Bions Model of the Mind

Karen Fraley

ABSTRACT. The author sets out to locate Bions model of the mind within the developmental history of psychoanalysis, from Freud to Klein to Bion, using biographical material and clinical case examples, to illustrate Bions concepts of container/contained, his understanding and use of projective identification, his extension of the use of the countertransference, and his differentiation between the psychotic and non-psychotic aspects of the mind. Links, and attacks against linking are discussed, as well as Bions thoughts about learning versus knowing, being versus becoming and his emphasis on the essential importance of the development of the capacity to think. doi:10.1300/J032v14n01_04 [Article copies available for a fee from
The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-HAWORTH. E-mail address: <docdelivery@haworthpress.com> Website: <http://www.HaworthPress.com> 2007 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.]

KEYWORDS. Container/contained, projective identification, anxiety, psychic truth

INTRODUCTION: SETTING THE STAGE Wilfred Bion, a member of the British school of object relations, offers us a unique and complex model of the mind, as a tool for understanding
Karen Fraley, LCSW, BCD, is Graduate and Faculty Member, International Psychotherapy Institute, Chevy Chase, MD and Philadelphia, PA. Currently she is in private practice in Exton, PA (E-mail: kfraley1@verizon.net). Psychoanalytic Social Work, Vol. 14(1) 2007 Available online at http://psw.haworthpress.com 2007 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1300/J032v14n01_04

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the clinical encounter. A remarkable man, born and raised in India, educated as a young boy in England, Bion employs philosophy and mathematical principles to think about the mind, the personality, trauma and the traumatized state, extending the fundamental principles described by Freud and Klein (Meltzer, 1978). Full of ambiguity and idiosyncrasies (Meltzer, 1978: 274), saturated/unsaturated words, points, lines and trajectories, time and space, facts and phantasies, and different vertices, Bion requires each of us to advance our thinking in line with our deepest emotional states and memories. Reading Bion is a daunting task, an exercise in containing our own frustration, but doing so provides rich rewards. As Meltzer (1978) states, Freud set out to create a new science to describe the mind, and his drive/structure model develops the theory of innate, biological drives impinging on the mind through the body, activating the psychic apparatus and stimulating thought. Klein extended Freuds model, elaborating the affective experiences of the internal world, and placing emotion and unconscious phantasy at the heart of psychic experience. Bion adds another dimension to this work, advancing us further into the realm of thinking, in which the mind is the apparatus for perceiving emotional experiences, organizing them, and generating meaning for development and growth. In Freuds model, the activity of the drives increases tension in the system, demanding release and satisfaction; and his hydraulic, mechanistic model posits that knowledge of the object is necessary for the satisfaction of the impulse (Meltzer, 1978). The drive for gratification forces the ego to action and counteracted by the pressure of external reality and frustration, the ego generates thought. Thinking begins with the delay of gratification (Freud, 1911). For Klein, the mind is constantly compromised by the forces of the death instincts, and, in the face of these anxieties, struggles to maintain the good object, resorting to splitting and omnipotent phantasies when necessary. The internal world is characterized by security or the lack of it (Meltzer, 1978). For Klein, the desire to know the object is a drive of its own. In Bions view emotional experiences penetrate our awareness and require integration to generate psychic truth and understanding for the healthy functioning of the mind (Meltzer, 1978; Symington, 1966). Placing the emphasis on both the intra-psychic experience and on interpersonal relationships, Bion (1962: 42) says, An emotional experience cannot be conceived of in isolation from a relationship.

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BIOGRAPHY Wilfred Bion was born in 1897 in India, where he lived until the age of eight, when he was sent to boarding school in England. He never returned to India. In 1916, at the age of 19, he joined the Royal Tank Regiment and was posted on the front line of WWI. His traumatic experiences of this devastatingly destructive war, in which more than 10 million people died, motivated his later work (F. Bion, 1995; Symington, 1996; Meltzer, 1978). Bion received the Distinguished Service Order for his service, an award about which he felt deeply ambivalent and was keenly aware of the futility and waste, the irrationality and stupidity of war, and of those in command (Bion, 1982; F. Bion, 1995; Symington, 1996). Much of his thinking struggles to make sense of the senseless. After the war, he attended Oxford University and went on to medical school. He decided to pursue psychiatry and trained in psychotherapy at the Tavistock Clinic. There he practiced psychoanalysis with John Rickman, and later with Melanie Klein. In 1950, Bion presented his membership paper to the British Psychoanalytic Society, and began a long and distinguished career in the Society (F. Bion, 1995), where he served as director, chairman of the publications committee and the Melanie Klein Trust, and member of the training committee. He published his four major works during the 1960s: Learning from Experience, Elements of Psychoanalysis, Transformations, and Attention and Interpretation. In 1967 he moved to Los Angeles, despite the risks of practicing medicine there with a British medical degree, and as a resident alien (F. Bion, 1995: 8). He wanted more freedom and he felt loaded with honors and sunk without a trace (Grotstein, 1981: 5) in the British psychoanalytic community. The move was risky, and heavily criticized by colleagues in London (F. Bion, 1995). His new colleagues in California could not understand his work. He traveled to South America to lecture and teach and was very well-received there. In 1978, he returned to England planning to continue working in London and Los Angeles. He was 82 years old and still teaching all over the world. However, he was diagnosed with leukemia and died very soon after. A remarkable man, compassionate and humorous, gentle, courageous, deeply moved by beauty and art, he threw himself into thinking about the psychotic part of the mind, struggled to understand it, and felt the frustrations of his limited understanding very deeply (F. Bion, 1995). He had a strong respect for the truth, and placed it at the center of

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mental health (F. Bion, 1995; Symington, 1996; Meltzer, 1978). Catastrophe, anxiety, and dread are the bedrocks upon which the human mind attempts development and growth. He focused on the clinical encounter, in the moment-to-moment here and now, using hypothetical models to test the validity of his observations (Meltzer, 1978) and was fully aware of unknown forces exerting pressure on and against the mind, in both the patient and the analyst (Bion, 1962). For Bion, experiences, emotions, dreams, phantasies, and body sensations and impressions are the fuel for generating thoughts, which require a thinker, and nourish us with understanding and meaning in the daily struggle against primitive forces of envy, profound anxieties, rage, and death (Bion, 1962; Meltzer, 1978; Symington, 1996). CONTAINER/CONTAINED Bion (1967) differentiated the psychotic and the non-psychotic aspects of the mind and assumed that experience is constantly shifting between these two worlds, developing Kleins view of the movement from the paranoid/schizoid position to the depressive position. Every individual mind contains both psychotic and non-psychotic aspects and the proportions shift from so-called healthy neuroses, to the more severe characterological disorders, depending on the activity of powerful unconscious phantasies. The paranoid/schizoid position is characterized by persecutory anxiety, fragmentation, splitting and projective identification, and symbolic capacity is compromised, so that what is perceived is reality, and the internal world is populated by part objects, either all good or all bad. In the depressive position the whole object is present, with the integration of both good and bad aspects, promoting the capacity for concern for the other, depressive guilt and the sense of psychic responsibility (Bion, 1962, 1967). Symbolic thinking allows the creation of a joint narrative, between self and other, as well as the capacity to think ones own thoughts (Bion, 1962). Bion (1962, 1967) extends the concept of projective identification, in which the bad object is split off and projected into the other, and, in his thinking, it becomes not just a means to evacuate intolerable anxiety, but also a means of communication, a vehicle to reduce the burden of anxiety, to foster the capacity to think. The employment of projective identification by the psychotic part of the mind is contrasted with projective identification employed by the non-psychotic part (Bion, 1967). The therapists countertransference, previously seen as a road block to

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understanding, is used to distinguish between the types of projective identification deployed, and to identify and retrieve split-off aspects of the self (Bion, 1962). Projective identification is the link par excellence between the mother and the baby, the analyst and the patient. Primitive, infantile anxieties constitute the primary psychic experience; not only castration anxiety, which Freud describes, and not only annihilation anxiety, as defined by Melanie Klein, but also, in Bions view, nameless dread (Bion, 1962: 96); the experience of the self in infinite space, smallness, catastrophic anxiety about psychic change, devastation, and trauma. Bion (1962), following Klein, conceives of the infant projecting its bad objects, anxiety and fear, into the good breast, where persecutory emotions are modified through maternal reverie and, consequently, re-introjected by the infant in usable and tolerable form. Reverie is the state of mind that is receptive to communications from the loved object about love and hate, about the good and the bad object (Bion, 1962). The word reverie is a French word meaning to daydream, or to play-dream. The mothers capacity for reverie provides the infant with a means to tolerate frustration, to have a sense of reality, and to understand the emotional world. Klein is very clear in seeing projective identification as a narcissistic, intrapsychic process, occurring through omnipotent, unconscious phantasies (Meltzer, 1978). Bion expands projective identification into an interpersonal phenomenon, the pressure of one object acting on the other, with omnipotent phantasy aspects personalized through the object relationship (Scharff, 1996). Bion (1962) uses the metaphor of container/contained to represent this process, a container into which the material is projected, and an object that represents the material projected, both suffused with emotion, and providing two possible outcomes: the material is modified and transformed into a tolerable object for the infant to hold on to, or, if the process is disabled or constricted, emotion is negated, the process is devoid of vitality and growth, and the material is re-introjected with an increased persecutory quality. In this way Bion (1962) values countertransference experiences as important clinical material essential to understanding the transference. The contained material seeks a container, just as the newborn baby seeks the breast (Bion, 1962). Bion uses the symbols for male and female to represent the container/contained relationship, both seeking the other, mating, penetrating and generating realizations, binding together emotional experience and thought, in a steady relationship to each other, which, over time, constructs knowledge about the self and the

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world, and, internalized by the baby, forms an apparatus for thinking (Bion, 1962). Lets look at the two scenarios: projective identification as communication and as an evacuation of the bad object. The infant, overwhelmed by intolerable anxiety, projects his distress onto his mother, and through her attunement to her baby, she takes in the projected emotional material, digests and mitigates it, and through her maternal reverie, responds to her baby and returns the projected emotional experience in a manageable form. As this process is repeated over time, the baby forms the rudimentary building blocks of thought: intolerable and unbearable emotional states are suffered, discerned, organized, and made meaningful. Meaning emerges from the object relationship, from the experience of self and other. The mothers words and attunement feed the hungry baby. Frustration can be tolerated long enough to trigger thought. The self is able to know its own attributes and experiences. The thinking capacity is nurtured and developed through the container/contained interaction, establishing the capacity for thought. In Bions words learning from experience (Bion, 1962) is possible. This forms the foundation for the self-observing ego, described by Freud as the basis of the healthy mind. If the mother is unable to receive the babys projected emotional state, and is not capable of reverie, then the infant re-introjects not just the original intolerable state, but an emotional state increased in power and strength, and experienced as a foreign body, an intrusive bad object, persecutory and hateful; a nameless dread (Bion, 1962: 96). Symbolization is not available. The experience cannot be registered, only denied, split off, and evacuated. In this case, projective identification is used as a withdrawal from reality into an omnipotent phantasy, in defiance of the burden of reality. Massive projective identification results in parts of the ego being located in the other, living an uncontrolled existence there, magnified in vitality, so the patient is caught between facing the reality he has expelled and the persecution of the other. Thought is destroyed, and violently projected (Bion, 1962). In clinical practice, the container is a psychological vessel to gather the projected bits and pieces, split-off fragments of the psyche. Elements are identified and not integrated, but rather held and considered in a medium of suspended action and judgment (Bion, 1962). Tolerated doubt, the capacity to maintain awareness of not knowing, to look into the darkness, without feelings of persecution and without feelings of therapeutic ambition, characterizes the optimum containment process (Bion, 1962). The container must remain integrated and flexible, open

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to constructing past experiences in a new way, with the capacity to line up the pieces and suspend putting them together, and to reformulate past experiences based on current conditions, and changing emotional variables (Bion, 1962). I sometimes think of this as something similar to the process of putting together a jigsaw puzzle: First all the pieces are laid out on the table, sorted, noted, and remembered. The container holds the pieces, which change and develop over time, linking with each other, constructing a picture of the patients internal world. The contained material must penetrate the container/therapist, and communicate the value of the experience, the emotion of it. Knowledge depends on the relationship between the container and the contained, increasing the capacity for understanding as the apparatus for thinking grows. In becoming more complex over time, and expanding the ability to abstract and think, the container can then consider more and more possibilities as the universe expands (Bion, 1962). If the container/therapist is too rigid, the contained material is compacted and pulverized (Bion, 1962). If the container/therapist is not stable enough, or too porous, the contained material is dispersed, and fragmented, and remains unintegrated. Bions container/contained concept differs from Winnicotts holding environment (Winnicott, 1958) in several ways (Scharff, 1996; Symington, 1996). The container/contained relationship occurs both intrapsychically and interpersonally (Scharff, 1996; Symington, 1996), represented in both dimensions, between subject and object. The holding environment is modeled upon the good enough mother (Winnicott, 1958), the healthy, normative quality of maintaining the body through adequate environmental care. The mother of a distressed baby might adjust the temperature of the room, or add a blanket, as well as provide reverie about the emotional state of her baby. As Symington (1996: 58) says, the container is non-sensuous; it is psychological rather than physical. Symington (1996: 58) goes on to say the container/contained relationship is active, and produces either integrating or destructive activity. The holding environment promotes well-being and growth. Many cases present problems of containment, especially those with a predominance of projected material. A patient might go on and on about other family members, judging and correcting others, provoking the therapist to agree or disagree, rather than to contain. Patients also push us to educate, to tell them what to do, rather than consider their particular internal situation.

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CASE MATERIAL: A BRIEF EXAMPLE OF CONTAINMENT This is a brief example of a problem with containment. The patient is a woman in once a week therapy for two years, who begins the session justifying her decision to divorce her husband. She likens the marriage to an addiction, and shes trying to break the pattern of her addiction. Her husband is irresponsible, yet he blames her for all the problems in the marriage. Her indignant, vindictive tone cuts to the core, but shes calm, and controlled. Shes confronting him, setting limits. He borrowed her car, left the window down, it rained all night. She told him he cant borrow her car anymore, because hes not responsible enough. He countered her attack and blamed the children, maintaining it was not his fault. Shes outraged by this. Then he didnt help her with the holiday dinner and, when she confronted him, he said he had nothing to do with her anxiety about preparing the meal. Her continued focus on him, his betrayal of her, along with her scorn and indignation for him, drove me away from her. I felt myself in a fog, drifting. Trying to make contact with her, I said that the addiction provided a means for her to avoid painful feelings about the relationship and her feelings of being unappreciated, unrecognized, unacknowledged. She responded, saying that her husband really does these things to her. She feels this way because of him; locating the action in him, and pressuring me to side with her and maintain her innocence. I agreed that these things really happen, adding that, when she takes the victim role and makes him out to be the bad person, she avoids her deeper feelings, a road we had been down before. She slowed down a bit and considered this. Then she said there is nothing she can do about his blaming her. She knows she has something to do with the constant arguments, but in this case she is totally innocent. I feel flattened, and heavy: shes right and I am wrong. This is the world of absolutes, and I am either with her or Im against her. Im caught up in her internal world. The bad object, located in the husband, is now located in me. She is innocent. Im the one who doesnt see her. Her confusion and turmoil is split off and projected. Im pulled into action and away from thinking. LINKS AND ATTACKS ON LINKS In this case the bad object is aggressively defended against, placed in the other and rigidly maintained there. Any awareness of the bad object

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being located within the self is blocked. Bion (1967) thought about how the mind blocks conscious awareness and stops the process of understanding. He provides us with a shorthand, notational system, using the concept of links, to track and contemplate the elements present and absent in the emotional experience of the countertransference in the clinical moment. These links are abstracts of a complex emotional situation, helping the therapist to perceive the psychic quality of the patients unconscious experience. To be used as a point of reference, the links characterize the affective connection between objects in relationship to each other. Bion (1962) postulates six essential links: L standing for love, H standing for hate, and K standing for knowledge. The three positive qualities also have negative forms: minus L, the absence of love, such as indifference; minus H, the absence of hate; and minus K, the absence of knowledge, such as envy. Other emotions such as greed, rivalry, and desire are subsumed under these basic groupings. Bion is not clear in defining minus L and minus H. He uses these to represent the absence of something, a silent dismantling and repudiation of the object. Love, hate, and knowledge are the fundamental passions stirring object relationships, connecting self to other, galvanizing thought, and a sense of reality, based on psychic truth. Bions emphasis on knowledge is similar to Kleins emphasis on desire to know the object as an inherent drive, which she calls the epistemophilic instinct, and Freuds view of the ego investing libido in the other as a sign of healthy psychic activity. For Bion, knowledge of the self, derived through experiences in relationships, is the hallmark of healthy psychic growth. In Bions terms, therapy is the process of generating the K link, increasing selfknowledge. Positive L, H, and K stand for the presence of the links between objects, between self and other, which is internalized over time forming links in the internal world between unconscious and consciousness, perceived experiences and associated verbal representations (body and mind), emotion and thought. Minus L, H, and K represent the absence of links, links attacked and destroyed through the destructive forces of the mind. This attacking destroys any symbolic process, so that emotions and experiences cannot be represented, either visually, as images, or verbally. What is attacked is the function of the link, the generative aspect of an experience mating with associated verbal thought, and a representation of the self, to produce thinking. Attacks on linking affect perception; the patient cant see himself, his feelings, or his internal experiences.

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When the infant seeks a breast and finds a no-breast (the absence of the breast) and is able to tolerate frustration, the no-breast stimulates thought, a way to think about it, that makes the absence tolerable. This is the process of the K link, in which knowledge about the self and the ability to tolerate frustration increase. If the infant cannot tolerate frustration, the no-breast and the associated frustration have to be evacuated. The infant projects fear, and the bad object into the breast and employs envy of the undisturbed breast. The good breast is now the envious breast and extracts the good from the projected frustration, forcing the residual fear back into the infant, so that the infant now contains, as Bion (1967: 37) says, an unremitting dread of imminent annihilation. The infants mind is now taken over by the persecuting psychotic anxiety of this dread, fears of being inside the body of the mother and her destruction, fears of retaliation. The minus K pair is dominated by absence, an internal world without an external, a psyche without a body, a persecuting super-ego imposed on an ego. An atmosphere of hatred and relentless criticism prevails, based on moral certitude. Guilt plays a strong hand against the self, supporting the persecuting superegos power, killing off any questioning. Might is right and power is the supreme objective. Omnipotent phantasies, made possible through denial and disavowal, manipulate the external world to line up with the internal. Avoidance of psychic reality is the ultimate objective, to be purchased at any cost. Evasion predominates. The needed object is the bad object, which exists outside our possession, and arouses feelings of needing, longing, yearning, and emptiness, which must be deflected. Feelings of hatred toward these emotional experiences, toward emotional reality, and toward life take hold (Bion, 1962). The transference is the conduit through which these internal objects, and the links which bind them together, are activated in the therapist-patient encounter. When minus K prevails, patients fortify their position in therapy by disproving the interpretations, so that misunderstanding becomes superior to understanding. When H predominates, violence and conflict are used to protect against the guilt of a loving connection. With L, the patient wants support and encouragement, rather than understanding and integration. CASE MATERIAL Getting back to my patient. Early on in the treatment she recounted a dream, in which she was alone in a room, with the door locked, her

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mother pleading on the other side of the door for her to come out, and my patient refusing, hiding behind the door, keeping it locked. I thought this showed her activity in remaining unknown, as well as her attack against object relationships and against the link between self and object. She lived in a world of self or other, each polarized against the other, not engaged in a joint activity. In the marriage, she felt devalued and shut out. She described her husband as uninterested in her needs, silently going his own way. She wanted a second child, he refused to discuss it. She wanted to move to the country and have a farm, he refused again. He blamed her for the problems in the marriage: If she would not be so forceful and demanding, everything would be fine. Her very deep feelings of despair and longing were covered over by an aggressive greediness. She sacrificed herself for her son and her husband, narcissistically resigning herself to less, while aggressively demanding more: more attention, more communication, more of a partnership in the family. If she did more for her husband and son, they would do more for her. She attempted to control the treatment, canceling sessions during critical times when she felt most vulnerable, such as when her husband was recovering from a life-threatening illness, while making it clear to me that she was keeping her appointments with others: her chiropractor and masseuse. She would tell me about conversations with friends, in which she found emotional support and sustenance, but bring only vague, generalized material into the sessions. She found therapy to be a chore, like going to the grocery store: you dont like doing it, but you feel better after you do. She made it clear that I was not giving her much of value and pressured me to give her more. In one session, she announced her decision to divorce, and explained that she had made the decision a year earlier. Still sleeping in the same bedroom, and pretending to have a relationship for the sake of their son, she had withdrawn from her husband emotionally. While I knew of her unrelenting hostility towards her husband, I felt stunned by this decision, blind-sided and locked out. I could see that the hatred in the marriage covered deep feelings of dependency and loneliness. I was now on the other side of the locked door. Her decision was made outside of the therapeutic relationship, so that she could deny the perspective I would bring, the reality of her own actions in the marriage, her responsibility for it, and the guilt she feels about the failed relationship. Through the attacking and withholding she kept away the possibility of needing me and of having me give her something. She attempted to shut down my ability to see her, and to integrate the fragmented parts of

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her. She pressured me, instead, to give her support, to reinforce her right to demand more, without understanding her and without seeing her desperate dependency needs. She saw me as another person who would not understand her. Bion (1962) describes the K link as essential to the therapeutic action; it is the therapist getting to know the patient, and the patient getting to be known. Minus K is the active involvement of the patient against being known, against taking back the expelled parts of the self, understanding and integrating those parts, tolerating the pain, and against taking responsibility for the patients destructiveness. ALPHA AND BETA Bion (1962) offers us a developmental scheme, in which experiences in the body, emotions, sense impressions, dreams are transformed into representations: visual and verbal, and elaborated through thinking. His conceptual model shows the progression of thought along a continuum from unconscious body experiences to abstract ideas about the world. In this scheme, raw emotional experiences, which he calls beta elements, are converted to alpha elements, available for thought. Alpha elements represent primitive symbolic processes: dreams, impressions, feelings, embryonic thought elements, which are registered and thought about. Alpha function translates beta elements into alpha elements, which can be used for remembering and thinking about the emotional experience. Prehistoric cave paintings are an example of alpha elements: primitive symbols used to record experiences of everyday life. This conversion of experience into alpha elements (symbols) allows the mind to be conscious of experiences from unconscious parts of the mind while protecting the conscious mind from being overwhelmed by unconscious forces (Bion, 1962). Alpha function preserves the non-psychotic part of the personality, through its facilitation of ordered thinking and the growth of meaning. Experiences are represented and symbolized giving perspective and recording the experience in time. For Bion, knowing, as in learning from experience, is contrasted with learning about things. Learning about things can be used as a defense against knowing, in which the construction of a knowledge base provides a stability which protects against uncertainty, anxiety, and suffering. Bion (1962) thought about this dynamic as a thing constructed in the place of the no-thing. In this case knowledge is used as a means to evade the anxiety of catastrophic change, to avoid understanding and suffering rather than a means to know it. Learning from experience requires

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us to know our limitations and failures, to face the narcissistic injury of not-knowing, and to integrate unwanted and hated parts. The narcissistic experience of being, or not-knowing, on the other hand, provides a state of primal bliss, which does not require the effort of feeling, thinking, and integrating the frustration of not-knowing. For Bion, the goal of the psychoanalytic endeavor is to establish and develop the capacity to suffer the blood, sweat and tears of becoming, and to know psychic truth. GROUPS Bions work with groups began during World War II, in a military psychiatric unit, and continued in peace time, at the Tavistock Clinic. Bion (1961) views the group as one object, comprising individuals, in which individual experiences create the group process, and the group experience is shared by individuals, according to their particular unconscious predisposition. The individuals in the group come together through projective identification creating the illusion that a group mind exists, and constructing the group leader, in line with the unconscious phantasies active in the individual group members. Because of this, Bion (1961) says that interpretation aimed at relieving the prevalent anxieties of the group serve to strengthen the group. Group membership stimulates primitive anxieties about survival, destruction, and love in the group members, who are both excited by the possibility of achieving more within the group than they could individually, and feel prohibited from pursuing individual aims because of the need to preserve the group (Bion, 1961). Bion (1961) uses the term Basic Assumptions to denote the primitive, irrational, psychotic aspects of the individual experience, which emerge as the individuals in the group create the group experience, and attempt to survive hatred and destruction. Basic Assumptions seek to avoid the pain of learning through experience, facing trauma, and integrating the unthinkable. A form of mental activity, Basic Assumptions represent underlying phantasies, pooled by individual members experiences, about what can happen in the group, imbued with emotion and unconscious omnipotent beliefs, favoring hiding, obliterating, and denying the anxieties of the group, and working against thinking, integration, and development. These underlying phantasies bind the individuals together, pressuring the group leader and causing the leader to feel caught in a role, numb and used by the group for the purpose of furthering the phantasy.

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The work group is an aspect of the group able to use thought to lead to action, engaged in the group task, not evacuating emotion, but processing it, generating growth from the interaction of group members, each generating thought. The work group is along the line of secondary process, and the depressive position. Underneath the work group is the Basic Assumption level of activity, having to do with primary process, omnipotent phantasies and the paranoid/schizoid position. BION IDENTIFIES THREE BASIC ASSUMPTIONS The Basic Assumption-dependent group assumes that the group leader will rescue the group, assuming full responsibility for the group and providing for the members. The group leader is to assume the role the members want for the group, and in addition, each group member tries to claim the leader, to become the favored child, of the parent leader. The Basic Assumption-dependent group is characterized by feelings of guilt and depression. The Basic Assumption-pairing group relies on hope that a future pairing will produce a child who will absolve the group anxieties. It is not the current leader but the leader-yet-to-come who will rescue the group. This future messiah will not resolve despair and hatred but magically eradicate it. The future must never come but always be hoped for. New ideas are refuted and seen as repetitions of the past. The pairing continues, but the future child is never born. This Basic Assumption represents a messianic hope for the future. In the Basic Assumption-fight/flight group, aggression and evasion predominate and are seen as the only means to preserve the group. There is no understanding, and the individual does not matter; what matters is only the continuation of the group. The leader moves the group away from pain, through flight, or leads the group members to fight against anxiety, damage and pain. The enemy is identified and attacked, and thought is destroyed. The group is characterized by fear and hate. Bion uses the term valency (Bion, 1961: 116) to denote the individuals capacity to respond unconsciously, adopting and sharing in the particular Basic Assumption present in the group. Each group has a valency for a particular Basic Assumption, which cements the group. Bion (1961: 153) states that participation in the Basic Assumption is instantaneous, inevitable, and instinctive. Usually one Basic Assumption is dominant, and the other two are absent. Groups fluctuate between the three Basic Assumptions. All groups form around a phantasy of the return

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to a blissful dyad, the breast, and the trance-like quality of belonging to a greater whole (Fornari, 1966), which provides safety and narcissistic fulfillment for the members. APPLICATION TO CURRENT RESEARCH It is notable that when his first wife tragically died in childbirth, Bion became the primary caregiver of a newborn infant (F. Bion, 1995). Perhaps it is partly due to this extremely difficult experience that Bion so profoundly understood the mother/infant relationship. The current research of Fonagy, Gergely, Jurist, and Target (2002), which attempts to empirically validate psychoanalytic concepts with attachment theory, makes use of Bions formulation of the container/contained, the uses of projective identification and alpha function. As Fonagy states (2001: 167) The psychological self develops through perception of oneself in another persons mind as thinking and feeling. Fonagys research shows that cognitive development is not predetermined by biological, genetic drives, but based in object relations. The need for object relations is not purely psychological, and the infants need for physical proximity to the maternal object may be explained by Bions concept of container/contained (Fonagy, 2001). As Fonagy, Gergely, Jurist, and Target (2002) describe it, a secure attachment is constructed through the interpersonal, primary relationships of the child. Developed over time, through the interactions between the infant and the primary caregiver, a secure attachment is one in which the babys anxieties are received, understood and mitigated, promoting the development of mentalization (Fonagy et al., 2002: 3), defined as the ability to register, represent, and make meaning of affective experiences. Fonagys term mentalization is similar to Bions concept of alpha function, denoting the process of representing internal, concrete experiences, through symbolic function, so that experiences can be thought about, and transformed into thinkable and tolerable experiences (Fonagy, 2001: 167). Attachment is built upon the successful container/contained process, and provides the foundation for developing an apparatus for thinking, essential to the development and organization of the self and the personality (Fonagy et al., 2002). Fonagys (1991, 2002) research shows that development of the capacity to mentalize provides the capacity to differentiate between self and other, and to represent beliefs and desires as possible, as if states of mind, without having to act them out or require them to be shared by

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the other. Individual states of mind can be discerned, considered as the motivation for behavior, and played with as representations of affective experiences. The ability to regulate behavior is dependent upon the ability to represent affective experiences (Fonagy, 1991: 641-642). If the primary caregiver avoids the childs communication of affect, through dissociation, or by attributing it to illness or tiredness, the child cannot find representation of his or her experience in the objects mind, and the opportunity for symbolic representation is lost (Fonagy, 2001: 172). The child or patient who has not registered recognizable representations of affective states through the caregiver/therapist may have trouble differentiating reality from phantasy and physical experiences from psychological experiences. This may cause him or her to act, rather than think about experiences, and to manipulate relationships rather than communicate. This is along the line of Bions minus K. Projective identification is used as a manipulation of the other, without empathy and understanding, rather than as a means to communicate affective experiences through mutuality (Fonagy, 2001: 84). Seligman (2000) and Fonagy (1991, 2001, 2002) argue that the therapeutic situation provides a secure environment with a stable relationship in which to reflect on the contents of ones own mind and the mind of the other, to differentiate between motivation and consequences, to view ones own experiences and thoughts as one possible angle among many others, and to distinguish between subjectivity and objectivity, for both the self and the other. In short, the therapeutic situation provides the necessary elements for the development of thought, a mind of ones own, distinct and verified, through time and experience, linking feelings and thoughts. Understanding as a basic underpinning of therapeutic action, is an experience in itself, and, indeed, the experience may be more essential than the content of the understanding (Seligman, 2000: 1192). As Seligman (2000) notes, in pathological situations, such as those with borderline patients, internal experiences are felt to be the only reality, and the external world is experienced as dangerous. Bad experiences exist, not just within the self, but as things in themselves outside, thus limiting the symbolic function necessary to integrate and understand such negative experiences (Fonagy, 2002). The avoidant patient cannot tolerate thinking about the internal state of the other. The resistant patient focuses on his or her own affective states of distress to the exclusion of the other. Disorganized patients appear to be hypervigilant and acutely sensitive to the emotional states of the other, yet fail to

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recognize their own internal states and experiences, remaining disorganized and unregulated (Fonagy, 2001: 167). CONCLUSION Bion challenges us to think about thinking and dares us to think about what is known and yet not thought. In addition to the concepts described in this paper, his model of thinking describes a selected fact, mating with a preconception, to generate a realization. The Grid, Bions attempt to formulate a periodic table of thought, akin to the Periodic Table of Chemical Elements, shows the genetic development of thoughts, as Symington describes it (1996: 34) along one axis, and the function of thought, along the other axis. Bion intended for The Grid to be used to analyze a session after it occurred, to identify generative thought leading to realization and understanding versus thought used to negate, avoid, or block understanding, thereby avoiding intolerable anxieties. Bion offers us unique paradigms to conceptualize the interplay among love, hate, and knowledge, and the minds effort to understand the complexities of these powerful emotions: receiving, digesting, and making meaning or refusing, shutting down and denying. He is interested in the problems of integration versus fragmentation, being versus becoming, growth versus stagnation and repetition, abstract thought developing increasing possibilities and complexities versus thought that is constrained, blocked, and constricted. His emphasis on the importance of psychic truth, the smallness of our ability to understand the universe, and our relentless attempts to evade, avoid and deny reality are contrasted against his unshakable belief in the power of the mind to generate thoughts, and in the human being to develop the capacity to think. He urges each of us to think our own thoughts, and to use our deepest experiences in the clinical encounter to form a fresh theory of mind with each individual patient, and as he says to meet each session without memory and desire (Bion, 1967: 143-145). REFERENCES
Bion, F. (1995). The days of our years. The Journal of Melanie Klein & Object Relations Journal, 3(1) [accessed from The British Psychoanalytical Society website]. Bion, W. (1961). Experiences in groups. London: Routledge. Bion, W. (1962). Learning from experience. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson.

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Bion, W. (1967). Second thoughts. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson. Bion, W. (1982). The long week-end 1897-1919, Part of a life. London: Karnac Books. Bion, W. (1991). A memoir of the future. London: Karnac Books. Coates, S. (1998). Having a mind of ones own and holding the other in mind: Commentary on paper by Peter Fonagy and Mary Target. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 8:115-148. Fonagy, P. (1991). Thinking about thinking: Some clinical and theoretical considerations. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 72:639-656. Fonagy, P. (2001). Attachment theory and psychoanalysis. New York, NY: Other Press. Fonagy, P., Gergely, G., Jurist, E., & Target, M. (2002). Affect regulation, mentalization, and the development of the self. New York, NY: Other Press. Fornari, F. (1966). The psychoanalysis of war. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Freud, S. (1911). Formulations on the two principles of mental functioning. Standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 12, p. 215. London: Hogarth Press. Grotstein, J. (1981). Do I dare disturb the universe? A memorial to Wilfred R. Bion. Beverly Hills, CA: Caesura Press. Meltzer, D. (1978). The Kleinian development. London: Karnac Books. Scharff, D. (1996). Object relations theory and practice: An introduction. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson. Seligman, S. (2000). Clinical implications of current attachment theory. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 48:1189-1194. Symington, J.N. (1996). The clinical thinking of Wilfred Bion. London: Routledge. Winnicott, D.W. (1958). The maturational processes and the facilitating environment. New York, NY: International University Press.

Manuscript Submitted: 04/12/06 Final Revision Received: 08/21/06 doi:10.1300/J032v14n01_04