BPAS:

Guest paper on Bion

Bion's Perspectives on
Psychoanalytic Technique

by James A. Gooch, MD, PhD.

This paper is a shortened version of a paper given as part of a panel held at the 42nd Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association in Nice on the 26th July 2001. We are grateful to Dr Gooch for allowing us to feature it on the Society's website [Eds].

I address myself to what I take to be the essence of Bion's ideas about the theory and practice of psychoanalytic technique, based on my personal experience of analysis with Bion for five years in the early and mid-1970's in Los Angeles, and my reflections on reading Bion as a practicing analyst over the past 30 years.

Analysis with Bion was very different, notwithstanding some features which were in common with my first analysis. I would like to illustrate this difference in terms of the attention given to the defensive use of omnipotent attitudes arising in the analysis. As with my first experience of analysis there were interpretations about omnipotence, but Bion would in all cases offer a conjecture, or ‘guess’ (his word) what the omnipotence was a defence against, always calling my attention to the evidence in the session that supported it. When insufficient evidence was available to him he would say something like,

‘My experience is that whenever a person uses omnipotence, they are feeling helpless about something. Omnipotence seems to be a psychic reflex for surviving actual helplessness, as in infancy, senility, and extreme physical illness. But if used at any other time, it produces helplessness, since it is an illusion. Perhaps you have some idea of what may be making you feel helpless, so that you are reduced to omnipotence’.

Invariably I would be able to identify that about which I was feeling helpless.
Bion would also sometimes suggest guesses based on ‘hunches’, as he called them, where I think he was drawing evidence from his own emotional experience.

I felt Bion was with me. The loneliness was much less intense. In time I could feel and hear his emotionality as he interpreted (i.e. guessed) what I might be struggling to find access to and feel in the moment. He would say that even though he rarely told me directly of his own emotional experience I was likely to know a great deal about him based on what he was and was not able to understand of me.

The theoretical understanding of psychoanalytic technique that I will now describe has grown mostly out of my experience as an analysand of Bion, a reader of Bion and others, and my experiences as an analyst over decades.

A psychoanalytic interpretation, in my view, is a mature, respectful, compassionate, disciplined educated guess, an hypothesis, a description in words, accompanied by the appropriate music and dance, that addresses the analysand's emotional experience in the moment.

Stated theoretically, the analysand's internal psychic objects, intuited by the analyst to be active but unnoticed by the analysand in the moment of the session, are described in the interpretation.

Psychic objects are ephemeral, evanescent and only able to be observed privately by the individual. In fashioning an interpretation, the analyst uses his or her own psychoanalytic objects, also ephemeral, evanescent, and only observable by the analyst, as these are evoked and provoked by the analysand's communication and behaviour.

Returning to the analyst's intuition of the analysand's experience, similar psychical objects have been experienced by analysand and analyst, having been first communicated by the former to the latter. This is very similar, if not equivalent to, the baby's conveying to the mother by way of normal projective identification its incomprehensible experiences (beta elements).

These beta elements are acted upon by maternal reverie (alpha function), thereby creating alpha elements which are returned via maternal (parental) ministrations, often including the spoken, but incomprehensible word - where it is the accompanying music and dance that convey the understanding to the baby of any age.

I would modify maternal reverie to parental reverie, including paternal reverie and maternal reverie in mature, cooperative, respectful, genital union, ministering to the baby.

In Freudian terms, compassion is related to a passive receptive feminine position under the aegis of genital libido, and discipline is related to an active masculine attitude under the aegis of genital libido. In these terms Mature compassion, in a depressive-position organisation of personality, and discipline cooperate in the formation of dream function alpha (alpha function).

When as psychoanalysts we make accurate verbal interpretations from the heart, utilizing our own psychic objects, our words - in some ways like the lyrics of a song – bring the song and dance aspects together for the patient in a truthful way. I am increasingly convinced that it is the music and dance of our interpretations that are transformative to the infantile aspects of our analysands.

The analyst needs, in the unconscious, to be under the auspices as it were, of a mature internal couple - mother and father - in genital communion with one another in relationship to the psychoanalytic objects being experienced.

Such attuned empathic experience in turn allows for psychical growth in both analyst and analysand. In Learning from Experience, Bion proposes that, alongside physical ministrations to the baby, the mother shows her love through her reverie (Bion 1962:36).

I am suggesting that the analyst's main work is to make this internal mother and father in genital communion available to the analysand.

I believe the internal mature parental couple in the analyst is the psychoanalyst's instrument in tending to and analyzing the unborn, immature, somatised, psychotic, criminal, perverse, autistic, and otherwise pathologic and pathogenic aspects of our analysands.

Such in vivo parental alpha function shows the analysand how the intolerable, toxic, undigested experiences (beta elements) can be withstood (detoxified, digested). Through the mysterious process of introjective identification in a mature K link between analyst and analysand, the analysand develops a capacity that he or she did not previously possess. Under proper conditions of genitality - mature, cooperative, respectful, compassion and discipline - the capacity for meaningful emotional experience is acquired.

Returning to my personal experience with Bion. What was incomprehensible upon early readings of Bion became, as time passed, increasingly understandable. Now when I reflect on my psychic experience as a practicing analyst, I can increasingly feel the emotionality underlying his texts, which at first reading were so difficult. At times the experience of reading him can be almost shockingly and embarrassingly intimate. His writings are personal letters to colleagues and fellow travellers as yet unmet and unborn, in the practice of analysis, now and years hence.

He took very seriously the task of communicating his emotional experiences - his psychical experiences - in the practice of analysis to other practitioners of analysis, so that we could compare them with our own experiences and engage Bion in dialogue about the practice of analysis.

He wrote that as analysts we need theories and abstractions when we try to write and speak to one another about our work, partly because these experiences are so painful. Our theories and abstractions make the pain more bearable to us. He wrote that if only one or two understood his writings, he would count himself lucky. He was very aware of how ‘psychoanalese’ can become dead and empty shibboleths that crush the life out of psychoanalysis, in practitioners and analysands alike. He warned that psychoanalysis may very well not survive the psychoanalytic Establishment.

Another feature of Bion's technique that became noticeable and fairly common from early on was something with which I was totally unfamiliar at the time, and would not previously have thought of as interpretation. This was his calling attention to what I call ‘the splits’.

He would note that I had talked about A, B, and C, for example, and that each was a different facet of the same experience viewed from different angles, vertices or points-of-view. This helped me move between PS and D. The effect was not only acknowledging the discovery of a realisation and conception (D), but of unsaturating the conception so that it was now available as a preconception (PS) awaiting the next discovery through another realisation (D).

I recall features of a dream which illustrate his calling attention to different vertices. In one part of the dream I was swimming under water which was cloudy and turbulent, so that I could only vaguely make out shapes, colours, and motion. In another part I was situated at a high vista point. The atmosphere was still, and details of the expansive vista were sharp and clear. Bion related this to my bringing together two views of emotional experience regarding some specific event which was evident at the time. I was usually surprised by such interpretations, though they were frequent. I found them so simple and yet integrating and useful. At times when he and I were not clear as to what, specifically and concretely, the different vertices of a dream or association were referring, he would ask for other associations, which often yielded the needed information. He would say that his own questions eliciting associations were also interpretations to call attention to the questions.

I recall a particular session, probably within the first year of my analysis, in which he began an interpretation from something I had said, the link to which was clear at the time. The interpretation was in typical, Kleinian part-object language. I was utterly outraged by such a meaningless bunch of jargon, but before I could express outrage and dismay, Bion went on to say something like,

‘I have no idea whether there is any truth in what I just said, nor what it would mean in more practical and concrete terms. But you may; so I mention it to you in case you have some knowledge of it’.

I was flabbergasted. The room seemed to literally brighten. I felt a rush of associations which were indeed emotionally alive, along with feelings of amazement, exhilaration, discovery, hope, and so on. I knew this was the way that, in time, one might carry on an ongoing self-analysis. It also emphasized Bion's faith in psychoanalysis and its aesthetic qualities, and his willingness to take a leap, a chance, to use the link we had developed. There were many such instances thereafter. I recall another one that involved my not confirming an interpretation he had made by accessing the emotional experience he was calling to my attention. I was ready to let it go when he said, ‘It may be the sort of thing you experienced with an aunt’.
In a flash, the emotional experience came into my awareness, through a memory of just such an experience with an aunt. This is another example of his likely using his own psychoanalytic objects to successfully intuit mine.

Characteristic of Bion's technique was his use of questions. When I would mention things in conceptual terms he would often, if not usually, ask if I were thinking of something specific. If I were not, he would often ask if I could think of something specific, adding, ‘The specific details may help me better understand your experience and give me some clue as to what to say’.
Here, I think, he was helping the search not only for my internal objects, but for my associations to elicit his own objects which would hopefully closely correspond to mine. If successful, he would not only understand my emotional (psychical) experience, but perhaps be able to call attention to additional psychical or ‘protopsychical’ experiences, brought to life in me by his having utilized the emotions evoked in him via the specific details of my associations elicited by his questions.

A noteworthy set of experiences occurred on occasions when, not having grasped an interpretation, I would ask if he could repeat it - to be met with his not uncommon response,

‘It is too late’ or ‘too far gone’. A related set of remarks would occur when he might ask me what I had meant by some earlier remark, including the comment that it might be too far gone for me to say. At first, I was dismayed and bemused by his comments that it was too late to repeat what he had said, and at times I felt he was deliberately withholding. But I now think, and at times even then suspected, that such remarks were due to the evanescent nature of psychoanalytic objects, and especially when he needed access to his psychoanalytic objects in order to make an alive interpretation. Instead of resorting to memory and desire, which are unsuited to psychic reality, he focused on that which can only be observed and described in the moment of its occurrence in analyst or analysand.

A recurring, even fairly frequent, feature of Bion’s technique was the use of sarcasm, including facetious sarcasm, that sometimes shocked, stunned, frightened, and confused me, and which I never really got used to. I did, in time, get tougher and more resilient in response to it. An example would be my commenting on his sounding sarcastic or facetious, and his responding that I was ‘perspicacious’, which response also felt sarcastic to me. Was he responding to some sarcasm or aggression in me of which I was unaware? The question is still open.

Another innovative class of interpretation, almost entirely new by comparison with what I had learned in my classical American training, was what I refer to as ‘Column 6 interpretations’.

A straightforward example of such an interpretation would be an analysand complaining of chest pain in himself or a loved one, evoking an action-oriented experience in the analyst, transitory or otherwise, such as the idea of calling an ambulance or getting himself or a loved one to a hospital.

Such a psychic object in the analyst might result in an interpretation that the analysand may somewhere have the idea of calling an ambulance or getting the loved one to the E.R.

This form of interpretation can easily sound like advice or be construed as advice by the analysand. These interpretations are not advice, but rather call attention to a state of mind enabling the analysand, seemingly oblivious to the possible urgency of the situation, to consider or reject taking an action. The analysand is then presented with an option that was previously unavailable. I am not certain how often such interpretations are made by more classical Kleinian analysts. I do know interpretations addressing projective identification in (Grid terms) A6 with + and - (L,H,K) links are characteristic of classical Kleinian interpretations.

These interpretations can, I suggest, facilitate what Bion referred to as the Language of Achievement, the type of psychical (emotional and ideational) experience (feeling and thinking) which leads to thoughtful decisions and actions in both the internal and external worlds.

Bion describes the particular senses of loneliness, responsibility and concern, including concern about whether one may be acting out by giving advice instead of interpreting, or whether the analysand will misconstrue such interpretations as advice. I found that my classical Freudian training did not provide models useful to me for making precisely these facilitating interpretations. This inability particularly contributed to my earlier sense of dissatisfaction with my practice of analysis. The omission of these interpretations at a propitious time deprives analysands of access to their ‘Language of Achievement’, the emotional experience needed in order to make useful changes in their lives externally and internally.

I think these ‘Column 6 interpretations’ facilitate (in Bion’s terms) K to O transformations - to become, indeed to be, one's self.

Yet another technical observation made by Bion was that reactive aggression due to the absence of needed alpha function, with the resultant hypertrophied projective identification, needs to be clearly differentiated from the envy aroused by the presence of needed alpha function supplied by the analyst (mature parental couple).

And another outgrowth of Bion's development of Klein's model of mind is the differentiation of the various component voices in the ensemble of internal objects and parts of self regarding the same psychical object (envy, for example). Each component voice needs to be discretely felt by the analysand so that each voice can be individually and distinctly considered by the mature internal parents, allowing selective choices as to which voices are heeded for choosing specific action, whether wholesome gratification and/or constraint.

I hope this description of my personal experience with Bion may help to clarify these aspects in his writings as you come across them in your psychoanalytic sojourn.

References

Bion, W.R. (1962) Learning from Experience. New York: Basic Books.
Bion, W.R. (1963) Elements of Psychoanalysis. London: Heinemann.
Bion, W.R. (1965) Transformations. New York: Basic Books.
Bion, W.R. (1967) “Notes on Memory and Desire.”
Psychoanalytic Forum 2:271-280.
Bion, W.R. (1970) Attention and Interpretation. London: Tavistock.
Stern, D. (1998) The Interpersonal World of the Infant. London: Karnac.

James Gooch