Attention and Interpretation

Attention and Interpretation (1970), subtitled A Scientific Approach to Insight in Psycho-Analysis and Groups, is the last of Wilfred Bion's four theoretical books on thinking and psychoanalytic method, after Learning from Experience, Elements of Psycho-Analysis and Transformations. It begins by questioning the medical model: a physician works from what the senses report, whereas the realities an analyst meets, such as anxiety, have no shape, colour or smell, and must be intuited rather than perceived. Bion names the ultimate reality of the session O, the unknowable truth or thing-in-itself, which cannot be known but only 'become'; knowledge (K) can describe its evolutions, but a transformation in O changes the person who undergoes it. To be open to O, the analyst should set aside memory, desire and even understanding, since each fills the mind with what is already known or wanted and blocks perception of what is evolving now. Bion calls this disciplined state an act of faith, and links it to the 'negative capability' described by Keats: the capacity to remain in uncertainty and doubt without straining after fact and reason. He describes the analyst's movement from patience, a state close to the paranoid-schizoid position in which incoherence and persecution are tolerated, to security, akin to the depressive position, in which a pattern emerges and an interpretation can be given. The second half extends the theory of container and contained to the relation between the mystic or genius, who carries a new and disruptive idea, and the Establishment of the group, which must both preserve the idea and protect itself from it. Such relations may be commensal, symbiotic or parasitic, and the same pattern governs the relation between an emotion and the words meant to hold it, as in a stammer that breaks the words apart. Bion also argues that true thoughts need no thinker, while a lie requires one, and discusses the psychotic patient's experience of an unbounded mental space and of the 'no-thing' left where an object was. The book closes by distinguishing language that substitutes for action or thought from a 'language of achievement' that is itself a prelude to growth.