Bion, who was born in 1897, in Muttra, India, to a European father and an Anglo-Indian mother, moved to England for boarding school at age eight. After fighting for the British in the First World War, he attended Oxford, and then University College London for medical school. By the time he entered formal analytic training, at the British Psycho-Analytical Society, around 1946, he was already recognized for the originality of his thinking, particularly his experimental work on group relations, which he began as an Army psychiatrist during the Second World War. Once, after Bion presented a paper, Klein, who had been his training analyst and saw him as a “prize catch,” “was found weeping in the hall because Bion had failed to give acknowledgement to her,” the biographer Phyllis Grosskurth notes in “Melanie Klein: Her World and Her Work.”
In my own experience, I’ve found that practicing psychoanalysis in a Bionian way is like writing poetry rather than prose—intuition is as important as intellect. Whereas Freud’s investment in legitimizing psychoanalysis led him to frame it as a medical science, Bion treated it as an art form. He believed that psychoanalysts, like “artists, musicians, scientists, discoverers,” were investigating what may be “beyond our comprehension or experience” and should not limit themselves to “what we understand.” Even the notion that what happens when we are awake is more real than when we dream was, to Bion, “prejudice . . . in favour of the voluntary musculature.”
Bion’s clinical work was guided by the belief that an analyst “needs to be able to listen not only to the words, but also to the music.” In one case vignette, Bion described a breakthrough after realizing his patient was not conveying verbal meaning but was “doodling in sound.” He once advised an analyst presenting a case to tolerate confusion: the befuddling story his patient had relayed “will form the basis of an interpretation which you will give six sessions later, six months later, six years later. That is why it is so important to have your senses open to what is going on.”
Bion was fond of quoting a line from the philosopher Maurice Blanchot: “The answer is the misfortune of the question.” In analysis, Bion told an audience in 1976, “there is always a craving to slap in an answer so as to prevent any spread of the flood through the gap which exists.” Analysts must resist the urge to stop up that gap—which Bion described as the “nasty hole where one hasn’t any knowledge at all”—with ready-made answers. In my work with patients, I have observed that the unconscious, too, is a nasty hole. You can’t anticipate what will escape. That’s why I particularly appreciate Bion’s portrait of the dynamic between analyst and analysand. “In every consulting-room, there ought to be two rather frightened people: the patient and the psychoanalyst,” Bion said in an interview that same year. (His writings and interviews can be found in “The Complete Works of W. R. Bion,” edited by Chris Mawson.) “If they are not both frightened, one wonders why they are bothering to find out what everyone knows.”
Beckett, in writing to McGreevy about his sessions with Bion, described himself as unplugged: “belting along with the covey with great freedom of indecency & conviction.” (“The covey” was Beckett’s nickname for his analyst, who was nine years his senior and wore chunky knitted Scottish sweaters.) After a few weeks, Beckett’s symptoms began to resolve, and after a few months he observed that “things at home” felt “simpler.” Yet during extended stays with his mother—something Bion had advised against—his symptoms would return. He would then resume with Bion and report “feeling better,” which he thought was “a kind of confirmation of the analysis.” The sessions seemed to alleviate his writer’s block: “I have been working hard at the book”—his first published novel, “Murphy”—“& it goes very slowly, but I do not think there is any doubt now that it will be finished sooner or later,” he reported in October, 1935.
Analysis, rather than encouraging Beckett to adjust to the external world as his mother had hoped, led him inward. He experienced “extraordinary memories of being in the womb, intra-uterine memories,” as he would later tell Knowlson. The writer began to see his “diseased condition” as having begun in his “pre-history,” the time before he was born. Analysis also helped unleash the wholly original style one sees in “Murphy,” published in 1938, about a protagonist who would rather be strapped naked to a chair and “come alive in his mind” than pursue such normative aims as a job, marriage, money. Dylan Thomas, reviewing “Murphy” that year, dubbed it “Freudian blarney.” Beckett was no longer following anyone around.
On October 2, 1935, toward the end of Beckett’s analysis, Bion invited the writer to dinner—“a hurried but good sole at the Etoile in Charlotte St.,” Beckett noted to McGreevy—followed by a lecture by Carl Jung. It was a move as unorthodox then as it would be now. “I hope he hasn’t done us both a disservice by inviting me to meet him in that way,” Beckett reflected. The lecture was the third of five in a series; Bion had attended two, making it likely that he thought Jung’s insights would be meaningful to his patient.
Sure enough, something Jung said appears to have catalyzed their work together. Jung discussed how children maintain an extraordinary awareness of the world from which they have emerged until a “veil of forgetfulness is drawn” and they adapt to the external world. He spoke in elusive terms about a girl who lived between worlds. “She had never been born entirely,” Jung said.
