Bion Modelo Mental

Bion’s Model of the Mind

Karen Fraley

ABSTRACT. The author sets out to locate Bion’s model of the mindwithin the developmental history of psychoanalysis, from Freud to Kleinto Bion, using biographical material and clinical case examples, to illus-trate Bion’s concepts of container/contained, his understanding and use ofprojective identification, his extension of the use of the countertransference,and his differentiation between the psychotic and non-psychotic aspects ofthe mind. Links, and attacks against linking are discussed, as well as Bion’sthoughts about learning versus knowing, being versus becoming and hisemphasis on the essential importance of the development of the capacityto think. doi:10.1300/J032v14n01_04 [Article copies available for a fee fromThe Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-HAWORTH. E-mail address:<[email protected]> 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, offersus a unique and complex model of the mind, as a tool for understanding

Karen Fraley, LCSW, BCD, is Graduate and Faculty Member, International Psy-chotherapy Institute, Chevy Chase, MD and Philadelphia, PA. Currently she is in pri-vate practice in Exton, PA (E-mail: [email protected]).

Psychoanalytic Social Work, Vol. 14(1) 2007Available online at http://psw.haworthpress.com

© 2007 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.doi:10.1300/J032v14n01_04 59

mailto:[email protected]

http://www.HaworthPress.com


http://psw.haworthpress.com


the clinical encounter. A remarkable man, born and raised in India, edu-cated as a young boy in England, Bion employs philosophy and mathe-matical principles to think about the mind, the personality, trauma andthe traumatized state, extending the fundamental principles described byFreud and Klein (Meltzer, 1978). Full of “ambiguity and idiosyncrasies”(Meltzer, 1978: 274), saturated/unsaturated words, points, lines and tra-jectories, time and space, facts and phantasies, and different vertices,Bion requires each of us to advance our thinking in line with our deepestemotional states and memories. Reading Bion is a daunting task, an ex-ercise in containing our own frustration, but doing so provides richrewards.

As Meltzer (1978) states, Freud set out to create a new science to de-scribe the mind, and his drive/structure model develops the theory ofinnate, biological drives impinging on the mind through the body, acti-vating the psychic apparatus and stimulating thought. Klein extendedFreud’s model, elaborating the affective experiences of the internalworld, and placing emotion and unconscious phantasy at the heart of psy-chic experience. Bion adds another dimension to this work, advancingus further into the realm of thinking, in which the mind is the apparatusfor perceiving emotional experiences, organizing them, and generatingmeaning for development and growth.

In Freud’s model, the activity of the drives increases tension in thesystem, demanding release and satisfaction; and his hydraulic, mecha-nistic model posits that knowledge of the object is necessary for the sat-isfaction of the impulse (Meltzer, 1978). The drive for gratificationforces the ego to action and counteracted by the pressure of external re-ality and frustration, the ego generates thought. Thinking begins withthe delay of gratification (Freud, 1911). For Klein, the mind is con-stantly compromised by the forces of the death instincts, and, in the faceof these anxieties, struggles to maintain the good object, resorting tosplitting and omnipotent phantasies when necessary. The internal worldis 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 Bion’s view emo-tional experiences penetrate our awareness and require integration togenerate psychic truth and understanding for the healthy functioning ofthe mind (Meltzer, 1978; Symington, 1966). Placing the emphasis onboth the intra-psychic experience and on interpersonal relationships,Bion (1962: 42) says, “An emotional experience cannot be conceived ofin isolation from a relationship.”

60 PSYCHOANALYTIC SOCIAL WORK

BIOGRAPHY

Wilfred Bion was born in 1897 in India, where he lived until the ageof eight, when he was sent to boarding school in England. He never re-turned to India.

In 1916, at the age of 19, he joined the Royal Tank Regiment and wasposted on the front line of WWI. His traumatic experiences of this dev-astatingly 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, anaward about which he felt deeply ambivalent and was keenly aware ofthe futility and waste, the irrationality and stupidity of war, and of thosein command (Bion, 1982; F. Bion, 1995; Symington, 1996). Much ofhis thinking struggles to make sense of the senseless.

After the war, he attended Oxford University and went on to medi-cal school. He decided to pursue psychiatry and trained in psychother-apy at the Tavistock Clinic. There he practiced psychoanalysis withJohn Rickman, and later with Melanie Klein.

In 1950, Bion presented his membership paper to the British Psycho-analytic Society, and began a long and distinguished career in the Society(F. Bion, 1995), where he served as director, chairman of the publicationscommittee and the Melanie Klein Trust, and member of the trainingcommittee. He published his four major works during the 1960s: Learn-ing from Experience, Elements of Psychoanalysis, Transformations,and Attention and Interpretation.

In 1967 he moved to Los Angeles, despite the risks of practicingmedicine there with a British medical degree, and as a “resident alien”(F. Bion, 1995: 8). He wanted more freedom and he felt “loaded withhonors and sunk without a trace” (Grotstein, 1981: 5) in the British psy-choanalytic community. The move was risky, and heavily criticized bycolleagues in London (F. Bion, 1995). His new colleagues in Californiacould not understand his work. He traveled to South America to lectureand teach and was very well-received there. In 1978, he returned to Eng-land planning to continue working in London and Los Angeles. He was82 years old and still teaching all over the world. However, he was diag-nosed with leukemia and died very soon after.

A remarkable man, compassionate and humorous, gentle, coura-geous, deeply moved by beauty and art, he threw himself into think-ing about the psychotic part of the mind, struggled to understand it, andfelt 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

Karen Fraley 61

mental health (F. Bion, 1995; Symington, 1996; Meltzer, 1978). Catas-trophe, anxiety, and dread are the bedrocks upon which the human mindattempts development and growth. He focused on the clinical encoun-ter, in the moment-to-moment here and now, using hypothetical modelsto test the validity of his observations (Meltzer, 1978) and was fullyaware of unknown forces exerting pressure on and against the mind, inboth the patient and the analyst (Bion, 1962). For Bion, experiences,emotions, dreams, phantasies, and body sensations and impressions arethe fuel for generating thoughts, which require a thinker, and nourish uswith understanding and meaning in the daily struggle against primitiveforces of envy, profound anxieties, rage, and death (Bion, 1962; Meltzer,1978; Symington, 1996).

CONTAINER/CONTAINED

Bion (1967) differentiated the psychotic and the non-psychotic as-pects of the mind and assumed that experience is constantly shiftingbetween these two worlds, developing Klein’s view of the movementfrom the paranoid/schizoid position to the depressive position. Everyindividual mind contains both psychotic and non-psychotic aspects andthe proportions shift from so-called healthy neuroses, to the more se-vere characterological disorders, depending on the activity of powerfulunconscious phantasies. The paranoid/schizoid position is character-ized by persecutory anxiety, fragmentation, splitting and projectiveidentification, and symbolic capacity is compromised, so that what isperceived is reality, and the internal world is populated by part objects,either all good or all bad. In the depressive position the whole object ispresent, with the integration of both good and bad aspects, promotingthe capacity for concern for the other, depressive guilt and the sense ofpsychic responsibility (Bion, 1962, 1967). Symbolic thinking allowsthe creation of a joint narrative, between self and other, as well as thecapacity to think one’s own thoughts (Bion, 1962).

Bion (1962, 1967) extends the concept of projective identification, inwhich the bad object is split off and projected into the other, and, in histhinking, it becomes not just a means to evacuate intolerable anxiety,but also a means of communication, a vehicle to reduce the burden ofanxiety, to foster the capacity to think. The employment of projectiveidentification by the psychotic part of the mind is contrasted with pro-jective identification employed by the non-psychotic part (Bion, 1967).The therapist’s countertransference, previously seen as a road block to


understanding, is used to distinguish between the types of projectiveidentification deployed, and to identify and retrieve split-off aspects ofthe self (Bion, 1962). Projective identification is the link par excellencebetween the mother and the baby, the analyst and the patient.

Primitive, infantile anxieties constitute the primary psychic experi-ence; not only castration anxiety, which Freud describes, and not onlyannihilation anxiety, as defined by Melanie Klein, but also, in Bion’sview, “nameless dread” (Bion, 1962: 96); the experience of the selfin infinite space, smallness, catastrophic anxiety about psychic change,devastation, and trauma. Bion (1962), following Klein, conceives of theinfant 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 theloved object about love and hate, about the good and the bad object(Bion, 1962). The word “reverie” is a French word meaning to day-dream, or to play-dream. The mother’s capacity for reverie provides theinfant with a means to tolerate frustration, to have a sense of reality, andto understand the emotional world.

Klein is very clear in seeing projective identification as a narcissistic,intrapsychic process, occurring through omnipotent, unconscious phan-tasies (Meltzer, 1978). Bion expands projective identification into aninterpersonal phenomenon, the pressure of one object acting on theother, with omnipotent phantasy aspects personalized through the ob-ject relationship (Scharff, 1996). Bion (1962) uses the metaphor ofcontainer/contained to represent this process, a container into which thematerial is projected, and an object that represents the material pro-jected, both suffused with emotion, and providing two possible out-comes: the material is modified and transformed into a tolerable objectfor 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 thematerial is re-introjected with an increased persecutory quality. In thisway Bion (1962) values countertransference experiences as importantclinical material essential to understanding the transference.

The contained material seeks a container, just as the newborn babyseeks the breast (Bion, 1962). Bion uses the symbols for male and fe-male to represent the container/contained relationship, both seeking theother, mating, penetrating and generating realizations, binding togetheremotional experience and thought, in a steady relationship to eachother, which, over time, constructs knowledge about the self and the

Karen Fraley 63

world, and, internalized by the baby, forms an apparatus for thinking(Bion, 1962).

Let’s look at the two scenarios: projective identification as communi-cation and as an evacuation of the bad object.

The infant, overwhelmed by intolerable anxiety, projects his distressonto his mother, and through her attunement to her baby, she takes inthe projected emotional material, digests and mitigates it, and throughher maternal reverie, responds to her baby and returns the projectedemotional experience in a manageable form. As this process is repeatedover time, the baby forms the rudimentary building blocks of thought:intolerable and unbearable emotional states are suffered, discerned, or-ganized, and made meaningful. Meaning emerges from the object rela-tionship, from the experience of self and other. The mother’s words andattunement feed the hungry baby. Frustration can be tolerated longenough to trigger thought. The self is able to know its own attributes andexperiences. The thinking capacity is nurtured and developed through thecontainer/contained interaction, establishing the capacity for thought. InBion’s words “learning from experience” (Bion, 1962) is possible. Thisforms the foundation for the self-observing ego, described by Freud asthe basis of the healthy mind.

If the mother is unable to receive the baby’s projected emotionalstate, and is not capable of reverie, then the infant re-introjects not justthe original intolerable state, but an emotional state increased in powerand strength, and experienced as a foreign body, an intrusive bad object,persecutory and hateful; a “nameless dread” (Bion, 1962: 96). Symbol-ization is not available. The experience cannot be registered, only de-nied, split off, and evacuated. In this case, projective identification isused as a withdrawal from reality into an omnipotent phantasy, in defi-ance of the burden of reality. Massive projective identification results inparts of the ego being located in the other, living an uncontrolled exis-tence there, magnified in vitality, so the patient is caught between facingthe reality he has expelled and the persecution of the other. Thought isdestroyed, and violently projected (Bion, 1962).

In clinical practice, the container is a psychological vessel to gatherthe projected bits and pieces, split-off fragments of the psyche. Ele-ments are identified and not integrated, but rather held and consideredin a medium of suspended action and judgment (Bion, 1962). Tolerateddoubt, the capacity to maintain awareness of not knowing, to look intothe darkness, without feelings of persecution and without feelings oftherapeutic ambition, characterizes the optimum containment process(Bion, 1962). The container must remain integrated and flexible, open


to constructing past experiences in a new way, with the capacity to lineup the pieces and suspend putting them together, and to reformulate pastexperiences based on current conditions, and changing emotional vari-ables (Bion, 1962). I sometimes think of this as something similar to theprocess of putting together a jigsaw puzzle: First all the pieces are laidout on the table, sorted, noted, and remembered. The container holds thepieces, which change and develop over time, linking with each other,constructing a picture of the patient’s internal world.

The contained material must penetrate the container/therapist, andcommunicate the value of the experience, the emotion of it. Knowledgedepends on the relationship between the container and the contained, in-creasing the capacity for understanding as the apparatus for thinkinggrows. In becoming more complex over time, and expanding the abilityto abstract and think, the container can then consider more and morepossibilities as the universe expands (Bion, 1962). If the container/ther-apist is too rigid, the contained material is compacted and pulverized(Bion, 1962). If the container/therapist is not stable enough, or too po-rous, the contained material is dispersed, and fragmented, and remainsunintegrated.

Bion’s container/contained concept differs from Winnicott’s “hold-ing environment” (Winnicott, 1958) in several ways (Scharff, 1996;Symington, 1996). The container/contained relationship occurs bothintrapsychically and interpersonally (Scharff, 1996; Symington, 1996),represented in both dimensions, between subject and object. The holdingenvironment is modeled upon the “good enough mother” (Winnicott,1958), the healthy, normative quality of maintaining the body throughadequate environmental care. The mother of a distressed baby might ad-just the temperature of the room, or add a blanket, as well as providereverie about the emotional state of her baby. As Symington (1996: 58)says, “the container is non-sensuous”; it is psychological rather thanphysical. Symington (1996: 58) goes on to say the container/containedrelationship 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 apredominance of projected material. A patient might go on and on aboutother family members, judging and correcting others, provoking thetherapist to agree or disagree, rather than to contain. Patients also pushus to educate, to tell them what to do, rather than consider their particularinternal situation.

Karen Fraley 65

CASE MATERIAL:A BRIEF EXAMPLE OF CONTAINMENT

This is a brief example of a problem with containment. The patient isa woman in once a week therapy for two years, who begins the sessionjustifying her decision to divorce her husband. She likens the marriageto an addiction, and she’s trying to break the pattern of her addiction.Her husband is irresponsible, yet he blames her for all the problems inthe marriage. Her indignant, vindictive tone cuts to the core, but she’scalm, and controlled. She’s confronting him, setting limits. He bor-rowed her car, left the window down, it rained all night. She told him hecan’t borrow her car anymore, because he’s not responsible enough. Hecountered her attack and blamed the children, maintaining it was not hisfault. She’s outraged by this. Then he didn’t help her with the holidaydinner and, when she confronted him, he said he had nothing to do withher anxiety about preparing the meal. Her continued focus on him, hisbetrayal of her, along with her scorn and indignation for him, drove meaway from her. I felt myself in a fog, drifting. Trying to make contactwith her, I said that the addiction provided a means for her to avoid pain-ful feelings about the relationship and her feelings of being unappreci-ated, unrecognized, unacknowledged. She responded, saying that herhusband really does these things to her. She feels this way because ofhim; locating the action in him, and pressuring me to side with her andmaintain her innocence. I agreed that these things really happen, addingthat, when she takes the victim role and makes him out to be the bad per-son, 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 noth-ing she can do about his blaming her. She knows she has something todo with the constant arguments, but in this case she is totally innocent. Ifeel flattened, and heavy: she’s right and I am wrong. This is the worldof absolutes, and I am either with her or I’m against her. I’m caught upin her internal world. The bad object, located in the husband, is now lo-cated in me. She is innocent. I’m the one who doesn’t see her. Herconfusion and turmoil is split off and projected. I’m pulled into actionand away from thinking.

LINKS AND ATTACKS ON LINKS

In this case the bad object is aggressively defended against, placed inthe other and rigidly maintained there. Any awareness of the bad object


being located within the self is blocked. Bion (1967) thought about howthe mind blocks conscious awareness and stops the process of under-standing. He provides us with a shorthand, notational system, using theconcept of links, to track and contemplate the elements present and absentin the emotional experience of the countertransference in the clinical mo-ment. These links are abstracts of a complex emotional situation, helpingthe therapist to perceive the psychic quality of the patient’s unconsciousexperience. To be used as a point of reference, the links characterize theaffective connection between objects in relationship to each other.

Bion (1962) postulates six essential links: L standing for love, H stand-ing for hate, and K standing for knowledge. The three positive qualitiesalso have negative forms: minus L, the absence of love, such as indiffer-ence; minus H, the absence of hate; and minus K, the absence of knowl-edge, such as envy. Other emotions such as greed, rivalry, and desire aresubsumed under these basic groupings. Bion is not clear in defining mi-nus 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 ob-ject relationships, connecting self to other, galvanizing thought, and asense of reality, based on psychic truth. Bion’s emphasis on knowledgeis similar to Klein’s emphasis on “desire to know the object” as an in-herent drive, which she calls the epistemophilic instinct, and Freud’sview of the ego investing libido in the other as a sign of healthy psychicactivity. For Bion, knowledge of the self, derived through experiencesin relationships, is the hallmark of healthy psychic growth. In Bion’sterms, therapy is the process of generating the K link, increasing self-knowledge.

Positive L, H, and K stand for the presence of the links between ob-jects, between self and other, which is internalized over time forminglinks in the internal world between unconscious and consciousness, per-ceived experiences and associated verbal representations (body andmind), emotion and thought. Minus L, H, and K represent the absenceof links, links attacked and destroyed through the destructive forces ofthe mind. This attacking destroys any symbolic process, so that emo-tions and experiences cannot be represented, either visually, as images,or verbally. What is attacked is the function of the link, the generativeaspect of an experience mating with associated verbal thought, and arepresentation of the self, to produce thinking. Attacks on linking af-fect perception; the patient can’t see himself, his feelings, or his internalexperiences.

Karen Fraley 67

When the infant seeks a breast and finds a no-breast (the absence ofthe breast) and is able to tolerate frustration, the no-breast stimulatesthought, a way to think about it, that makes the absence tolerable. This isthe process of the K link, in which knowledge about the self and theability to tolerate frustration increase.

If the infant cannot tolerate frustration, the no-breast and the associatedfrustration have to be evacuated. The infant projects fear, and the bad ob-ject into the breast and employs envy of the undisturbed breast. The goodbreast is now the envious breast and extracts the good from the projectedfrustration, forcing the residual fear back into the infant, so that the infantnow contains, as Bion (1967: 37) says, an “unremitting dread of immi-nent annihilation.” The infant’s mind is now taken over by the persecut-ing psychotic anxiety of this dread, fears of being inside the body of themother and her destruction, fears of retaliation. The minus K pair is domi-nated by absence, an internal world without an external, a psyche withouta body, a persecuting super-ego imposed on an ego. An atmosphere of ha-tred and relentless criticism prevails, based on moral certitude. Guiltplays a strong hand against the self, supporting the persecuting super-ego’s power, killing off any questioning. “Might is right” and power isthe supreme objective. Omnipotent phantasies, made possible throughdenial and disavowal, manipulate the external world to line up with theinternal. Avoidance of psychic reality is the ultimate objective, to be pur-chased at any cost. Evasion predominates. The needed object is the badobject, which exists outside our possession, and arouses feelings of need-ing, longing, yearning, and emptiness, which must be deflected. Feelingsof 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-pa-tient encounter. When minus K prevails, patients fortify their position intherapy by disproving the interpretations, so that misunderstanding be-comes superior to understanding. When H predominates, violence andconflict are used to protect against the guilt of a loving connection. WithL, the patient wants support and encouragement, rather than under-standing and integration.

CASE MATERIAL

Getting back to my patient. Early on in the treatment she recounted adream, in which she was alone in a room, with the door locked, her


mother pleading on the other side of the door for her to come out, andmy patient refusing, hiding behind the door, keeping it locked. I thoughtthis showed her activity in remaining unknown, as well as her attackagainst object relationships and against the link between self and object.She lived in a world of self or other, each polarized against the other, notengaged in a joint activity.

In the marriage, she felt devalued and shut out. She described herhusband as uninterested in her needs, silently going his own way. Shewanted a second child, he refused to discuss it. She wanted to move tothe country and have a farm, he refused again. He blamed her for theproblems in the marriage: If she would not be so forceful and demand-ing, everything would be fine. Her very deep feelings of despair andlonging were covered over by an aggressive greediness. She sacrificedherself for her son and her husband, narcissistically resigning herselfto less, while aggressively demanding more: more attention, more com-munication, more of a partnership in the family. If she did more for herhusband and son, they would do more for her.

She attempted to control the treatment, canceling sessions duringcritical times when she felt most vulnerable, such as when her husbandwas recovering from a life-threatening illness, while making it clear tome that she was keeping her appointments with others: her chiropractorand masseuse. She would tell me about conversations with friends, inwhich she found emotional support and sustenance, but bring onlyvague, generalized material into the sessions. She found therapy to bea chore, like going to the grocery store: you don’t like doing it, but youfeel better after you do. She made it clear that I was not giving her muchof value and pressured me to give her more.

In one session, she announced her decision to divorce, and explainedthat she had made the decision a year earlier. Still sleeping in the samebedroom, and pretending to have a relationship for the sake of their son,she had withdrawn from her husband emotionally. While I knew of herunrelenting hostility towards her husband, I felt stunned by this deci-sion, blind-sided and locked out. I could see that the hatred in the mar-riage covered deep feelings of dependency and loneliness. I was now onthe other side of the locked door. Her decision was made outside of thetherapeutic relationship, so that she could deny the perspective I wouldbring, the reality of her own actions in the marriage, her responsibilityfor it, and the guilt she feels about the failed relationship.

Through the attacking and withholding she kept away the possibilityof needing me and of having me give her something. She attempted toshut down my ability to see her, and to integrate the fragmented parts of

Karen Fraley 69

her. She pressured me, instead, to give her support, to reinforce her rightto demand more, without understanding her and without seeing her des-perate dependency needs. She saw me as another person who would notunderstand her. Bion (1962) describes the K link as essential to the ther-apeutic action; it is the therapist getting to know the patient, and the pa-tient getting to be known. Minus K is the active involvement of thepatient against being known, against taking back the expelled parts ofthe self, understanding and integrating those parts, tolerating the pain,and against taking responsibility for the patient’s destructiveness.

ALPHA AND BETA

Bion (1962) offers us a developmental scheme, in which experiencesin the body, emotions, sense impressions, dreams are transformed intorepresentations: visual and verbal, and elaborated through thinking. Hisconceptual model shows the progression of thought along a continuumfrom unconscious body experiences to abstract ideas about the world. Inthis scheme, raw emotional experiences, which he calls beta elements,are converted to alpha elements, available for thought. Alpha elementsrepresent primitive symbolic processes: dreams, impressions, feelings,embryonic thought elements, which are registered and thought about.

Alpha function translates beta elements into alpha elements, which canbe used for remembering and thinking about the emotional experience.Prehistoric cave paintings are an example of alpha elements: primitivesymbols used to record experiences of everyday life. This conversion ofexperience into alpha elements (symbols) allows the mind to be con-scious of experiences from unconscious parts of the mind while protect-ing the conscious mind from being overwhelmed by unconscious forces(Bion, 1962). Alpha function preserves the non-psychotic part of thepersonality, through its facilitation of ordered thinking and the growthof meaning. Experiences are represented and symbolized giving per-spective and recording the experience in time.

For Bion, knowing, as in learning from experience, is contrasted withlearning about things. Learning about things can be used as a defenseagainst knowing, in which the construction of a knowledge base pro-vides a stability which protects against uncertainty, anxiety, and suffer-ing. Bion (1962) thought about this dynamic as a thing constructed inthe place of the no-thing. In this case knowledge is used as a means toevade the anxiety of catastrophic change, to avoid understanding and suf-fering rather than a means to know it. Learning from experience requires


us to know our limitations and failures, to face the narcissistic injury ofnot-knowing, and to integrate unwanted and hated parts. The narcissisticexperience of being, or not-knowing, on the other hand, provides a stateof primal bliss, which does not require the effort of feeling, thinking, andintegrating the frustration of not-knowing. For Bion, the goal of the psy-choanalytic endeavor is to establish and develop the capacity to suffer theblood, sweat and tears of becoming, and to know psychic truth.

GROUPS

Bion’s work with groups began during World War II, in a military psy-chiatric unit, and continued in peace time, at the Tavistock Clinic. Bion(1961) views the group as one object, comprising individuals, in whichindividual experiences create the group process, and the group experi-ence is shared by individuals, according to their particular unconsciouspredisposition. The individuals in the group come together through pro-jective identification creating the illusion that a group mind exists, andconstructing the group leader, in line with the unconscious phantasiesactive in the individual group members. Because of this, Bion (1961)says that interpretation aimed at relieving the prevalent anxieties of thegroup serve to strengthen the group.

Group membership stimulates primitive anxieties about survival, de-struction, and love in the group members, who are both excited by thepossibility of achieving more within the group than they could individu-ally, and feel prohibited from pursuing individual aims because of theneed to preserve the group (Bion, 1961).

Bion (1961) uses the term “Basic Assumptions” to denote the primi-tive, irrational, psychotic aspects of the individual experience, whichemerge as the individuals in the group create the group experience, andattempt to survive hatred and destruction. Basic Assumptions seek toavoid the pain of learning through experience, facing trauma, and inte-grating the unthinkable. A form of mental activity, Basic Assumptionsrepresent underlying phantasies, pooled by individual members’ experi-ences, about what can happen in the group, imbued with emotion and un-conscious omnipotent beliefs, favoring hiding, obliterating, and denyingthe anxieties of the group, and working against thinking, integration,and development. These underlying phantasies bind the individuals to-gether, pressuring the group leader and causing the leader to feel caughtin a role, numb and used by the group for the purpose of furthering thephantasy.

Karen Fraley 71

The work group is an aspect of the group able to use thought to lead toaction, engaged in the group task, not evacuating emotion, but process-ing it, generating growth from the interaction of group members, eachgenerating thought. The work group is along the line of secondary pro-cess, and the depressive position. Underneath the work group is theBasic 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 groupleader will rescue the group, assuming full responsibility for the groupand providing for the members. The group leader is to assume the rolethe members want for the group, and in addition, each group membertries to claim the leader, to become the favored child, of the parentleader. The Basic Assumption-dependent group is characterized byfeelings of guilt and depression.

The Basic Assumption-pairing group relies on hope that a futurepairing will produce a child who will absolve the group anxieties. It isnot the current leader but the leader-yet-to-come who will rescue thegroup. This future messiah will not resolve despair and hatred but magi-cally eradicate it. The future must never come but always be hoped for.New ideas are refuted and seen as repetitions of the past. The pairingcontinues, but the future child is never born. This Basic Assumptionrepresents a messianic hope for the future.

In the Basic Assumption-fight/flight group, aggression and evasionpredominate and are seen as the only means to preserve the group. Thereis no understanding, and the individual does not matter; what matters isonly the continuation of the group. The leader moves the group awayfrom pain, through flight, or leads the group members to fight againstanxiety, damage and pain. The enemy is identified and attacked, andthought is destroyed. The group is characterized by fear and hate.

Bion uses the term “valency” (Bion, 1961: 116) to denote the individ-ual’s capacity to respond unconsciously, adopting and sharing in theparticular Basic Assumption present in the group. Each group has a va-lency for a particular Basic Assumption, which cements the group. Bion(1961: 153) states that participation in the Basic Assumption is “instan-taneous, inevitable, and instinctive.” Usually one Basic Assumption isdominant, and the other two are absent. Groups fluctuate between thethree Basic Assumptions. All groups form around a phantasy of the return


to a blissful dyad, the breast, and the trance-like quality of belonging toa greater whole (Fornari, 1966), which provides safety and narcissisticfulfillment for the members.

APPLICATION TO CURRENT RESEARCH

It is notable that when his first wife tragically died in childbirth, Bionbecame the primary caregiver of a newborn infant (F. Bion, 1995). Per-haps it is partly due to this extremely difficult experience that Bion soprofoundly understood the mother/infant relationship. The current re-search of Fonagy, Gergely, Jurist, and Target (2002), which attempts toempirically validate psychoanalytic concepts with attachment theory,makes use of Bion’s formulation of the container/contained, the uses ofprojective identification and alpha function.

As Fonagy states (2001: 167) “The psychological self developsthrough perception of oneself in another person’s mind as thinking andfeeling.” Fonagy’s research shows that cognitive development is notpredetermined by biological, genetic drives, but based in object rela-tions. The need for object relations is not purely psychological, and theinfant’s need for physical proximity to the maternal object may be ex-plained by Bion’s concept of container/contained (Fonagy, 2001).

As Fonagy, Gergely, Jurist, and Target (2002) describe it, a secureattachment is constructed through the interpersonal, primary relation-ships of the child. Developed over time, through the interactions be-tween the infant and the primary caregiver, a secure attachment is one inwhich the baby’s anxieties are received, understood and mitigated, pro-moting the development of “mentalization” (Fonagy et al., 2002: 3), de-fined as the ability to register, represent, and make meaning of affectiveexperiences. Fonagy’s term “mentalization” is similar to Bion’s con-cept of alpha function, denoting the process of representing internal,concrete experiences, through symbolic function, so that experiencescan be thought about, and transformed into thinkable and tolerable ex-periences (Fonagy, 2001: 167). Attachment is built upon the successfulcontainer/contained process, and provides the foundation for develop-ing an apparatus for thinking, essential to the development and organi-zation of the self and the personality (Fonagy et al., 2002).

Fonagy’s (1991, 2002) research shows that development of the ca-pacity to mentalize provides the capacity to differentiate between selfand other, and to represent beliefs and desires as possible, “as if ” statesof mind, without having to act them out or require them to be shared by

Karen Fraley 73

the other. Individual states of mind can be discerned, considered as themotivation for behavior, and played with as representations of affectiveexperiences. The ability to regulate behavior is dependent upon the abil-ity to represent affective experiences (Fonagy, 1991: 641-642). If theprimary caregiver avoids the child’s communication of affect, throughdissociation, or by attributing it to illness or tiredness, the child cannotfind representation of his or her experience in the object’s mind, and theopportunity for symbolic representation is lost (Fonagy, 2001: 172).The child or patient who has not registered recognizable representationsof affective states through the caregiver/therapist may have trouble dif-ferentiating reality from phantasy and physical experiences from psycho-logical experiences. This may cause him or her to act, rather than thinkabout experiences, and to manipulate relationships rather than commu-nicate. This is along the line of Bion’s minus K. Projective identifica-tion is used as a manipulation of the other, without empathy andunderstanding, rather than as a means to communicate affective experi-ences through mutuality (Fonagy, 2001: 84).

Seligman (2000) and Fonagy (1991, 2001, 2002) argue that the thera-peutic situation provides a secure environment with a stable relation-ship in which to reflect on the contents of one’s own mind and the mindof the other, to differentiate between motivation and consequences, toview one’s own experiences and thoughts as one possible angle amongmany others, and to distinguish between subjectivity and objectivity,for both the self and the other. In short, the therapeutic situation pro-vides the necessary elements for the development of thought, a mind ofone’s own, distinct and verified, through time and experience, linkingfeelings and thoughts. Understanding as a basic underpinning of thera-peutic action, is an experience in itself, and, indeed, the experience maybe more essential than the content of the understanding (Seligman,2000: 1192).

As Seligman (2000) notes, in pathological situations, such as thosewith borderline patients, internal experiences are felt to be the only real-ity, and the external world is experienced as dangerous. Bad experi-ences exist, not just within the self, but as things in themselves outside,thus limiting the symbolic function necessary to integrate and under-stand such negative experiences (Fonagy, 2002). The avoidant patientcannot tolerate thinking about the internal state of the other. The resis-tant patient focuses on his or her own affective states of distress to theexclusion of the other. Disorganized patients appear to be hypervigilantand acutely sensitive to the emotional states of the other, yet fail to


recognize their own internal states and experiences, remaining disorga-nized and unregulated (Fonagy, 2001: 167).

CONCLUSION

Bion challenges us to think about thinking and dares us to think aboutwhat is known and yet not thought. In addition to the concepts describedin this paper, his model of thinking describes a selected fact, matingwith a preconception, to generate a realization. The Grid, Bion’s at-tempt to formulate a periodic table of thought, akin to the Periodic Tableof Chemical Elements, shows “the genetic development of thoughts,”as Symington describes it (1996: 34) along one axis, and the function ofthought, along the other axis. Bion intended for The Grid to be used toanalyze a session after it occurred, to identify generative thought lead-ing 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 amonglove, hate, and knowledge, and the mind’s effort to understand the com-plexities of these powerful emotions: receiving, digesting, and makingmeaning or refusing, shutting down and denying. He is interested in theproblems of integration versus fragmentation, being versus becoming,growth versus stagnation and repetition, abstract thought developing in-creasing possibilities and complexities versus thought that is con-strained, blocked, and constricted. His emphasis on the importance ofpsychic truth, the smallness of our ability to understand the universe,and our relentless attempts to evade, avoid and deny reality are con-trasted against his unshakable belief in the power of the mind to gener-ate 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 deepestexperiences in the clinical encounter to form a fresh theory of mind witheach individual patient, and as he says to meet each session “withoutmemory and desire” (Bion, 1967: 143-145).

REFERENCES

Bion, F. (1995). “The days of our years.” The Journal of Melanie Klein & Object Rela-tions 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.

Karen Fraley 75

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 one’s own and holding the other in mind: Com-

mentary on paper by Peter Fonagy and Mary Target. Psychoanalytic Dialogues,8:115-148.

Fonagy, P. (1991). Thinking about thinking: Some clinical and theoretical consider-ations. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 72:639-656.

Fonagy, P. (2001). Attachment theory and psychoanalysis. New York, NY: OtherPress.

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 UniversityPress.

Freud, S. (1911). Formulations on the two principles of mental functioning. Standardedition 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: 04/12/06Final Revision Received: 08/21/06

doi:10.1300/J032v14n01_04


Documents

Bion Modelo Mental