another, sometimes explicitly,
sometimes its implicit, but I think that Bion is sort of the author of that point of view in
psychoanalysis. Realistic projective identification. So thats one way that I frequently think about
Bion. Later Adam returned to the importance of this concept for him, speaking about his
appreciation of the pervasiveness and power and depth of projectivewhat he calls realistic
projective identificationinterpersonal projective identification, in everyday life, in parent-child
relationships and in analysis. And I think its helped me try to tune in to and respect that
dimension of relatedness or lack thereof, in ways that I dont think I would haveI dont know
how I would have thought those things without Bion. Adam finds this concept useful not only
for thinking about patients who might be trying to get a feeling into me they cant cope with
alone, but longer, larger, more elaborate kinds of enactments, of the way that certain unconscious
phantasies get repeated in peoples lives in this uncanny way, and can draw any number of
people in many different spheres of life into certain kinds of dynamics very, very powerfully and
then wonder why this keeps happening to me. Thats a pretty interesting phenomenon, I think,
and I dont think I could of made heads or tails of it without Bion.
Greg finds the relational model of projective identification as a profound means of
communication really, really useful and really interesting. He considers projective
identification, and even the evacuative beta screen (a concept he also finds helpful in his work),
to be really about anxiety and desperation, really wanting it to be understood by another person,
or fearing some imagined toxicity and trying to put it in another person, but I think the ultimate
wish is that it becomes kind of part of the K system: knowledge, curiosity, and never ending
getting to know, so that can be transformed into something that can be thought, dreamt about,
whatever. But first it has to be taken in. Greg pays a lot of attention to his own internal
experience, state of mind, emotions, ideas, shifts and transitions as a way of tuning in to pieces
of information being communicated either from myself to me or from the patient to me, or
maybe the patient to herself. He understands the exchange of projections to happen at the level
of unconscious to unconscious communication, so he attempts to make room for the subtleties of
internal experience.
Carol reported, Bions idea of projective identification as a communication I think has
been very helpful to me, so that when Im feeling sort of dystonic feelings, body sensations and
thoughts, I oftenbut Im scrupulous about whats me and whats a projective identification. I
dont assume its always something the patient is putting into me. I always assume that theres a
coming together of vulnerabilities, that Im taking something on because its in me too.
Jeff endorsed as very influential Bions amendments to projective identification, not as
purely defensive and evacuative, as Klein would say, but as communication. That seemed
infinitely sensible. I mean my own cat projective identifiesevokes. Its what creatures do, they
evoke. Jeff talked about his role in being receptive and responding to both verbal

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communications, patients alpha constructions, as well as the deep less verbal stuff too from
the deep projective identification folks, implying that he notices some patients relying much
more heavily on projective identification than others.
For Steve, normal projective identification, leading to alpha-function, is the Bionian
concept that I use. It just seems to make so much sense. Steve feels that the demand placed
upon a mother or a father or a therapist to understand the babys experience or the patients
experience is an extreme demand, but its extremely necessary. Steves way of working
analytically is shaped around the concept that we are hard-wired to need to get our emotional
experience into another human beingThats how were built. He added, I think were
constantly hearing the cries of the primitive baby inside our patients, and were constantly
needing to receive that projection and metabolize it and give it back in some form that is
usableI think that really is the work.
Projective identification as Bion defined it is a very important concept for Trudy as well.
When we came to the subject, she said, Let me see, how I can put this about what I really
appreciate about projective identification. Well, its the contact with the intrapsychic with the
intrapsychic. The patients mind, including their unconscious mind with my mind, including my
unconscious mind. It is that meeting that I think is so amazing. Trudy explained that it took me
a long time to really truly in my bones understand projective identification. But that I consider
one of the most valuable concepts in psychoanalysis quite frankly. To illustrate its power, she
offered a clinical example in which a patient became very attacking and devaluing of the work,
evoking very difficult feelings in Trudy: I sat here just obliterated, I mean, its like the floor
inside of me just fell away, I felt my cheeks redden, I just felt horrible, really horrible, yet a part
of me knew this isnt true, this isnt true, but, I was overwhelmed by that experience.
Eventually Trudy was able to pull back from herself in what she termed an act of retrospection,
and look at how she was feeling, at which point she was able to realize, boy, this must be
something like what she feels.
8B. Containment and the mother-infant analogy. All eight participants spoke in one
way or another about what they see as their role in intuiting or receiving the aspects of the
patients experience that they are unable to tolerate, manage, or process on their own, and
helping to render those aspects usable or thinkable for the patient. Five of the participants
mentioned the container-contained model when asked open-endedly about which Bionian ideas
have impacted their thinking, and when asked specifically whether they draw upon the concept
of containment in conceptualizing their role as analysts, all eight spoke to different aspects of
what containment means to them, and how it either shapes or describes what they do.
All eight of the participants also found the analogy Bion drew between the mother-infant
dyad and the analyst-patient dyad to be a helpful one that informs how they understand their role
with their patients. This analogy helps Adam stay grounded in what I think is the right
framework to do psychoanalysis, since it highlights the level of responsibility the analyst has
for the nurturance of the patient, the importance of a caring attitude, and an absolute necessity
of a kind ofactually a kind of loveand I think the analystfor an analysis to work the
analyst actually has to love the patient. Jeff also mentioned the mother-infant model, in which
the primitive mind is given external help to process its experience, as an excellent model for
what he does in his office all day long, which is helping that which cant be thought about be
thought about. Steve and Kathleen both made mention of Bions use of the concept of the crying
infant, where the well-equipped mother does not simply empathize with or provide reassurance
for the child, but actually suffers for herself the infants cries and takes on the possibility that it is

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dying, as an analogy for experiencing for themselves the deep anxiety of their patients. This is
how Kathleen understands containment, which is a very important concept for me because I
think that thats really one of the primary jobs we have, to be the container for the patients most
primitive self, or most upset self, or most disturbing self, and to make it knowable, and then not
so frightening.
Trudy also spoke about the essential importance of experiencing for herself what it must
be like to be her patient at a deeper level. Heres whats closest to me, if I can put into words
what happens with my patients, is that I identify with them and I try to identify even though I
have a personal resistance to something thats going on in them, I nevertheless try to identify
with their experience, sort of roll around in that identification, and then step out of it. As she
explained, sometimes its forced upon me through projective identification, but when its not I
have to make that effort. Especially if its, you know, someone who had a psychotic mother, I
didnt have a psychotic mother, but there are aspects of it that are familiar to me. In explaining
her view of containment, Trudy recalled a quote by Bion that had stuck with her: In analysis,
its the analyst who changes. And I think what hes referring to is the way ones container, the
analysts container, that is, ones ability to tolerate the symbolic meaning of experience, is what
really grows, what really develops. And to the extent that that happens, I think ones ability
personally, my ability to sort of take in projections and transform them has increased, but you
sure need that container that enables you to tolerate those projections, because sometimes they
are, they feel life threatening. They can be really violent. She added that I think each patient
has worked on my container in different ways.
For Carol, there are multiple aspects to the process of containment. The first is
permeability, which requires overcoming the fear of letting these terrible states of being and
thinking inand having your own analyst, your own consultant, your own group is enormously
helpful for that. The second is thinking about what has been taken in, and being patient enough
to not think you have to get back with an interpretation quickly. The third aspect of
containment concerns how to speak from what you think you have learned by that. And its
always challenging, and its so much a dyadic thing, what two people can say together. Carol
does feel that the end of containment is a response that brings the patient from Ps to D. In a
transient way. Transitive wayits not a forever insight. Although we can get quite excited
about a new insight and its important to enjoy it, and what I love is when weve had this kind of
containment where a patient says, Oh wow. Absolutely right!and when they start with the
external world links and the genetic links you know youve hit gold dust. But thats good, for a
week or two, and then whats next?
Carol also mentioned that the container-contained model has been very helpful to her as a
way of thinking about all that gets exchanged in both directions between her and her patients,
and the ways that each member of the dyad can function or malfunction as a container. She
provided an example of a patient who was able to correct her when she malfunctioned, and then
explained how with other patients, we have to do it implicitly: we see that we jammed the
process up, or the patient has diverted somewhere, or we hear in the derivative how we messed
up. She then added the importance of thinking about how her patients can function as distorted
containers for the things that go on in the sessions and in their lives. Related to this, Steve
expressed his current interest in Duncan Cartwrights (2010) concept of the pseudo-container,
that is to say a container that is constructed by the individual of their own omnipotent design
because the actual container that they were given as children was flawedSometimes theres
such a pseudo-container that theyve brought with them in the room that when you speak to

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them, you have to kind of get through that shield they have constructed against actual contact,
while seeming to participate in psychotherapy.
One of the most helpful Bionian ideas for Adam has been the importance of trying to
understand, digest, metabolize, and at some point make use of what the patient is doingrender
it thinkable eventually for the patientin a way that is going to be sensitive and appropriate to
where that patient is at that time, so I dont want to end up firing back at the patient something
that they were showing me, possibly that they cant deal withif Im not sensitive to that, if Im
in a hurry or if Im not in touch or out of tune with the patient then I can actually make things
quite a bit worse, trying to work with what I think the patient is communicating in that way.
Like Carol, Adam is very aware of how delicate this process can be, and also thinks about the
ways it can go wrong, or the ways that projective identification can happen in reverse. When
later asked directly about the concept of containment, Adam thinks about it as being called upon
to provide a container for something that the patient cant cope withand I often need help
dealing with a patient, because of whats stirred up with me so that I might turn to a supervisor or
a colleague or my own analyst for containment. Adam has also come to appreciate a certain
phenomenological component to containment: I think theres a certain quality of experience that
you have when something is being containedwhen something that has not been contained is
finally adequately contained, even in an hour, or in treatment, theres a shift that Ive come to
recognize or identify as containment, thats the strongest evidence to me that containment has
occurred.
On the subject of containment, seven of the eight participants brought up Winnicotts
concept of holding. Jeff, Steve and Kathleen all spoke to ways that containment is not about
holding and is in fact very different, Richard and Carol view the concepts as different but
overlapping and draw upon them both in conceptualizing their role with their patients, and Adam
and Greg tend to extend their concept of containment to include holding. Gregs view of
containment is that its like background. To help describe it he used a visual metaphor from a
patients dream: A long time ago a patient had a dream where shes looking in a bowl of soup
and someone in the dream said dont look at whats floating in the soup, look at the broth, look
at the transparent thing thats holding everything up. Thats a veryto me a very interesting,
very beautiful rendering of aspects of containment. That its a surround. Its like what Winnicott
talked about as an environment. And once you take a patient into treatment, youre the container.
Just from day one. You dont get weekends off. Theyre with you, they show up in your
thoughts. And you know that theyre thinking about you. Similar to Carol and Adams
descriptions of the multiple aspects of containment, Greg explained that containment involves
receiving, holding, transforming and returning, at some point, if it feels right. Sometimes we
hold things for a long time. Greg added that containment is also a state of mind. When Bion
talks about the ultimate conditions for the container, its the toleration of uncertainty against a
background of infinity. So take that on as your mantra.
Jeff emphasized that to him, containment is not a holding environment, but an active
process, not a background process. He talked about how patients come in to analysis with
highly alphabetized histories, often poorly alphabetized, but often leave with a very different
history than when they began thanks to a very active and mutual exchange of interpretation.
Whats analysis? he asks, you bring yourself to a new container. And that new container
operates on you differently than the old container. And it maybe operates on some of it that
youve never presented successfully to a container. So its an interactive process.

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Steve also distinguished containment from holding, and referred to a paper he saw
presented by Grotstein: Grotstein, you know, because he was in analysis with Bion he feels like
he can speak with authority, but he says for Bion containment is the experience that you have
inside the tank, when a tank shell hits itIts dealing with crisis, being the recipient of crisis.
Were not talking about Winnicotts baby being held nicely in the lap of the mother. For Bion
containment iscan be on that level. Its not necessarily nice or comfortable.
8C. Alpha-function. All eight participants spoke in one way or another about the role of
psychoanalysis in helping patients develop their capacity to use, process, think creatively about,
or learn from their ongoing emotional experience, but only two made frequent use of the term
alpha-function in discussing how they think about the work or about their patients. Many
participants used other terms like thinking, processing, or metabolizing to describe a similar
function, so it was found that while the concept represented by the term alpha-function is
essential to the majority of the participants view of the aim of psychoanalysis (see Theme 5), the
term alpha-function itself is not often used in their clinical thinking.
Alpha-function is a concept that Jeff finds useful in talking and thinking about how
patients draw meaning from their emotional experience. He provided a number of examples of
patients with low-quality alpha-function, whose interpretation of reality gets them into
problematic situations and causes them great suffering. His view of alpha-function is broad, and
includes any kind of meaning-making, even if it is primitive. He explained that splitting
processes as well as delusions are both the consequence of low quality alpha-function, since in
both cases reality has been interpreted in an unhelpful way. He also provided the example of the
castration complex: The castration complex is bad alpha-function. You can get castration
complex without a castrating father, because youve got this little mind that doesnt really know
sh.., youre 5 years old. In Jeffs view of the work, alpha function is not a cure its just a
beginning. So another way of saying what were doing is helping people further their alpha
function.
Steve prefers the model of beta-elements being transformed into alpha-elements over the
language of the container-contained model. He uses the concept to represent the process by
which projective identifications become transformed in his reverie and returned to the patient in
a way they can more easily bear to work with. Both Jeff and Steve also talked about their own
dream-work alpha as a lively and creative source of information, and about the importance of
maintaining permeability in their own contact barrier between consciousness and
unconsciousness. Greg and Richard spoke to this as well, but not with the language of alpha.
Greg pays close attention to his reverie for this purpose, and Richard has learned to rely on his
unconscious creative process, displaying passion for Bions concept of dreaming the patient,
saying this is another thing I love about Bion, youre dreaming the person, youre dreaming the
session, so its completely unconscious, its an unconscious activity!
8D. The concept of O. Five of the participants found O to be a clinically useful concept.
The eight analysts varied in terms of what O meant to each of them, and what kinds of clinical
applications it can have. Five of the participants mentioned that O as a spiritual or cosmic idea
did not have meaning or practicality for them, but all of them did report having their own version
of O.
For Carol, attempting to find the O of the sessions is a way of describing something real
for her in her approach to the work. She described it as tuning in to what Bion called the
infrared spectrum. Tuning in to what is not the obvious content, not the obvious linkbut the
emanation of affects, flavorsthe penumbra around the selected fact. Beyond that, the idea of

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O as infinity, or O in any spiritual, cosmological, or philosophical sense remains in the realm

of fun ideas without clinical applications. But Carol did add that I do however everyday in my
own consciousness find myself with these moments of you know, something that no one has
articulated well. That you can call O, of just being aware of the mystery of being alive at all. I
would put it that way. That is a daily experience for me, but I dont think about it clinically, use
it clinically. But it is part of me, so who knows what my patients pick up?
Kathleen said, I have a lot of trouble with O. Im not a real spiritual person, I just dont
get O. But she went on to explain that she does have her own practical version of the concept of
O, which sounded in some ways similar to Carols, in that she also asks herself, what is the O of
the session? And its kind of like a selected fact, or the selected theme, which isnt really what
Bion means by O, but it helps methis is my version. For Kathleen, listening for the O of the
session is a way of trying to fathom or intuit something thats very important thats going on
thats actually kind of creating this shape, but unseenand it could be something that hasnt
been said, it could be that this is our first time after vacation, it could be they just had a dream
but then they went away from it and the whole session is going away from the dreamit could
be anything. But, its a misuse of Bion I know that.
Kathleen encountered difficulty in attempting to talk about O in the way she thought Bion
meant it, and Trudy encountered difficulty as well, saying that she probably has her own version
of O, but its not something she finds easy to talk about. She was clear that O is about being
rather than knowing, and the transformation from knowing to being. She explained also that her
understanding of Bion is from O, in that it is experiential and intuitive and not about knowing
the concepts. In attempting to talk further about O she began to explain how emotional truth was
involved, but then cut herself off and said, But see I actually dont like this discussion, I find it a
little too abstruse, in many ways. Im not saying lets stop it, its just my own feeling about Bion.
Its that kind of discussion that puts me off actually.
Steve was more interested than any of the other participants in speculating about the
Godhead and Ultimate Reality: So what is this Ultimate Reality? What does it consist of? Is it
possible for the human mind to experience that? Certainly not on the level of neocortical
thinking. It may be possible for the human mind to experience that with ecstatic states or
psychedelics or trance states or other deep meditative spiritual practices. But Im interested in
looking at what the psychoanalytic discourse can open up between two people, and Im also
interested in admitting its limitations, in terms of O, that its a way of looking atits a way of
theoretically conceptualizing it, of concretizing something, but as soon as we do that, we begin to
loose the essence of what It is. Kind of like, if we have too much memory or too much desire
about what Bion has written about O, then we lose the experience entirely. Steve reported
having his own personal version of O from his meditative practices, but doesnt think about O
much in the therapy hour, but I think its always at the gate. And probably with every case that
Im treating I could probably locate the patients relationship to O in some way. I mean I think
its kind of like talking about a patients relationship to their own psychic chaos, or fear of the
formlessness, or of falling into an endless boundless space.But I think Bion meant it as
something actually quite different, something kind of coming at you from infinity.
Steve stated that astrophysics is probably better suited for dealing with O than
psychoanalysis, and Adam expressed his feeling that philosophers, physicists and artists have
more interesting things to say about that whole domain than psychoanalysts, and that when
psychoanalysts start talking about it in a kind of knowing, mystical way it makes me wanna
throw up. Like most of the participants, Adam doesnt assume he understands what Bion means

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by O, but he does think that the concept of infinity is a useful one for the purposes of
psychoanalysis, specifically the infinity of the other person, which becomes an internal infinity.
Originally for the human baby I think its the infinity of the adults that are responsible for his or
her care, and then later, largely as a consequence of those relationships, the infinity is something
inside that we can never know once and for all that were always living with and working with
hopefullySo if you just add the letters t, h, e, r to O, just say its the other, otherness, other
person, other inside of me, Im down with that. Adam describes this as a narrower kind of
infinity that is really about the infinite potential interpretations of what happened between me
and other people originally, and now what happens between different parts of my mind. So for
Adam, O is a way of describing the trauma of the patient and the trauma that all human beings
experience by virtue of being children: The residue of these early relationships leave us with
this otherness inside of us, that would be my way of thinking of O. He views it as a source of
suffering, but also a source of creativity by continuously evoking, activating, or inspiring ones
alpha-function.
For Richard, O goes hand in hand with Bions concept of thoughts without a thinker:
emotional truth that exists independently of the mind. This is a concept that guides him in his
work, keeping him oriented to the difference between actuality and subjective construction.
Jeffs use of the concept of O is similar to Richards, in that O is what happens to you prior to
making meaning out of it. Experience is not what happens to you, O is what happens to you,
experience is what you make of it, and what you make of it is limited by your capacities. And it
generates tremendous amounts of anxiety, defense, affect, what you make of something. The
idea, which he ties to Bion but admits is not only Bions idea, that we live not in what happens to
us but in our interpretation of it, has had a deep impact on Jeffs view of reality and his approach
to the work. To me its astounding. And so when Im thinking about experiences in the room,
thats kind of the angle.
Greg was unique among the participants in saying that for him, O is a state of being and a
state of mind: Its very much an experience of being in the present. Its not about desiring
anything, moving to the future. Its not about possessing anything, of moving into the past. Its
really just how to stay meaningfully engaged moment to moment. And to be open to information
arising from almost anywhere. And trusting that information. Greg takes as a given that there is
so much more to reality than we can see, and that we barely know whats happening in any
moment, but using O to label content, even if that content is infinity itself, is not of use to him
clinically. What is useful is attempting to be one with O, which for Greg means being present,
even if that means being present with the emergence of memories and desires, since they are part
of the information of the experience.
8E. Without memory, desire or understanding. Four of the eight participants reported
that they attempt to follow Bions advice to be without memory, desire or understanding in every
session to the extent that it is possible. Seven out of eight have found the message in Bions
advice valuable and helpful in their approach to the work.
Several participants found the need to first culturally and historically contextualize the
concept. Trudy views it as Bion simply attempting to show American analysts how he listens to
psychotic patients. Carol began by saying, So thats one of Bions characteristically brilliant
formulations to my mind. I think whats hard to translate is that Bion is one of those very typical
British educated minds that loves to exaggerate, uses tremendous amounts of wit, and always in
the interest of waking people up to a new possible way of being in relation to patients. She went
on to mention the furor that broke out among mainly the ego psychoanalysts, extremely

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concrete, who thought Bion meant youre supposed to forget about what your patient said
yesterday or what he dreamed last month. Adam sees it as Bion reacting to a saturation of
knowingness all around him at that time, especially in the Kleinian world, where analysts really
were way over the top in what they thought they knew about their patients mindsand I think
Bion was reacting to thatso I think Bion went as far as he could in the other direction, to say
you really need to get rid of all of your knowledge and desire, you shouldnt have an agenda, you
shouldnt think you know anything.
Steve understands Bions advice as a palate cleanser for all the sticky theory that we get
stuck to, and taking of the patients history, and reaching for the history, or making the error that
the dyed in the wool Kleinians make of the transference assumptions, what the middle school
people call the, that means me interpretations, like a patientAntonino Ferro is as capable of
making this error as other peoplethe patient loses her dog over the weekend and the analyst
says, oh, well you lost me over the weekend. No, the patient lost her f..g dog! I mean, you
know? Get off your high horseso being without memory and desire and understanding also
means being without the desire to have the patient being focused on you as the analyst all the
time. He added that its a way of actually being with the patient as if theyve newly arrived in
your officeto be with the patient and the phenomena of the hour as if it is new, as if it is fresh.
Thats where he says, if you think you know the patient that youre treating, youre treating the
wrong patient. If you think your patient is married, youre missing the aspects of the patient who
is not married. For Steve, to not understand the patient is to be with the O of the patients
material. And I think that is really useful and its also really hard to do.
Richard found Bions idea of no memory or desire compelling, because that makes
sensehe also said no memory or desire or understanding. So I didnt understand anything, its
perfect for meand my memorys not good. I do have desire. Like Steve, Richard found value
in the idea of approaching each session as a new entity in itself, and each person as a new
person, too. Thats one of the things that I was really struck by, he was writing about how
someone would come in, one day he is a father, the next day he is a child, the next day he is a
lover, the next day he is a son, so at different times we all have these different roles, thats what
hes basically saying, so to not have these pre-conceptualized interferences in how we see the
person or how we interact with the person.
Kathleen has similarly found it helpful to remember to ask herself, who is my patient
today? Who am I to my patient today? She has found Bions advice a valuable reminder to stay
open to the unknown, to new experience, or to a new development on the part of the patient,
youre just opening a new book again today. And what you knew yesterday may not apply at
all. Being without understanding is a helpful idea for Kathleen because she feels at times she
can get too certain, attached to an idea, or proud of an insight: so its like anti-hubrisand a
reminder that you have a hypothesis and you have to be able to move on to the next one.
Along the lines of anti-hubris, Carol takes humility as a lesson from Bions advice:
humility about what we know, what we know of our own minds, what we know of anyone
elses minds, and how helpful we can be, also adding humility with what psychoanalysis can
offer, with what I, being psychoanalysis can offer. Similarly, Trudy said of Bions advice, Its
humbling. Its the antithesis of arrogance, and omniscience, and omnipotence, because in order
to practice it you have to be able to tolerate uncertainty, not knowing. Yeah, so it certainly has
that kind of effect, and its easy to say, hard to do. You dont think about theory, if the patients
talking about a movie that youve seen, youve never seen that movie, and I think in that way, it
helps you really appreciate the subjectivity of your analysand. Trudy finds it helpful to

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remember to be without memory and desire right at the beginning of sessions. I remind myself
not to think about yesterdays hour, yesterdays patient. What happened to me earlier this
morning. All that sort of thing.
In Carols view of Bions advice, Bion is simply wanting to, in the whole gestalt of
everything we have to notice, observe and relate to, foreground for a moment an attitude of
openness to the unknown. And I find that repeatedly with patients, very helpful. Kathleen,
Richard and Carol all spoke to the importance of being able to hold ideas loosely, with a
willingness to let them go. Carol referred to the paper by Britton and Steiner (1994) titled
Interpretation: Selected Fact or Overvalued Idea, which she feels applies to all of us no matter
how experienced we are, that we can form an idea of what the patient is thinking about that fits
and that feels so right, and that can then start to skew all of our responses to the patient, so that
the patient is actually saying something that sort of fits but doesnt, and we are not open to
hearing that, because were busy trying to see whether the patient has taken in what we said
yesterday and blah, blah, blah. And that can blind us. And I think thats the process that Bions
idea of no memory or desire can be so helpful with. I say to myself, Im sitting with a patient,
okay, that one is clearly not enlivening the process, its clearly not getting any pay dirt, the
patient is going somewhere else. Who knows why? Let me open up my antennae again to see
what else is there or what may be a more fruitful avenue in. And this is not about whether what I
thought was right or wrong. Who cares whats right or wrong? What matters is what works.
Six of the participants reported taking Bions advice to be without desire as a reminder to
be without an agenda with the patient, whether personal or theoretical. Carol provided some
examples of agendas in the form of the desire to move the patient into the depressive position, or
the desire to have the patient overcome his hatred of his father. Its pull yourself back from the
brink of that and it takes discipline. Who could not want good things for ones patient, youve
got to be crazy. But stay with the discipline of getting curious about the hatred, of getting curious
about why this patient likes to keep herself the victim of everything and always persecuted by
everything. Kathleen provided examples of the way that personal agendas can interfere with the
work, explaining, sometimes you can think oh this person should not be in this relationship, or
I think they should go to graduate school, or I really want you to become an analyst, or you
should have your own business, or whatever it is. You see them in your future. You create their
future in your mind. And I think thats a really bad idea. And I mean it happens. And the positive
part of that is that you have hope for them, you can see the best for them, you can see them
growing and developing, but its your idea, not theirs. Ive remembered this the hard way. She
went on to provide an example of a patient who was a musical prodigy who gave up music
because her family insisted she pursue a more practical career. And I was so taken by how
music was just in her blood. When she talked about opera, it was mesmerizing. And so I was too
eager to help her get back to her music. And she left, because I had an agenda.
Jeff and Greg emphasized the aspect of Bions message that is really about being in the
present moment. Jeff stated, the problem with memory is it confuses the past with the present,
and the problem with desire is it confuses the present with the wish for the future. And youre
trying to be in the present. And in Bions spirit you dont want to be with all the theories that
youve learned. You want to be with the situation. And you want to be able to think creatively.
And the problem with memory and desire is that they limit creative thinking. For Greg, being
one with O is synonymous with being without memory or desire, which he said are really,
really important parameters to try to work with, and everyone is gonna be pulled into the past,
into the future, distracted, but can you keep coming back, you know, thats part of the discipline

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and the meditation of analysis for me right now. For Greg its about staying present, and its
also letting past experiences and future experiences come to you, but its not like youre thinking
of what youre gonna do later, but if you do, and thats part of the reverie, can you bring yourself
back, and can you appreciate that as some sort of an excursion that may have been stimulated by
something thats going on between you and the patient. But if you get lost in it or you dwell
Oh, what did the patient say yesterday? thats not necessarily a bad thing. Its so much not the
content and so much the state of mind for me.
Carol and Trudy find it an important distinction to make between memories that arise for
the analyst unbidden, as opposed to consciously holding on to or reaching for memories of the
patient in an effort to force coherence upon the present situation. If youre searching for
something in the present that will match up nicely with some observation or insight you made in
the past, you are limiting your receptivity to new information. Several times in the interview
Trudy used the phrase, no searchlight. You wont find it if you have a searchlight. Its the
paradox in Bions way of listening.
Jeff, Kathleen and Adam expressed their view that being without memory, desire and
understanding is not actually possible, but is better understood, as Jeff put it, as aspirational,
like neutrality. Kathleen holds it as a valuable reminder and a valuable ideal that in reality
cant be achieved. Adam was the one participant to offer a critique of Bions injunction. He
considers it a good aspiration, but I think its totally impossible, and I also think that its not a
good idea for me to forget about my patients. I think that I do need to keep certain things in mind
about them, I think its much more helpful if I keep what I think I understand, think I understand,
up to that point. I think theyre counting on me for that. And I think it helps me. And then at the
same time I wanna remain open to learning something new, or being wrong, every time I meet
my patients, so if thats what Bions talking about I agree with him totally, but scrubbing my
mind of everything I think itsfirst of all its impossible, and if I could actually do that I dont
think it would be so great. Adam admitted that his desires are probably not that great for my
patients, but I think its better for me that I accept that I have them and try to think about them,
as opposed to somehow mystically, you know, getting rid of them. Adams attitude of
acceptance and curiosity about his own desires was similar to Jeff and Gregs view that
memories and desires are inevitable and potentially valuable sources of information.
9. Other related areas of interest. A small theme was identified across all eight
interviews which concerned areas of the participants personal and current interest or inquiry
stimulated for them through their exposure to Bions ideas.
Greg is currently interested in the concept of the caesura: what can be learned from
attending to transitions on the micro or macro scale, whether it be the subtle shift from one state
of mind to another, or the developmental transition from adolescence to adulthood.
Richard feels encouraged by Bion to speculate about pre-natal experience, and has taken
an interest in relating Bions concepts such as the K instinct to his own ideas about the
gestational level of psychical experience, which is related to the life instinct and ones basic
sense of well-being, and which has clinical relevance to Richards approach to the work.
Studying Bion has sparked Adams interest in the idea of the mind being like a body
(referring to Bions comparison of the mind to the digestive system), rather than the mind being
about the body (referring to Freudian metapsychology). Adam finds there to be something
really interesting about that, about the ways that at its most fundamental level mental function is
in some ways a lot like other bodily functions.

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Carol and Kathleen both expressed interest in the question of how Bions war trauma
shaped him as a man, a psychoanalyst, and a theoretician, and Kathleen wonders what Bion
would have said about trauma work, given his personal history.
Jeff, Trudy and Steve all find that Bions ideas have opened up for them questions about
what is the fundamental nature of reality. Steve is particularly interested in how Bions terms and
concepts can be applied in the conceptualization of transcendental experience.

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Chapter V: Discussion

History of Bionian Influence in the Bay Area

Until the mid-to-late 1980s, psychoanalytic training in San Francisco focused on building
ego structure, privileged the observing function of the mind, aimed to reveal defenses, make the
unconscious conscious, and help patients move toward truths they were anxious about. Then
beginning in the late 1980s and intensifying throughout the 1990s, a shift occurred with a
development in interest in British Object Relations, Kleinian, neo-Kleinian and Bionian ideas.
Four participants were mentees or supervisees of Tom Ogden, who attest to his influence in
helping foster appreciation and enthusiasm for British Object Relations throughout the Bay Area.
At least three participants were supervised or taught by James Grotstein, who would come up
from Los Angeles on the weekends to teach Klein and Bion. Local psychoanalytic study groups
were formed that studied such thinkers as Abraham, Klein, Fairbairn, Winnicott, Bion and
Meltzer. The psychoanalytic institutes began to invite prominent neo-Kleinians from London and
Latin America to come teach Bion, and started organizing study-abroad trips for candidates and
members to study overseas. Bions ideas caught on, and Bion became and has remained an
important part of the curricula at both San Francisco analytic training centers. In recent decades
there has been a fair amount of interaction and exchange between the San Francisco Bay Area
analytic community and analytic communities in Europe, Latin America, and South Africa, and
of just the eight participants in this study, consultative, supervisory, personal, or collegial
relationships have been formed with prominent thinkers such as Elizabeth de Bianchedi, Donald
Meltzer, Hana Segal, Betty Joseph, Ron Britton, Edna OShaughnessy, Michael Feldman,
Antonino Ferro and Guiseppe Civitarese.
Why There is no Such Thing as a Bionian Analyst
None of the participants claimed to be Bionian in their orientation or approach to the
work. They have all studied a wide gamut of psychoanalytic theoreticians, and none of them has
attempted to model their way of working according to any one thinker, or even any one school of
thought narrower than Object Relations. Of the six participants who seemed to be more heavily
influenced by Bion than any other psychoanalytic thinker, none of them called themselves
Bionian. The author suggests that they are not Bionian precisely because they are Bionian.
There appear to be at least three reasons why it would not be appropriate to call oneself
Bionian, and each of those three reasons have to do with ways of approaching the work of
psychoanalysis that Bion himself advocated.
The first is the significance that Bion placed on the ability to take multiple points of view,
or as he put it, multiple vertices. The importance that the analyst be able to switch between
perspectives is emphasized by Bion from Experiences in Groups (1961, p. 86) all the way
through to Attention and Interpretation (1970, p. 93). Bion felt that emotional experience can be
represented through multiple vertices, and in Transformations and Attention and Interpretation
he attempted to demonstrate this by experimenting with its representation through the
mathematical vertex, the aesthetic vertex, and the religious vertex. For Bion, there was value in
this exercise, since each perspective is able to capture certain aspects of the experience in
question better than any other perspective, while no perspective alone would be able to capture
all aspects of the experience in its fullness. But taken together, multiple vertices can provide the
psyche with a richer, more truthful grasp of the essence of the experience than any one
perspective alone.

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This notion is also supported in Bions concept of common sense (1962b, p. 50; 1992,
p. 10), whereby confidence or certitude in an objects reality is gained when perceived
simultaneously by more than one sense, more than one person, or more than one emotion. Not
only can an objects existence be verified, its variety of qualities and its extensions into different
domains (Bion, 1963) can be held together in unison by the psyche. The infant, for example,
learns a lot more about the multifaceted nature of a wooden block by perceiving it through sight,
taste, smell, and touch together. Bion makes a similar point with his concept of mental binocular
vision (Bion, 1961, 1962b, 1963, 1970) by which two different views of the same object are
correlated (Bion, 1962b, p. 86), adding stereoscopic depth (Ogden, 2004a, p. 293) to ones
view of the experience.
Bions view of the psyche as comprised of multiple layers of subjectivity makes the
capability to take different perspectives crucial to the analysts ability to work with a patients
personality in its fullness. There is no reason to think that the same does not hold true with
regard to the benefit of having at ones disposal multiple theoretical frameworks from which the
phenomena of psychoanalytic experience can be thought about. From the standpoint of critical
pluralism, multiple theoretical perspectives will result in divergent but equally valid
interpretations. Taken together, variety of interpretation can increase ones appreciation for the
complexity of the objects of psychoanalysis. Having facility with different theoretical
perspectives is also a functional asset to clinicians, since different theories can work better at
different moments with different patients. It is clear that from the Bionian perspective, it would
be considered advisable to have more perspectives than just the Bionian perspective.
The second reason that it might not be appropriate to call oneself Bionian is that doing so
could appear to imply that ones work is defined by ones theory; that one has a certain way of
working, and that certain way is limited to its accordance with a certain defined set of ideas. In
his clinical seminars (e.g. Bion, 1994) and his written works (e.g. Bion, 1970), Bion is adamant
in expressing the detriment to observation and intuition incurred by the presence of theory in the
mind of the working analyst. Attempting to conform ones way of working to a particular
theoretical perspective introduces an external agenda into the consulting room that can interfere
with attention to the needs of the moment.
Of course how much of a problem this is depends on how freely and loosely one is able
to hold the perspective offered by ones theoretical framework in any given situation. Bions
opinions about the dangers of memory, desire, understanding and preconception suggest that the
danger of theory exists in its capacity to ease the anxiety of the analyst, who is often under
pressure from within and from the patient to make sense of things as soon as possible. If being
Bionian means having ones trusty set of Bionian concepts at ones disposal to be used in a
protective or defensive way, that would not, in fact, be Bionian. If being Bionian means being
able to make sense of all the objects of psychoanalytic experience through a set of Bionian
models, as malleable and widely applicable as they are, this would suggest an ongoing liability to
the narrowing of ones receptivity to the unknown, the unfamiliar, and the richness of the multidetermined and complex nature of reality, and would not, in fact, be Bionian.
The third reason that it would not be appropriate to call oneself Bionian was well put by
Bions late daughter Parthenope Bion Talamo who said We cannot say that we are Bionians,
because being Bionian would mean, above all, being oneself, being mentally free in ones
journeys of discovery (Borgogno & Merciai, 2000, pp. 56-57). As a number of psychoanalytic
authors suggest (Billow, 1999, p. 630; Blandonu, 1994, p. 221; Giffney, 2013; Ogden, 2004a,
2012; Schermer, 2003; Sullivan, 2010 p. 40), and as several of the participants speculated, Bion

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intended that his readers do their own thinking, arrive at their own truths, and discover their way
of working for themselves. Bions highly inaccessible way of writing about theory, taken in
combination with his virtually atheoretical way of talking about psychoanalysis in the seminar
setting suggest that he was not interested in telling anyone how to think.
It is clear that Bion placed learning from experience above all else when it comes to
learning how to be a psychoanalyst, because that type of learning is more than just intellectual
learning, it is experiential learning, which requires analysts to develop their own functions, their
own ways of digesting powerful emotions and employing their intuition. Bion arrived at his very
unique way of thinking about the work on his own, through his own process, and encouraged
others to do the same. For example, he encouraged that everyone make their own grid, and
devise their own working models for describing what they see. He also felt that everyone needed
to make the best use of their own character and personality in their approach to the work, that the
unique personhood of the analyst is an asset, not a liability. Participants spoke to this in the
interview, the process of finding what fits ones character. As one put it, echoing Klein, when
asked about her theoretical orientation, I am what I am!
The Role of Theory in Practice
Participants comments on the role of theory in practice suggest that ones internalized,
implicit grasp of psychoanalytic theory has a strong shaping effect upon how one is with ones
patients and how one receives and processes the information of the sessions in the moment, even
among psychoanalysts who have taken to heart Bions recommendation to avoid consciously
thinking about theory or attempting to apply it while in the room with patients. Each participant
described multiple examples of the ways that ideas and models they had learned in their study
and training have contributed to their way of working in the clinical hour. Their reports revealed
that certain ideas and models seem to have stuck with them and become part of their
equipment and part of their own frame of reference. These ideas and models actually seem
better characterized as ways of thinking about the aims of the work and the processes involved,
ways of understanding and attending to patients needs and deficits, as well as ways of
conceptualizing the role of analyst. What was once abstract and theoretical becomes an implicit
part of the analysts skill set through a process of internalization and assimilation, where certain
ideas that may have initially resonated as intuitively elegant or potentially useful are tested out in
the room or applied to clinical material in reflection, supervision, or consultation until certain
techniques become natural and authentic to the personality of the analyst and certain models that
are useful for the generation of hypotheses are no longer applied in a conscious, intentional way,
but a spontaneous, creative, situation-specific way, contributing to the analysts natural creativity
and intuition.
Reading and Learning Bion
The value of the experience of reading the primary texts emerged as a question of
dispute, and appears to be a matter of personal taste and learning style. The participants varied
widely in terms of how enjoyable, engaging, and worthwhile they found the experience of
reading Bion to be. Some found his way of writing interesting and stimulating, others found it
irritating and frustrating, and some found it to be both. The impossibility of knowing with
certainty what Bion really means was generative for some but not for others. Of those who
reported that the struggle trying to understand Bion was a useful one, little explanation was
offered as to the nature of this benefit. Four participants expressed in a general way that the

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difficulty reading Bion forced them to think for themselves and come to their own
understanding, but examples of this, or more specific explanation of this process were not
particularly forthcoming. This may be because the value of engaging with Bions work is very
particular to each person and hard to put into words. One possible explanation for the felt but
unexplained sense among several participants that the struggle was worthwhile is that reading
Bion exercises and stimulates a mental muscle quite needed for psychoanalysts, which is the
ability to work creatively and generatively with initially incoherent or incomprehensible
material. It is also likely that by being an emotional experience, reading Bion requires the
exercise of alpha-function, allowing for the possibility of personal growth and learning in the
reader, since it is by way of emotion that learning and growth occur.
As participants spoke of the value that Bion has had for their work, what was of greatest
worth were the ideas and models that they understood, that made sense, and that felt applicable
and useful. If Bions way of writing contributed to a more personally constructed and thus truer
understanding of the concepts, this did not come out in the reports. Little evidence was found
that wrestling with theoretical ideas in the reading process is what makes them come alive. It is
the locating of the theoretical ideas in the clinical material and seeing how they actually might
operate with ones patients which makes them come alive, and this application process, whether
occurring during reading, during supervision, or during the clinical hour seems to depend very
little on how they were presented in the texts. Laying out an idea in an obscure, confusing way
does not necessarily help readers in their process of locating it within themselves, playing with it,
and testing it out. Evidence for this was found among the participants who preferred the
secondary source material, or who needed to begin there before being able to effectively engage
with the primary source texts.
What is true is that Bions ideas are very unsaturated, the bare bones ideas, as one
participant called them, and because of this they lend themselves to a great degree of
personalization in addition to wide possibilities of application.
The implication for students new to Bion and interested in learning his ideas is that
reading the primary source material is not the only option. Bions ideas, particularly the most
influential ones that have been described in this study, and which appeared to be the most useful
to analysts, have been reproduced in much more easily digestible form by more contemporary
authors, and if the students goal is to learn the ideas so that they can begin to play with them on
their own and locate their meaning for themselves and within their work, they may want to begin
with the secondary source readings, or seek out teachers who are skilled at explaining the ideas,
or attend presentations were Bions concepts are applied to clinical material.
This, however, should not be seen to detract from the value of reading Bions papers and
books. As was shown in this study, many of the participants found reading Bion a very
worthwhile, fulfilling, and generative experience. His writings are extremely rich and thoughtprovoking, both intellectually and emotionally stimulating, and can stir the readers mind
consciously and unconsciously in a way similar to poetry. Not trying too hard to understand on
an intellectual level everything that is written can be very helpful in making the experience more
enjoyable and interesting.
Summary of What Could be Called a Bionian Psychoanalytic Orientation
Commonalities emerged across different participants descriptions of their ways of
working and their understanding of the processes and aims of psychoanalysis, and from these
commonalities the author suggests that a Bionian orientation to psychoanalysis can be

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delineated. This is not suggested to be an orientation to the work that Bion has any ownership
over, but it is suggested that this is the orientation from which Bion was working, writing, and
teaching, within which his highly influential ideas were developed. It is also suggested that
studying Bions work and learning to apply it to cases can help one develop this orientation.
Contact with emotional truth is the primary source of growth in the personality, and the
capacity to grow from that contact is facilitated by the psychoanalytic process. Psychological
health is predicated upon the ability to process emotional experience. This requires developing a
relationship with ones emotional life characterized by curiosity, acceptance, creativity and
courage. As ones ability to tolerate, experience, and work with challenging or particularly
threatening thoughts and feelings increases, the need to project them, split them off, or dissociate
from them diminishes.
A marker of psychological health is the power to make links as a source of meaning and
contextualization simultaneous to an ability to allow previous connections and meanings to break
down or dissolve so that fresh perspectives can form. The ability to create enough space
internally for difficult emotions to be approached from different interpretive angles is an asset to
analysts and a growth factor in patients.
A major part of the work involves helping patients give voice to parts of their mind with
which they would prefer not to identify, such as less developed parts, less rational parts, and less
emotionally mature parts. Allowing these parts to find expression relationally through the
analytic work can reduce patients need to rely on defenses and projective identification and can
increase their depth and breadth of available emotional experience.
The role of the analyst is to help the patient nurture and cultivate this type of internal
environment characterized by acceptance, curiosity, creativity, freedom and courage, and this is
often done by working with the internal obstacles that emerge in the process of developing such
an environment. Attention is paid to what the patient appears incapable of tolerating on their own
or incapable of thinking about or experiencing in more than one fixed way. Attention is paid to
moments when patients shut down curiosity, shut down dynamic tension, resist change, and
resist certain types of experiences that have the potential to evoke change. Attention is paid to
certain types of emotional experiences that the patient is having difficulty integrating, or that the
patient can only experience in a rigid, one-sided way, which tends to evoke inflexible, one-sided
responses in the other. The analyst attempts to understand what is being evoked in her in order to
understand what the patient needs to experience or put into words so that the patient can become
freer from the sway of perpetual enactments.
The analyst attempts to help the patient gain symbolic access to parts of their experience
with which they have been having trouble linking. Because it is non-symbolized experience,
often concrete, projected, or unconscious, the analyst needs to be skilled at intuiting that which is
not readily apparent, making room for this by not being excessively occupied with what is
already known. Patients difficulty linking with their experience is often reflective of its painful
emotionality, so the analyst must approach the work with a willingness to experience emotional
pain, which is requisite to its effective transformation into the workable realm of the symbolic.
Change and growth in the patient occur not only through integration of experience rendered more
tolerable and thinkable by the analyst, but also through a gradual internalization and
development of the functions and qualities of mind needed for the patient to do this
independently. These include the tolerance of pain, doubt, uncertainty and fear in its many forms,
the ability to take multiple perspectives and work creatively with conflict and complexity, and

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the ability to welcome the subjective experience of different parts of the self, no matter how
irrational, vulnerable, or immature, with an attitude of curiosity.
The Relative Usefulness of Bions Ideas and Models
The model of realistic projective identification was found to be a useful model by
allowing clinicians to recognize the needs and deficits of their patients, think about how those
needs are expressed, and better understand the function of the emotions at play in the room as
experienced by both members of the dyad. The concept of alpha-function was shown to be one
of many ways of representing a function of the mind of central importance to the work of
psychoanalysis. The concept of containment and Bions comparison between the mother-infant
dyad and the analyst-patient dyad were found to be very helpful for analysts in attaining a deeper
intuitive and operational understanding of the nature and function of their role for their patients.
The concept of the psychotic part of the personality was shown to be useful by encouraging
analysts to look for certain types of defenses and barriers to experiencing and thinking about
emotional reality that occur in every patient, regardless of level of functioning. The concept of O
and the ideas contained in Bions disparagement of memory, desire and understanding were
shown by this study to be helpful to analysts in their development of an analytic attitude,
encouraging them to be humble, to prioritize attention to the unknown, to hold what they think
they know lightly, and to maximize their openness to the depth and multi-layered complexity of
experience.
The results of the study also suggested that the concept of beta-elements is not
particularly clinically useful, and this may be due in part to confusion about the actual meaning
of the term, and to an absence of a need to employ that label in the clinical moment. The Ps D
model also does not seem to offer much usefulness to ones clinical thinking, which may also be
related to conceptual problems with the model. Dialectical terms the participants tended to find
useful were certainty versus doubt, fragmentation versus coherence, and psychic equilibrium
versus catastrophic change. Bions extension of the Ps D model to the description of
dialectical modes of the analysts internal experience does not appear helpful, since those same
ideas are better represented by the concepts of negative capability and selected fact. The Grid
appears to not have much clinical utility, although studying it can encourage clinicians to attend
to patients level of concreteness and ability to symbolize, and it can also encourage one to listen
beyond the content of a statement to its operational purpose.
Strengths and Limitations of the Present Study
A major strength of this study is its uniqueness in interviewing a sample of
psychoanalysts about the nature of the clinical value of the ideas of a particularly influential
psychoanalytic thinker. Never before has a study attempted to investigate the clinical and
practical value and application of Bionian ideas by way of systematically interviewing practicing
psychoanalysts. This researcher explored the ways in which Bionian ideas can be put to use in
the psychoanalytic situation, and the participants spoke from the authority of personal experience
about the clinical value of Bions ideas. Interviewing only psychoanalysts who endorse
significant Bionian influence contributed to the validity of the results.
Another advantage was the study participants themselves, whose passion for
psychoanalysis, ability to think critically and reflectively about their work, proclivity for putting
experience into words, and willingness to share their personal thoughts, feelings, opinions and
perspectives with openness and candor, contributed greatly to the richness, liveliness, depth and

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complexity of the data gathered. Meeting the participants in their consulting rooms during
business hours may have also contributed to the authenticity of the data.
The format of the interview was another advantage in terms of the depth, breadth, and
quality of the data gathered. The semi-structured interview schedule allowed the interviewer
freedom to inquire in a natural and conversational way about the value of Bions ideas, which
encouraged the establishment of rapport, put the participants in the position of experiential
expert, and allowed them to reflect freely in a relatively unpressured way. By allowing a full 2
hours with each participant, a variety of research questions were able to be addressed, including
the role of theory in practice, the experience of reading and studying Bion, as well as the nature
of the practical value of Bions ideas. In addition to being asked in a general way about the value
of Bion to their work, the length of the interview also allowed the researcher to ask each
participant about specific Bionian ideas and topics, which often helped them to remember other
aspects of Bions thinking they have found useful and that they had not already thought to
mention.
The qualitative approach of this study made it possible to explore in rich detail the
personal experience of finding resonance with Bions ideas in ones work. By comparing
responses across participants, not only could generalizations be drawn from the emergent themes
regarding the clinical value of Bions ideas, those themes were also able to be presented with the
detail, fullness and nuance provided by the advantage of multiple phenomenological
perspectives.
This study also had a number of limitations. The central constraint of qualitative research
is the small sample size, which limits the confidence with which one can generalize from the
findings. This limit may be compounded by the homogeny of the sample, specifically the fact
that all the analysts received their training from one of two San Francisco training centers. Many
shared the same teachers, and all trained within the same training culture, although that culture
has evolved over time and the timeframe of each participants analytic training varied.
Specifically, the influence that Tom Ogden has had upon psychoanalytic thought at the local
level may have resulted in Tom Ogdens interpretation of Bion shaping or coloring each
participants version of Bion. The implication may be that the findings have limits to
generalizability outside the San Francisco Bay Area.
The fact that the participants were self-selected also imposes a limitation to the
generalizability of the findings. For example, if psychoanalysts have attempted to study Bion or
apply his ideas clinically without finding it to be particularly helpful, their perspective would be
missing from these findings because they would not have self-selected for this study or met the
criteria for participation.
There were also limitations inherent to the breadth of the research aims and the
constraints of a 2 hour interview. It is impossible to capture in any completeness the full nature
and impact of Bions ideas upon the clinical mind of each participant. Certain aspects of Bions
influence were inevitably neglected due to time constraints and the limits of recollection and
articulation. And of those areas of influence that were endorsed by participants, a limited amount
of time could be spent exploring the nature of that influence because of the large number of ideas
and topics to be addressed. It was also found that asking participants to provide a background
sketch of the history of their theoretical studies took up time generating data that was not
relevant to the research questions.
Finally, another limitation may have been imposed by the conscious and unconscious
biases of the interviewer. His own study of Bions ideas was likely to have caused him at times

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to influence the flow of conversation with participants in particular ways, sometimes in the
direction of his own conceptual familiarity, other times in the direction of personal and specific
areas of curiosity. This may have caused participants to tailor their responses according to their
perceptions of the interviewers knowledge and interests, and this may have foreclosed
opportunities to open up areas of reflection more unique to the individuality of each participant.
Suggestions for Further Research
There are many other ways that Bions value to psychoanalysis could be assessed and
studied that could yield alternative interpretations and conclusions from those drawn in the
present dissertation. A study that focuses more exclusively on clinical examples and case
material could provide a more real-life portrait of the clinical application of concepts. This
material of study could be video or audiotape recorded during sessions, and this could offer the
added advantage of not relying solely on the retrospective, condensed, generalized and one-sided
testimony of the analyst but on direct observation. Phenomenological research could also be
conducted with patients of Bionian analysts to better understand the subjective nature of the
benefit to them, or with Bionian supervisors to explore the role of Bionian concepts in
supervision and the processes whereby those concepts are transferred and developed in the mind
of the supervisee.
Studies could also be conducted that explore the potential value of Bions ideas outside of
the psychoanalytic setting, such as psychiatric hospitals where there are a much higher
proportion of psychotic patients, or outpatient clinics where therapy is usually conducted on a
once per week basis. The value of the Bionian approach could be assessed for its usefulness in
working with specific patient populations, such as borderline patients, traumatized patients,
clinically depressed patients, etc. Studies could also focus exclusively on a singular Bionian
concept to explore the nature of its clinical implications in depth.
Because this study focused on the application of Bions ideas by San Francisco Bay Area
psychoanalysts who were trained here and remain part of the current analytic culture, similar
studies could be undertaken in different cities where Bions ideas are popular to see if there are
differences in the ways that his ideas are understood and applied. For example, it may be that in
Los Angeles, more clinical use is made of Bions later work.
Conclusions
The current qualitative study examined the ideas of W. R. Bion as they exist in the
literature, and as they have been put to use by practicing psychoanalysts. Eight San Francisco
Bay Area based psychoanalysts who endorse significant Bionian influence were interviewed
about the role that psychoanalytic theory plays in their work, about their experience of reading
and studying Bion, and about the importance and clinical usefulness that Bions ideas have had
for them in their psychoanalytic practices.
It was found that gaining a practical understanding of psychoanalytic theory is
instrumental in ones development as a psychoanalyst, and that over the course of ones
development theory can become seamlessly assimilated into ones way of being with patients,
ones way of thinking about the emotional truth of the moment, and ones capacity for generating
interpretive hypotheses.
Reading Bion was found to be an emotional experience, difficult but potentially
worthwhile, although secondary sources can be an easier initial point of access to his ideas and

123

models. However they are absorbed, their clinical value and relevance must be discovered
through the individuals personal process.
A number of Bions ideas and theoretical models were found to be highly influential to
each participants orientation to the work, and it was possible to generalize from the participants
reports a summary of what could be called a Bionian psychoanalytic orientation. This
orientation includes a way of understanding and working with defense mechanisms, a model of
psychic change and growth through the analytic process, and a description of an analytic attitude
that prioritizes making contact with emotional truth, taking multiple points of view, paying
attention to the unknown and not-yet-symbolized, and maintaining curiosity and openness to
experience.
The concepts of the psychotic part of the personality, realistic projective identification,
containment, the analogy to the mother-infant dyad, the transfer and development of alphafunction, and the advice to be without memory, desire and understanding were found to be the
Bionian concepts of greatest clinical value and importance. But the nature of the influence of
Bions thought upon each participant varied widely for each, and a large number of Bionian
ideas other than the ones just mentioned were reported as clinically valuable on an individual
basis.
It was clear from the literature review how important an impact Bion has had to the field
of psychoanalytic thought, and it was apparent from the interviews that the ideas contained
within Bions body of work are of enormous potential value to psychoanalytic practitioners.

124
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Appendix A: Human Studies Protocol

Project Summary
This study seeks to explore the experience of learning and applying the ideas of W. R.
Bion among practicing psychoanalysts as a way of better understanding the potential value of
studying Bions work.
Human Subjects
A total of ten licensed clinical psychologists, psychiatrists, marriage and family therapist
or licensed clinical social worker who are also certified and currently practicing psychoanalysts
who endorse having been significantly influenced by Bions ideas will be recruited to participate.
Participants will be identified by way of their reputation in the local psychoanalytic community.
They will have no personal or professional affiliation to the researcher.
Procedures
Potential participants will be contacted by phone or email and explained the nature of the
study, and asked to verify that they meet the above selection criteria. If willing to participate,
they will be emailed a copy of the consent form (Appendix B), describing the purpose of the
study and the nature of the interview, and delineating potential risks and their right to discontinue
at any time. They will be asked to meet in person for a maximum of two hours to conduct the
interview, although Skype interviews will be conducted if an in-person meeting cannot be
arranged. At the time of the interview a signed copy of the consent form will be obtained from
the participant. If the interview is done over Skype, a signed copy of the consent form will need
to be mailed or scanned and emailed to the researcher ahead of time. In-person interviews will
take place at a mutually agreed upon private and quiet location. The interview is estimated to last
approximately one hour, but participants will be asked to meet for a maximum of two hours. All
interviews will be audiotaped and later transcribed by the researcher. The transcripts will then be
systematically coded by the researcher using Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis as outlined
by Smith and Osborn (2007).
Potential Benefits
Benefits to participants of this study are not likely to be greatly significant, although the
self-reflection and vocalization of internal experience that comes with participation could be
experienced as stimulating, illuminating, clarifying or otherwise generative. Participants may
experience satisfaction in knowing that their contributions may lead by way of this study to a
greater understanding of and appreciation for the value that Bions ideas may have for the field
of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy.
Potential Risks
There are minimal risks involved in the participation in this study. However, in asking
participants about their inner world and personal experience, there is always the risk for
emotional discomfort in the contemplation and sharing of personal material. Participants will be
informed that they can choose not to respond to questions, to stop at any time, or to have their
responses omitted from the study or destroyed.

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Confidentiality
Confidentiality of the research participants will be protected. Participants names will not
be included on the transcripts, and they will be represented in the study by the assignment of a
letter. Responses to questions about their training experiences that include specific names of
people or institutions will be edited in order to conceal all identifying information of the
participant or the named people or institutions. Any case material that emerges in the interviews
that reveals any potentially identifying patient information will be edited to protect patient
confidentiality. All transcripts will be stored on the researchers password protected computer, to
which the researcher alone has access.
Informed Consent
A signed informed consent form will be obtained from participants prior to the initiation
of the interview. The informed consent form will provide a brief description of the studys
purpose, the nature of the interview, and the topics to be discussed. It will explain that
participation is voluntary, that they can decline to answer any of the questions, that they can
discontinue the interview at any time and request that any or all of their responses be omitted
from the study or destroyed. The informed consent form also explains the parameters of
confidentiality, and requests that the participants make the concerted attempt not to reveal any
identifying patient information to the researcher.
Debriefing
The nature of the study, its purpose, the format of the interview and the general topics to
be covered will be explained to the participants upon initial contact and outlined in the informed
consent form. Participants will also be informed that they are free to contact the researcher at any
time by email with questions about the study or requests for the studys results.
Appendix
The following materials are included in the Appendices:
Appendix B: Informed Consent Form
Appendix C: Interview Schedule
Reference
Smith, J. A. & Osborn, M. (2007). Interpretive phenomenological analysis. In: J. A.
Smith (Ed.), Qualitative psychology: A practical guide to research methods. London:
Sage Publications Ltd.

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Appendix B: Informed Consent

(PLEASE COMPLETE AND RETURN ONE COPY OF THIS FORM AND RETAIN THE
OTHER COPY FOR YOUR RECORDS)
I, ____________________________________, hereby authorize Alan Poey to gather
information from me for a study being conducted in association with his doctoral dissertation in
clinical psychology at the Wright Institute in Berkeley, California. The nature of this study has
been explained to me and I understand the following:
1. This study investigates practicing psychoanalysts experience of studying and interpreting the
theories of Wilfred Bion and attempting to apply them to their work. My participation in this
study will involve participation in an interview with the researcher that will last no longer
than two hours. The interview questions will inquire into my personal process of engaging
with Bions theories and making use of them clinically. It will attempt to explore in depth
which specific aspect(s) of Bions thought are the most useful and compelling to me in
particular, and will also ask me for optional comment and discussion on a set range of
predetermined Bionian topic areas. The interview will be audio recorded using a digital
recording device and transcribed by the interviewer.
2. To participate in this study, I must be a clinical psychologist, psychiatrist, marriage and
family therapist or licensed clinical social worker. I must be a certified and currently
practicing psychoanalyst. I have studied in some depth Bions ideas across different periods
of his work, and my development as a psychoanalyst has been significantly influenced by at
least one of Bions main ideas.
3. My participation is expected to involve minimal risk to me beyond the possibility of
becoming fatigued or experiencing mild emotional discomfort in considering and responding
to the questions under investigation.
4. My participation results in no direct benefit to me beyond what might be gained by the
experience of contemplating and verbalizing my own experience, participating in a research
study, and contributing to a deeper understanding of the topic. I understand that I will not
receive compensation, monetary or otherwise, in exchange for my participation.
5. My confidentiality will be protected to the full extent of the law. My identifying information
will be removed from my materials by the researcher as soon as they are received and stored
by the researcher in a separate location. Digital audio recordings will be destroyed
immediately after transcription, and all identifying information will be removed from the
typed transcript. With the exception of the Informed Consent Form, which legally must be
stored in the confidential files of the Wright Institute Committee for the Protection of Human
Subjects, only the researcher will have access to the identifying information.
6. If I have any questions or problems as a result of participation in this study, I may contact
primary researcher Alan Poey by phone at (510) 859-7996 or by email at alanpoey@wi.edu,
or dissertation chairperson Dr. Susana Winkel at swinkel@wi.edu.

146

7. My participation is voluntary and has been gained without coercion. I may refuse to
participate prior to the interview, and I may discontinue participation at any time during the
interview. I may refuse to answer specific questions, and I reserve the right to have any or all
of my responses omitted from the study or destroyed.
8. I may receive further information regarding the purpose of this study, and I may request a
copy of the results following participation by contacting Alan Poey by phone at (510) 8597996 or by email at alanpoey@wi.edu.

I consent to audio recording.

I do not consent to audio recording.

_____________________________________________
(Participants signature)

__________________
(Date)

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Appendix C: Interview Schedule

1) What might you say in reflecting upon the role of reading and learning theory in your
development as a psychoanalyst? And in your work with patients?
2) How do you generally describe your theoretical orientation?
3) With what populations do you work? (e.g. neurotic vs. psychotic?)
4) Could you provide a brief outline of the sequence of your theoretical studies in becoming a
psychoanalyst and your theoretical interests since?
5) How did learning Bion fit into your training and study? (e.g. independent study, graduate
training, analytic training, analysts orientation, supervisors orientation).
6) What has been your experience of studying Bion and engaging with his written material?
7) Which of his works impacted you the most? Why? How? What was it that was compelling to
you about Bion or his ideas?
8) What have you gotten out of studying Bion? What have you found valuable for you or your
work?
9) Are there ideas or models of his that stand out you as especially useful tools for thinking about
the psyche or psychoanalysis?
10) What questions has studying Bion opened up for you, personally or in your work?
11) Has studying Bion impacted the ways you attend to experience in the room, the ways you
listen, engage, or interpret?
Bion preferred that his audience do their own thinking, engage in their own process, discover
their own models and arrive at their own truths. The following questions are designed to ask you
for your personal take on some of the questions Bion seems to be asking himself. Feel free to
bring in clinical examples if any come to mind.
12) For you, what is psychoanalysis? What would you say is specific to your way of doing
psychoanalysis?
13) Is there such a thing as truth? and if so, what is its role in the emotional life of the patient
and in the work of psychoanalysis?
14) What, to you, are psychotic processes? Do you find it useful to attend to a psychotic level of
mental functioning in patients? How do you engage with the psychotic part of the personality?

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15) Do you find it clinically useful to think in terms of projective identification and containment?
How have you acted as container/embodied the containing function?
16) How do you understand alpha-function or the dreaming function? Would you agree that
most of psychopathology stems from disorders of this function? What role does dreaming play
in your work with patients?
17) Bion seemed to use the term beta to label both pre-representational experience as well as
evacuated/projected experience. How do you see and understand beta-elements and beta
mentality appearing in your work with patients? How do you engage with this material
analytically?
18) Does the Ps D model play any role in your work? Do you find it clinically useful to attend
to oscillations between fragmentation and integration?
19) What do you think of Bions Grid? Do you see a value in such exercises in classification?
20) Do you have your own version of O? How does this conceptualization operate in your work
with patients, in terms of your relationship to the unconscious, the unknown, and your
conception of psychic change?
21) Do you have your own version of faith?
22) How do you interpret Bions advice to be without memory, desire, or understanding? Have
you attempted to translate this to your approach to the work? What does that look like?
23) How do you conceptualize the mechanism of personal change and psychic growth through
psychoanalysis?
Final Questions:
24) Are there any other areas of Bions thinking that we havent covered that intrigue you, or that
you find yourself continuing to engage with?
25) What other authors or analytic schools have for you the most compatibility with Bions
ideas?
26) Have ideas stemming from Bion led you to other areas of thought or discourse you are
currently engaging with?
27) What would you say to a student of psychoanalysis interested in learning Bion? How might
you suggest s/he approach his work and engage with his ideas?
28) Do you impart Bions ideas to others (through teaching or supervision)? If so, how?
29) Any final thoughts? Any comments about what has this interview experience been like?