Elements of Psycho-Analysis

Elements of Psycho-Analysis (1963) is the second of Wilfred Bion's four theoretical books on thinking and psychoanalytic method, following Learning from Experience (1962) and preceding Transformations (1965) and Attention and Interpretation (1970). Troubled by the distance between what an analyst experiences in the session and the theories used to describe it, Bion looks for a small number of elements, comparable to Euclid's axioms or the letters of an alphabet, whose combinations could represent both psychoanalytic theories and the clinical facts they concern. He proposes as elements the relation of container and contained (♀♂); the oscillation between the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions (Ps↔D), in which a selected fact suddenly gathers scattered data into a coherent whole; the links of love, hate and knowledge (L, H, K); and reason and idea (R, I). A genuine psychoanalytic object, he argues, extends in three dimensions: in the domain of sense, since it can be observed; in the domain of myth, since it can be represented by a personal story such as the Oedipus myth; and in the domain of passion, the intense emotion that shows two minds are linked without violence. To classify statements made in the session, by patient and analyst alike, the book introduces the Grid, a table with two axes. Its vertical axis traces the genetic development of thought from beta-elements and alpha-elements through dream thoughts and myths, pre-conceptions, conceptions and concepts to scientific deductive systems and algebraic calculi; its horizontal axis records the use a statement serves: definitory hypothesis, a falsehood held against anxiety (column ψ), notation, attention, inquiry and action. Bion reads the Oedipus myth as a story about the drive to know and the arrogance of curiosity, and treats its components as elements of a pre-conception. The book ends with an account of reversible perspective, in which a patient appears to accept an interpretation while silently reversing its premises, so that a dynamic conflict is made static and pain is evaded. The aim of analysis, on this view, is not to relieve pain but to enlarge the patient's capacity to bear it.