Wilfred Bion
Wilfred Ruprecht Bion was an influential English psychoanalyst, who became president of the British Psychoanalytical Society from 1962 to 1965.
Early life and military service
Bion was born in Mathura, North-Western Provinces, India, and educated at Bishop's Stortford College in England. After the outbreak of the First World War, he served in the Tank Corps as a tank commander in France, and was awarded both the Distinguished Service Order , and the Croix de Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur. He first entered the war zone on 26 June 1917, and was promoted to temporary lieutenant on 10 June 1918, and to acting captain on 22 March 1918, when he took command of a tank section, he retained the rank when he became second-in-command of a tank company on 19 October 1918, and relinquished it on 7 January 1919. He was demobilised on 1 September 1921, and was granted the rank of captain. The full citation for his DSO reads:"Bion's daughter, Parthenope...raises the question of just how her father was shaped as an analyst by his wartime experiences...underinning Bion's later concern with the coexistence of regressed or primitive proto-mental states alongside more sophisticated one".
Career
In 1945, during the Second World War, Bion's wife Betty Jardine gave birth to a daughter, but Betty died a few days afterwards. His daughter, Parthenope, became a psychoanalyst in Italy, and often lectured and wrote about her father's work. Parthenope died, together with her 18-year-old daughter Patrizia, in a car crash in Italy in July 1998.Bion's theories, which were always based in the phenomena of the analytic encounter, revealed both correspondences and expansions of core ideas from both Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein. At one point, he attempted to understand thoughts and thinking from an 'algebraic', 'geometric' and 'mathematised' point of view, believing there to be too little precision in the existing vocabulary, a process culminating in "The Grid". Later he abandoned the complex, abstract applications of mathematics, and the Grid, and developed a more intuitive approach, epitomised in Attention and Interpretation.
In 1968, Bion moved to Los Angeles, California, where he remained until 1977. During those years he mentored a number of psychoanalysts interested in Kleinian approaches, including James Gooch and other founding members of the Psychoanalytic Center of California. Shortly before his death, he returned to Oxfordshire.
Reception and stature
Wilfred Bion was a potent and original contributor to psychoanalysis. He was one of the first to analyse patients in psychotic states using an unmodified analytic technique; he extended existing theories of projective processes and developed new conceptual tools. The degree of collaboration between Hanna Segal, Wilfred Bion and Herbert Rosenfeld in their work with psychotic patients during the late 1950s, and their discussions with Melanie Klein at the time, means that it is not always possible to distinguish their exact individual contributions to the developing theory of splitting, projective identification, unconscious phantasy and the use of countertransference. As Donald Meltzer, Denis Carpy, and Michael Feldman have pointed out, these three pioneering analysts not only sustained Klein's clinical and theoretical approach, but through an extension of the concept of projective identification and countertransference they deepened and expanded it. In Bion's clinical work and supervision the goal remains insightful understanding of psychic reality through a disciplined experiencing of the transference–countertransference, in a way that promotes the growth of the whole personality.'Bion's ideas are highly unique', so that he 'remained larger than life to almost all who encountered him'. He has been considered by Neville Symington as possibly "the greatest psychoanalytic thinker...after Freud".
There is some historical evidence to suggest that the idea of containment may have been suggested to Bion in the mid-1930s, by an encounter with C.G.Jung: Bion attended Jung's 1935 lectures at the Tavistock Clinic, in which Bion was an active participant. The experience was described by James Grotstein, Bion's biographer and "one of Bion's most influential pupils", as having had a "dramatic impact" on Bion.
Group experiments
Bion performed a lot of group experiments when he was put in charge of the training wing of a military hospital. Besides observing the basic assumptions recurring in these groups, he also has observed some very interesting phenomena which he believed may well apply to society.Bion also claimed that "...what the individual says or does in a group illumines both his own personality and his view of the group; sometimes his contribution illumines one more than the other." This observation is related to the psychological phenomenon of projection.
Bion posited the presence of "anonymous" contributions to a group as the foundations for "a successful system of evasion and denial". A related phenomenon is that of deindividuation.
In Experiences in Groups, Bion asserted that whenever a group is formed, it seeks a leader to follow. Moreover, he claimed that in the absence of a formal leader who satisfies the group, the most mentally ill member of the group will be treated as an informal leader: "In its search for a leader the group finds a paranoid schizophrenic or malignant hysteric if possible; failing either of these, a psychopathic personality with delinquent trends will do; failing a psychopathic personality it will pick on the verbally facile high-grade defective."
Group dynamics—the "basic assumptions"
Wilfred Bion's observations about the role of group processes in group dynamics are set out in Experiences in Groups and Other Papers, written in the 1940s but compiled and published in 1961, where he refers to recurrent emotional states of groups as 'basic assumptions'. Bion argues that in every group, two groups are actually present: the work group, and the basic assumption group. The work group is that aspect of group functioning which has to do with the primary task of the group—what the group has formed to accomplish; will "keep the group anchored to a sophisticated and rational level of behaviour". The basic assumption group describes the tacit underlying assumptions on which the behaviour of the group is based. Bion specifically identified three basic assumptions: dependency, fight–flight, and pairing. When a group adopts any one of these basic assumptions, it interferes with the task the group is attempting to accomplish. Bion believed that interpretation by the therapist of this aspect of group dynamics would, whilst being resisted, also result in potential insight regarding effective, co-operative group work.In dependency, the essential aim of the group is to attain security through, and have its members protected by, one individual. The basic assumption in this group culture seems to be that an external object exists whose function it is to provide security for the immature individual.
Bion considered that "the three basic-assumption groups seem each in turn to be aggregates of individuals sharing out between them the characteristics of one character in the Oedipal situation". Behind the Oedipal level, however, Bion postulated the existence of still more primitive, part-object phantasies; and "the more disturbed the group, the more easily discernible are these primitive phantasies and mechanisms". Such phantasies would prove the main focus of Bion's interest after his second analysis.
Bion on thinking
"During the 1950s and 1960s, Bion transformed Melanie Klein's theories of infantile phantasy...into an epistemological "theory of thinking" of his own." Bion used as his starting point the phenomenology of the analytic hour, highlighting the two principles of "the emergence of truth and mental growth. The mind grows through exposure to truth." The foundation for both mental development and truth are, for Bion, emotional experience.The evolution of emotional experience into the capacity for thought, and the potential derailment of this process, are the primary phenomena described in Bion's model. Through his hypothesized alpha and beta elements, Bion provides a language to help one think about what is occurring during the analytic hour. These tools are intended for use outside the hour in the clinician's reflective process. To attempt to apply his models during the analytic session violates the basic principle whereby "Bion had advocated starting every session 'without memory, desire or understanding'—his antidote to those intrusive influences that otherwise threaten to distort the analytic process."
Alpha elements, beta elements, and alpha function
Bion created a theory of thinking based on changing beta elements into alpha elements. Beta elements were seen as cognate to the underpinnings of the "basic assumptions" identified in his work with groups: "the fundamental anxieties that underlie the basic assumption group resistances were originally thought of as proto-mental phenomena...forerunners of Bion's later concept of beta-elements." They were equally conceptual developments from his work on projective identification—from the "minutely split 'particles'" Bion saw as expelled in pathological projective identification by the psychotic, who would then go on to "lodge them in the angry, so-called bizarre objects by which he feels persecuted and controlled". For "these raw bits of experience he called beta-elements...to be actively handled and made use of by the mind they must, through what Bion calls alpha-functions, become alpha-elements".β elements, α elements and α function are elements that Bion hypothesizes. He does not consider β-elements, α- elements, nor α function to actually exist. The terms are instead tools for thinking about what is being observed. They are elements whose qualities remain unsaturated, meaning we cannot know the full extent or scope of their meaning, so they are intended as tools for thought rather than real things to be accepted at face value.
Bion took for granted that the infant requires a mind to help it tolerate and organize experience. For Bion, thoughts exist prior to the development of an apparatus for thinking. The apparatus for thinking, the capacity to have thoughts "has to be called into existence to cope with thoughts".
To learn from experience alpha-function must operate on the awareness of the emotional experience; alpha–elements are produced from the impressions of the experience; these are thus made storable and available for dream thoughts and for unconscious waking thinking... If there are only beta-elements, which cannot be made unconscious, there can be no repression, suppression, or learning.
α-function works upon undigested facts, impressions, and sensations, that cannot be mentalized—beta-elements. α-function digests β-elements, making them available for thought.
Beta-elements are not amenable to use in dream thoughts but are suited for use in projective identification. They are influential in producing acting out. These are objects that can be evacuated or used for a kind of thinking that depends on manipulation of what are felt to be things in themselves as if to substitute such manipulations for words or ideas... Alpha-function transforms sense impressions into alpha-elements which resemble, and may in fact be identical with, the visual images with which we are familiar in dreams, namely, the elements that Freud regards as yielding their latent content when the analyst has interpreted them. Failure of alpha-function means the patient cannot dream and therefore cannot sleep. As alpha-function makes the sense impressions of the emotional experience available for conscious and dream—thought the patient who cannot dream cannot go to sleep and cannot wake up.