Wilfred Bion

Bion was born on 8 September 1897 at Mattra (also spelled Muttra), in the United Provinces of British India, where his father worked as a civil engineer. Bion Talamo's entry describes the family as of Swiss Huguenot and Anglo-Indian descent, with a background in Protestant missionary work. He lived in India until he was eight. In 1905 he was sent to school in England and stayed there for ten years. Chris Mawson's account of his life for the Melanie Klein Trust records that he was unhappy as a boarder.

From 1916 to 1918 Bion served with the Royal Tank Regiment in France. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Order, made a chevalier of the Légion d'honneur and mentioned in dispatches. After the war he read history at Queen's College, Oxford, from 1919 to 1921; Bion Talamo dates the start of his interest in Freud to these years. He then studied medicine at University College Hospital in London from 1924 to 1930 and won the Gold Medal for Surgery. There he trained under the surgeon Wilfred Trotter. Mawson counts Trotter's book Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War (1916) as an important influence on Bion's interest in group mentality.

After qualifying, Bion worked at the Tavistock Clinic for some seven years. Mawson notes that the writer Samuel Beckett was among the people he saw there. From 1933 to 1939 he was secretary of the Medical Section of the British Psychological Society. In 1938 he began an analysis with John Rickman, which the outbreak of the Second World War cut short.

During the Second World War Bion served as an army psychiatrist. Mawson writes that he treated traumatised soldiers and worked on boards that selected officers, and that his later group theory drew on this experience. Bion and Rickman ran what became known as the first Northfield experiment, in the training wing of a military psychiatric hospital. Their joint report, "Intra-group tensions in therapy", appeared in the Lancet in 1943; it was later reprinted as the Pre-view of Experiences in Groups¹. Bion Talamo writes that as a military psychiatrist "he initiated a new approach to group therapy."

In 1945 Bion became chairman of the Executive Committee of the Tavistock Clinic, and in 1946 he chaired the Medical Section of the British Psychological Society. At the Tavistock he took therapeutic groups. Seven papers on these groups, published in the journal Human Relations between 1948 and 1951, form the core of Experiences in Groups.

In the same years Bion had a training analysis with Melanie Klein, which lasted into the early 1950s. Bion Talamo dates its start to 1945 and Mawson to around 1946. He was elected to membership of the British Psychoanalytical Society in 1950. He married twice and had three children. His daughter Parthenope Bion Talamo became a psychoanalyst in Italy.

Through the 1950s Bion analysed psychotic patients, and it is this work, in Mawson's account, for which he is best known. Two other analysts, Hanna Segal and Herbert Rosenfeld, were doing the same, and Mawson recommends reading Bion's clinical papers alongside theirs. He directed the London Clinic of Psychoanalysis from 1956 to 1962 and was president of the British Psychoanalytical Society from 1962 to 1965. He also chaired the Melanie Klein Trust. His clinical papers of this period, including Attacks on Linking, were collected in Second Thoughts (1967). Between 1962 and 1970 he published four theoretical books.

In January 1968 Bion left London for California, where he settled in Los Angeles. In his last decade, Bion Talamo writes, he taught widely in Latin America. During these years he wrote A Memoir of the Future, published in three volumes in 1975, 1977 and 1979. Mawson describes it as a recasting of his theory in the form of a novel, and Bion Talamo says it is "commonly considered challenging". The Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society made him an honorary member in 1978, and the A. K. Rice Institute made him an honorary fellow in 1979. He returned to England in 1979 and died in Oxford a few months later, on 8 November 1979.

In the Tavistock groups, as Experiences in Groups reports, Bion declined the role of leader and interpreted what the group as a whole was doing. He wrote of a group mentality and a group culture, and he found two levels of functioning at work in every group. The work-group is the side of a group that cooperates on its real, declared task. It keeps in touch with reality and can learn from experience.

Alongside the work group, and breaking in on it, the group behaves as if its members shared an unspoken Basic assumption. Bion named three. In dependency the group relies on a leader who will provide. In fight-flight it bands together to fight or flee an enemy. In pairing it rests its hope on a messiah not yet born. Only one basic assumption is active at a time; Bion held that the others lie in what he called the protomental system.

Bion also asked how individuals are drawn into an assumption that none of them has stated or chosen. To explain it he borrowed the term valency from chemistry, for a person's readiness to combine with others in a basic assumption. He also suggested that some institutions act as specialised work groups, each managing one assumption on society's behalf: the Church manages dependency, the army fight-flight and the aristocracy pairing.

The book's final paper, "Group dynamics: a re-view" (1952), restates these findings in Kleinian terms. The basic assumptions now appear as defences against the psychotic anxieties of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, and the group stands for the mother's body. Projective identification explains why the therapist feels manipulated into a role.

In the same paper Bion takes up Freud's Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego⁴. He argues that the individual is a group animal, and that the family pattern Freud found in groups overlies more primitive mechanisms. The digest of the book calls it a founding text of the Tavistock group-relations tradition. Bion Talamo describes the influence of his group work as "both very rapid and widespread", but Mawson records that Klein did not support his ideas on groups.

In the 1950s Bion's papers turned to the psychotic part of the personality. In Attacks on Linking² (1959) he described how this part attacks whatever links one object to another. The prototype is the link between infant and breast. Others are the parental couple, the words a patient breaks up in a stammer, and the bond between analyst and patient. The attacks spring from envy of creative coupling and from hatred of emotion and of reality.

The paper also widened the scope of Projective identification. Bion treated its normal form as a means of communication: the infant puts into the mother feelings it cannot bear, so that she can hold them and return them. When the object refuses the projection, the infant projects with growing force. Bion traced the disturbance to two sources: the infant's inborn destructiveness and envy, and an object that cannot take projections in.

The outcome is a primitive internal object, the Ego-destructive superego. It forbids projective identification and attacks the links of emotion and thought. Bion calls the links that survive "perverse, cruel and sterile". The process is treated further under Attacks on linking.

Learning from Experience³ (1962), the first of Bion's four theoretical books, explains how experience becomes available for thought. Bion used deliberately empty signs, so that his terms would not carry earlier meanings, and described the personality as a set of functions and the factors that make them up.

Alpha-function turns sense impressions and emotions into alpha-elements, which can be stored, dreamed and thought. What it fails to transform remains as beta-elements: things-in-themselves, fit only to be evacuated by projective identification or acted out. Alpha-elements form a contact-barrier, a term Bion took from Freud's Project, which keeps conscious and unconscious apart. Where alpha-elements are lacking, a beta-screen forms instead, and a patient who cannot dream cannot properly fall asleep or wake. When alpha-function is reversed, it produces bizarre objects.

In this account Bion reworked Freud's dream-work. Alpha-function works on experience whether the person is asleep or awake, and dreaming is what keeps conscious and unconscious apart. Bion Talamo records his view that alpha-function could replace Freud's theory of the primary and secondary processes.

The model's first setting is mother and infant. The mother's reverie takes in the infant's projected fear of dying and returns it in a form the infant can bear. When reverie fails, the infant takes back a nameless dread instead. For Bion, thinking itself begins when an expectation meets frustration: an absence that can be tolerated becomes a thought. He tied this to Freud's two principles of mental functioning.

Bion named three links between objects: L (love), H (hate) and K (knowledge). K stands for getting to know, not for possessing knowledge. Its negative, minus K, is driven by envy and builds a moralising "super"-ego. The book also discusses the selected fact, an idea taken from Poincaré, and the movement between the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, which Bion wrote as Ps↔D. It ends with the relation of container (♀) to contained (♂).

Elements of Psycho-Analysis⁵ (1963) gave container-contained its sign ♀♂ and counted it among the elements of psychoanalysis, together with Ps↔D and the links L, H and K. Bion argued that a psychoanalytic object has three dimensions: sense, myth and passion.

The book introduced the Grid, a table for classifying thoughts. Its rows run from beta-elements up to algebraic calculus, and its columns record the use a thought is put to, from definitory hypothesis through notation, attention and inquiry to action. Bion read the Oedipus myth as a model of K, centred on the arrogance of curiosity. He held that analysis aims to increase the patient's capacity to suffer pain, not to relieve it.

In Transformations⁶ (1965), subtitled "Change from Learning to Growth", Bion treated analysis as the study of transformations and of what stays invariant through them. He illustrated the idea with a painting of a poppy field, in which the field can still be recognised.

Behind every transformation lies O, his sign for the ultimate reality of an emotional experience. O cannot be known; it can only be become. Bion distinguished rigid-motion transformations, with transference as his example, from projective transformations and transformations in hallucinosis. He also described the catastrophic change of psychotic breakdown. The move from K to O, from knowing about an experience to becoming it, meets resistance. He treated rival psychoanalytic theories as transformations of the same realities.

Attention and Interpretation⁷ (1970) drew out the consequences for technique. Bion criticised a medical model of analysis and relied on intuition instead. He asked the analyst to set aside memory, desire and understanding, and called the stance this requires an act of faith, which he wrote as F. He related it to Keats's idea of negative capability. The analyst passes from patience to security, two states Bion compared to Ps and D. A transformation in O changes the person who undergoes it.

The book also extended container-contained to the relation between an individual and a group, such as the mystic or genius and the Establishment. Bion called such relations commensal, symbiotic or parasitic. One of the book's formulations is that a true thought needs no thinker, while a lie needs one.

Bion Talamo writes that Bion's psychoanalytic ideas "engendered a great deal of controversy, and were hardly accepted until the 1970s." Mawson notes that Klein did not support Bion's use of an enlarged notion of projective identification to understand countertransference. He adds that O "still remains something of a challenge to contemporary analysts".

Several Kleinians built on Bion's work. Hanna Segal, like Bion a pupil of Klein who analysed psychotic patients, followed his account of pathological projective identification. She linked her own theory of symbol formation to alpha and beta elements, as in Dream, Phantasy and Art⁸ (1991). Donald Meltzer devoted the third part of The Kleinian Development⁹ (1978) to the clinical significance of Bion's work, and took his theory of thinking as the next step after Freud and Klein. In The Claustrum¹⁰ (1992) Meltzer reserved the term projective identification for Bion's communicative projection into a receptive container. He set Intrusive identification against it as its omnipotent counterpart. Bion supervised Martha Harris, whose model of the child in the family, written with Meltzer, rests on his ideas.

Bion's influence also reached beyond the Kleinians. André Green met Bion in 1976, and drew on his ideas, alongside Winnicott's, in his views of borderline states and of technique. For Thomas Ogden, reverie, container-contained, alpha-function and dreaming became the foundation of his work from the late 1990s.

In On Not Being Able to Dream¹¹ (2003) Ogden followed Bion in holding that dreaming creates the difference between conscious and unconscious. In On Holding and Containing, Being and Dreaming¹² (2004) he set Bion's container-contained, which concerns the processing of thoughts, beside Winnicott's holding, which concerns being. He continued this line in Rediscovering Psychoanalysis¹³ (2009). In Ontological Psychoanalysis or "What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up?"¹⁴ (2019) he traced Ontological psychoanalysis to the later Bion's turn from knowing about experience to becoming it.

Bion's group papers were collected in Experiences in Groups and Other Papers¹ (1961). His clinical papers on psychosis, including Attacks on Linking² (1959), were collected in Second Thoughts (1967). His four theoretical books are Learning from Experience³ (1962), Elements of Psycho-Analysis⁵ (1963), Transformations⁶ (1965) and Attention and Interpretation⁷ (1970); the last is subtitled "A Scientific Approach to Insight in Psycho-Analysis and Groups". His later writing includes the three volumes of A Memoir of the Future (1975–1979), and his autobiography The Long Week-End appeared after his death, in 1982. His collected works, edited by Chris Mawson, were published in 2014.