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Bion's infant: How he learns tothink his thoughtsNancy H. WolfPublished online: 04 Feb 2008.
To cite this article: Nancy H. Wolf (2003) Bion's infant: How he learns to think histhoughts, Infant Observation: International Journal of Infant Observation and ItsApplications, 6:1, 10-24, DOI: 10.1080/13698030308401684
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Bion’s Infant How He Learns to Think His Thoughts
Nancy H. Wolf
y thinlung on Bion and the infant began when I was invited to speak to The New York Freudian Society’s Infancy and M Toddler Program about Bion’s understanding of prenatal
life and infancy. The Infancy Toddler Program knew of my interest in Bion through a paper I had written and presented on reverie; their request gave me the opportunity to investigate Bion anew in regard to his specific writings on infancy. My initial interest in Bion was sparked by Thomas Ogden’s writings on both Melanie Klein and Wilfred Bion. I was particularly interested in Ogden’s account of Bion’s extension of Klein’s concept of projective identification. Bion’s idea that projective identifi- cation is the earliest form of thinking seemed potentially useful in my work with patients who used language less symbolically or not at all. The Bion Conference in California in February of 2002 occurred after my talk with the candidates; the conference’s focus on the prenatal mind was enormously provocative and helpful to me in elaborating the thinking begun with the candidates in the New York Freudian Society Infancy and Toddler Program, and in its application to my own clinical work.
Bion’s infant is a theoretical one; Bion has not observed and studied the infant a s Daniel Stern nor has he treated the infant as Melanie Klein or Margaret Mahler or Donald Winnicott have. Bion knows of infancy through ‘speculative imagination’ and reconstruction. Bion supposes that intrauterine life exposes the foetus to experience that is repstered. These experiences or impingements can be considered as a kind of thought or trace thought. Bion wonders what the infant does with his thoughts, how he makes sense of them. The developmental task before
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the infant is to acquire the capacity to think his thoughts; central to this task is the communication of these thoughts to another. I intend to discuss Bion’s interest in intra-uterine life and infancy as opportunities to examine archaic levels of thought and to study the importance of projec- tive identification for finding means to communicate these thoughts, making them available for thinking. I will show how his understandings can contribute to both adult and child treatment.
I am an adult psychoanalyst so when I wish to illustrate how Bion’s theories apply to infants, I will cite clinical moments from the work of the Swedish psychoanalyst, Johan Norman. I will begin, however, with a clinical moment in my practice. My way of listening and containing the analysand’s communications and my interventions owe much to my understanding of Bion and his thinhng about comprehending archaic levels of the mind.
My patient is a 30-year-old woman whom I have been seeing for three years four times a week. This session led me to contextualise a particular state of self representation that was more experienced than represented. It was not the first time we encountered her powerful conviction that something was very wrong with her, but that conviction was forcefully alive in this session. A particular event in her personal life meant that she had to face a failure in a relationship and speak with her friend about it. She began by telling me that she was angry with herself all day and at other people who got in her way. I responded by recalling with her how any difficulty in her life resulted in her attacking herself. She agreed, but only seemed partially able to use my intervention for reflection; she mostly maintained her conviction that difficulties meant impairments in her. Then she continued to tell me that a recent job appointment might interrupt our meeting schedule temporarily. She felt that niy lack of response indicated a too willing acceptance of her absence. We thought about this together and then Something shifted in the session. It shifted without my fully understanding why, though in retrospect it may have been that she felt that I wanted to get rid of her and nothing in our inter- change had altered her belief.
The shift lay in the character of the communication. Her words carried an emotional force that seemed to be the essence of the commu- nication. She began to tell me of her childhood wishes to hurt other chil- dren and that she in fact had acted on them. This was information I had not heard about before, and my usual way of working would have been to ask more about this recollection. But it felt less like a communication to think about and more like an assault. In retrospect, I can gather it up as an attempt to attack me in retaliation for my non response to her
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possible interruption, as an attempt to disturb me with this disturbing part of her self, as a more powerfully direct way to prove to me that she was flawed, and to explain it if I dared. This was an emotional commu- nication that seemed less about recollection or memory and more about placing something powerful in the room; maybe this something was about who was dangerous to whom, me the abandoner or she the one awful enough to need to be forever abandoned. The most I could venture to address this was to ask her with whom she was angry. She mumbled something, then said ‘maybe herself‘. She began to speak of how ugly she was. Moving inore into my usual frame, I asked her how she was ugly? In response, her tone and use of language shifted again. Here I think the shift in her level of communication resulted from my having been able to contain her projections. She began speaking to me as her analyst, not as the container for her projections. She said ‘as I have told you before, it is not something I can see; it’s more a feeling . . . like being deformed.’ And slowly I had room to think and my thought was about an infant being given away and what might be registered emotion- ally with such an abandonment. Her mother had placed her in an orphanage shortly after her birth.
In this clinical moment, Bion’s ideas of archaic levels of thought and of the use of projective identification in communicating and deciphering those thoughts were all somewhere in my mind. My patient and I had traversed a difficult moment which forced us both to be in contact with painful and troubling parts of her. It seems to me that Bion’s idea of stray thoughts without a thinker fits both myself and my patient in this session. My patient’s conviction that she was dangerous may be a ‘stray thought’ from an archaic Ievel of experience which she needs to engender in another in order for her to begin to think about it. Bion has a theory as to how this thinking process develops and it is this developmental process to which I turn.
Stray thoughts Bion writes of something he labels ‘stray thoughts’ (1977). He proposes that we can separate thoughts from the thinking of those thoughts. This separation results in attention to the raw materials of thinking. He assumes that there are proto ideas, primordial ideas and feelings, that there is the ‘existence of thoughts without a thinker’ (1980). Bion writes: ‘If a thought without a thinker comes along, it may be what is a “stray thought”, or it could be a thought with the owner’s name and address upon it, or it could be a “wild thought”. The problem, should such a thought come along, is what to do with it’ (1977):
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The worst of not being a mathematician or an artist is that I am very much in the position of the infant or the foetus, which I imagine hasn’t a great deal to communicate. I suppose the infant might want to communicate that it is either lonely or hungry. And I in this peculiar world in which I now find myself am both in need of nourishment and of somebody with whom to communicate, not because I have an awful lot to say, but because I find myself in the state of mind with which I am distressingly familiar- the state of mind in which I can only say I am abysmally, literally and metaphorically ignorant. That is why it is a matter of some urgency to me to find some sort of network in which I can catch any thoughts that are available . . . (1977).
The above passage reflects Bion’s belief that there is continuity between intrauterine existence and infancy (1989). It also allows him to employ the foetus and infant as clear examples of the immaturity of the thinking process. Both the foetus and the infant experience and register basic need states such as hunger and aloneness, perhaps maternal distress or comfort, but cannot think about them. The remnants of the experience linger. Christopher Bollas’s concept of the ‘unthought known’ may capture this as well, but for Bion it would read thought without a thinker. The question Bion poses is how do these thoughts find an ‘address’, a home, so that they reside rather than plague, confuse, or disturb. My patient’s thought-feeling about her malformation could be the way she processed early experience of separation and loss.
Bion’s suggests that even in utero, the foetus experiences and regsters experience. Because his infant is a theoretical one, Bion relies on what he calls ‘speculative imagination.’ In his NY lectures to IPTAR in 1977, he asks the audience to employ speculative imagination, to imagine themselves in a primitive state of awareness. H e continues that it is:
worth labelling as ‘probable’ . . . that even in the womb a creature becomes aware of certain things which are ’not self‘. For example, I could suggest to you here, ‘Don’t let’s say a thing; let’s shut the windows, make this place as silent as we can.’ What do we hear? If that could be carried out as an experiment then we could hear our heartbeat, the surge of blood in the arteries. It is possible that the foetus is aware of primordial ‘sight’, of light and can much c-llslike these impingements of experiences which seem to come from outer space . . . sensations of light, sensations of noise ... also from somewhere that may appear internal . . , the heartbeat, the blood rushing through the arteries. That might all be so intolerable that the foetus would to use our conscious
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terminology forget it, get rid of it. Then the infant is born, but this inheritance of enormous intelligence still survives (1980).
Bion has an idea that there is an ‘inaccessible state of mind’ which is neither conscious nor unconscious. Inaccessible does not mean non-exis- tent. Bion likens it to our dreaming experience, an experience that we can report on retrospectively because we awaken with traces from it. Though Bion assumes that the lack of some kind of container for the experience means that the foetus ‘gets rid of it as soon as it can’ (1977), Bion thinks that the ‘vestige remains . . . has a power like that of a wound which festers; the evacuated has to be kept evacuated . . .’ (1980). A hypo- thetical example Bion gives of such an evacuated thought which lingers is a migraine headache which may be the effect of light patterns from ‘pre-natal levels of mind (1989). This is a conjecture for Bion, useful for exploration.
Alpha and beta as categories for experience In his attempt to attend to the elements of thinking, Bion creates cate- gories for different kinds of thought. H e begins with something he labels ‘beta’ and writes of it in Taming Wild Thought:
The first box I am thinking of is really not suitable for anything as ephemeral as what I usually call a thought, something that is physical; I shall call it a ‘beta-element’ . . .There is something a bit more sophis- ticated: that is to say a similarly physical creature, hut one that arouses in me primordial thoughts or feelings, something that is a prototype ot‘ a mental reaction. These I shall call ‘alpha elements’. I likewise don’t know much about them, hut I think I have been in states of mind in which I am aware of their existence. That is to say I have what I call a stomach ache or headache, or I am possibly told that I am extremely restless ...
He uses colours as analogues and writes:
when it comes to this sort of thing which I have called a beta element, it gets more difficult . . . Perhaps provisionally it would do to say ‘gross darkness’ which is different from darkness which has a certain amount of light in it; this would he with absolutely no light whatsoever the sort of light verhalised . . . by Shakespeare (Macbeth, V. iii) when he talks about ‘a kale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifjmg nothing’ (p.30).
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‘Beta elements . . I cannot be treated as ordinary thoughts or emotions or as ordinary perceptions of the material world; they are on the boundary of somatic and psychic . . .’ (Britton). They are unlike the restlessness Bion categorises as belonging to alpha elements; for that restlessness alludes to a psychic distress which is sensible to the restless person.
My patient’s experience of being malformed teeters between beta and alpha elements. I seem to be necessary in the transformation of beta to alpha elements. Alpha function is a category Bion creates to hold the process that allows for thinking thoughts; he connects this function with the capacity to create and hold an affective image in mind; he links it with a capacity to dream. The capacity is intimately connected to the mother’s function as container for the infant’s thoughts and not yet thoughts. My patient needed to use me as a container in the session that I reported. My reception of her projections led me to think about her early abandonment first in what Bion calls ‘reverie’ to further understand her experience of being both deformed and hurtful.
Initially, Bion chose the appellation alpha in order to create an open or empty category, available for inore precise understanding in the future. Later, especially in his book Cogitations, he develops the idea that alpha elements or function equate with or approximate to dream images. He writes that they are very close if not the same as ‘the visual images with which we are familiar in dreams, namely the elements that Freud regards as yielding their latent content when the analyst has inter- preted them’ (1962). Alpha function allows for an ongoing conversion of experience into image, a dreaming process continuous with our walung and sleeping. These images are affective containers for experience condensed and in visual form, and stored and available for retrieval. My reverie, according to Bion, is a fiinction of my alpha function.
Projective identification The development of thinking in Bionls theory hinges on successful projective identification. Projective identification may have roots in the biological function of evacuation but in Bion’s understanding, it develops into a psychological function promoting temporary deposit not total evic- tion. I read Bion as saying that there is a land of innate readiness in infants to dispel into the mother what is unbearable and to expect relief. Though Bion may think that this is something for which we are wired, he is aware that this wiring is precarious and can be damaged by envy, trauma, or a mother’s inability to receive her child’s projections.
Bion writes of projective identification as a form of communication and speaks persuasively about this process in his lectures in Sao Paulo.
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At these talks, a questioner asks him to ‘speak about the realistic aspect of projective identification’. The questioner is referring to Klein’s under- standing of projective identification as a phantasy operation. Bion’s answer explicates how development occurs within the infanumaternal matrix:
Let us imagine that the baby is very upset and feels afraid of an impendmg disaster like dying, which he expresses by crying. That kind of language may be both comprehensible and disturbing to the mother who reacts by expressing anxiety - ‘I don’t know what’s the matter with the child!’ The infant feels the mother’s anxiety and impatience and is compelled to take its own anxiety back again. Contrast this with a different situation. Suppose the mother picks up the baby and comforts it, is not at all disorganised or distressed, but makes some soothing response. The distressed infant can feel that, by its screams or yells, it has expelled those feelings of impending disaster into the mother. The mother’s response can be felt to detoxicate the evacuation of the infant; the sense of impending disaster is modified by the mother’s reaction and can then be taken back into itself by the baby. Having got rid of a sense o f . . . disaster, the infant gets back something that is far more tolerable. Issacs describes a situation in which a baby could be heard saying something like ‘00 el 00 el’ which the mother recognised was an imitation of herself saying ‘well, well’. In that way the infant was able to feel comforted by a good mother inside and could make reassuring noises to itself as if the mother was there all the time (1990).
Bion returns to the first case with the anxious mother to note a differ- ent developmental outcome. The anxious mother, impatient with her infant and dismissive of his need will make the baby feel that the upset is worsened and more dreadful. His continued crying will further upset the mother:
until the infant cannot stand its own screams . . . left to deal with them itself, it becomes silent and closes inside itself a frightening and bad thing, something which it fears will burst out. In the meantime, it turns into a ‘good baby again (1990).
In this quotation, the vision Bion has of the mother receiving her infant’s projections is that of an unperturbed mother. In other writings, he is aware of the turbulence projections can cause and that such disturbances
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are often a necessary initial part of the communication (1992). But of course the mother can tolerate some distresses that upset her infant without too much disruption in herself. What Bion is particularly concerned with is the mother’s failure to receive her infant’s projections in any dosage; this refusal of the only means the infant has to think his thoughts is, to Bion’s mind, disastrous.
Mother as container and thinking partner Thinking, according to Bion, is the process by which we metabolise and retain our emotional experience; it is as necessary for our psychological survival as food is for our physical. But to think our thoughts is a devel- opmental achievement which requires the aid of another. The mother becomes the infant’s and child’s thinking partner; the early communica- tive link between mother and child is projective identification. Bion is particularly interested in what makes this projective process go awry. His recollection of his own childhood as written in his autobiography provides some clues as to his interest in this area. He writes of himself as a precocious child ever asking questions and searching for relief from his confusions. These questions seemed to tire his parents rather than intrigue them; questions like ‘is golden syrup really gold?’ did not lead them to provide mediation between data framed in the convention of adult language and a child’s concrete reasoning; they were wearied, not amused (1982). Bion was in search even then for a network to contain his stray thoughts.
Failures in thinking can in the most extreme instances be equated with Rene Spitz’s descriptions of infants who fail to thrive. Bion writes:
Failure to eat, drink or breathe properly has disastrous consequences for life itself. Failure to use emotional experience produces a compa- rable disaster in the development of the personality; I include amongst these disasters degrees of psychotic deterioration that could be described as death of the personality (1962).
Bion, as Spitz, does not think a baby can develop alone; though for Bion, the foetus must have some capacity for projective identification while in the womb in order to psychically survive excessive stimulation.
Bion’s theory of development posits a mother and baby duo, but unlike Winnicott, Bion does not imagine the beginning mother baby pair as an integral, inseparable psychological unit. In fact, the mother’s expe- rienced separateness is essential to the baby’s need for an other into whom he can project his or her distress. Donald Meltzer writes of Bion
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that: ‘like Melanie Klein, he sees the mind developing in the context of the mother infant relationship, but for him it is a relationship whose essence is understanding rather than gratification . . .’ (1978).
The registration of absence heralds thinking Thinking begins to be possible in the context of the baby’s capacity to tolerate the inevitable frustration of its needs and desires. Bion says, ‘It depends on whether the decision is to evade frustration or modify it’ (1967). The infant’s dilemma is whether to register its frustration or evict it, and further how to register it. The baby is prone to experience the absent breast as present, but present malevolently. ‘No breast is felt to be an attacking breast’ (Learning from experience). The early phantasy life of the infant is informed by ‘sensation, sensory experience and primary process thinking . . . loss, dissatisfaction and deprivation are felt in sensation to be positive, painful experiences’ (1948). It is a compli- cated task of discrimination to discern pangs of hunger as absence rather than presence. With the recognition of absence comes the capacity for thinking, for substitution, metaphor, and developmentally later, abstrac- tion, and reflection.
The mother is essential in the development of the capacity to tolerate and represent absence. If the mother and the infant fail in this ongoing task, the infant left with too much distress, resorts to a form of evacua- tion. Ceasing to use the mother as a repository for the discomfort and as an interpreter of the distress, he or she instead uses her as a depository for dumping the bad object experience, The dumping is not normal projective identification; the projected experience is evicted in such disconnected bits that the mother has great difficulty in understanding them. Bion writes that when a ‘psyche operates on the principle that evacuation of a bad breast is synonymous with obtaining sustenance from a good breast . . . The end result is all thoughts are treated as if they were indistinguishable from bad internal objects’ (1967). He means that when frustration can only be experienced as some inalevolent presence then the mother is not sought for containing but rather for a receptacle for evacuation. In such a case, there is no expectation for modification of the frustration. My patient’s projections were not disconnected bits; their force had meaning; I needed to tolerate the effect in order to begin to render them meaningful for us both.
In ‘The psychoanalyst and the baby: a new look at work with infiants’, Johan Norman speaks of his work with Lisa, a six month old, whose depressed mother has recently returned from a two month psychiatric hospital stay. Lisa’s withdrawal from her mother is the reason her inother
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brings herself and her daughter to Norman. Her withdrawal after her mother’s prolonged absence is illustrative of the very difficulty of which Bion writes, the difficulty for a child to represent absence as absence, and not as a bad internal object. Norman writes that Lisa has not yet internalised her relationship to her mother as a ‘split and frightening one’, bur she is needing to actively avoid her. She cannot keep herself open to her mother. She shuts down and will not look at her. We can presume that her mother’s absence became experienced as rejection not absence. It is with Norman’s verbalisation of her withdrawal that Lisa begins her journey back to her mother’s body and to her physical and emotional need for her.
Bion’s paper ‘Attacks on Linking’ is useful in understanding both the mother’s and Lisa’s emotional dilemma at this point of return. Bion writes, ‘emotion is hated; it is felt to be too powerful to be contained by the immature psyche; it is felt to link objects and it gives reality to objects which are not self and therefore inimical to primary narcissism’ (1967). For Lisa dependence on someone other than self can be dangerous if she is to be flooded with an internalised rejecting object, so all emotional links may be experienced as toxic. Lisa’s mother, too, may need to be willing to experience or re-experience whatever painful states, longings, or internal object relations that this emotional openness and receptivity to Lisa will evoke in her.
The necessary reception of projective identification Bion thinks development requires uninterrupted projective identifica- tion in the beginning of life. He writes, ‘The growth of insight depends, at inception, on undisturbed functioning of projective identification. If . . . dsturbed, mental development is hampered by the phantasy that insight depends on what is regarded . . . as action’; by which he means expulsion of the experience rather than thinking. In writing about psychosis, Bion writes, ‘such patients do not have memories only undi- gested facts. The breakdown appears to occur in the necessity for an object into which the patient feels he is able to project parts of his personality for their development and manipulation. If he feels there is no such object, and no such possibility as “splitting off parts of his personality” disturbance is set up’ (1965). In ‘A Theory of Thinking’, Bion writes: ‘the infant personality is by itself unable to make use of the sense data, but has to evacuate these elements into the mother, relying on her to do whatever has to be done to convert them into a form suit- able for employment as alpha elements by the infant ... the mother’s capacity for reverie is the receptor organ for the infant’s harvest of self
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sensation gained by its consciousness.’ Bion does not state a requisite length of time for this communicative process. But he does state that undue interruption or failure results in a preference for action over thinking, a confusion between thoughts and bad objects, a failure to develop memories, an inability to make sense of sense data and a diffi- culty in developing alpha functioning. The interruption of this process of projective identification can be the fault of the mother or of trauma or of excessive innate envy or aggression according to Bion.
Bion does not assume that reception of projections is an easy task. In Transsformutions, Bion uses the lake as mirror as analogous to our impressionable senses. Atmospheric changes alter the shape of the tree as it is reflected in the water. Bion writes, ‘The change in atmosphere from light to darkness or from calm to turbulence would influence the transforrnation sometimes slightly at others so deeply that the observer would have to exercise all his perceptiveness to deduce the nature ...’ (1965). Bion is addressing the difficulty of knowing the essence of any experience due to intervening elements which impinge on perception; in this passage he is particularly investigating the analyst’s capacity to know the analysand’s experience. One can apply this example to the mother and child, noting that turbulence either in the mother or in the infant can impair or distort either the reception of projective identification or the clarity of the projection or even the capacity to project at all; all these impasses affect the achievement of mind and thinking.
Early trauma can render the use of projective identification untenable and disrupt the normal use of breast as container. Johan Norman writes of his work with a child, Tim, who had been born prematurely at 25 weeks. The amniotic fluid surrounding Tim had ‘dried up’ when he was 22 weeks:
the foetus had got stuck, could not move and was close to death. At his birth in the twenty-fifth week by Caesarean section, he weighed six hundred grams and immediately had a heart operation. He was in an incubator in intensive care for four months.
Six hundred grams is a little over two pounds in weight. Norman began treating Tim when he was 20 months old, not quite two years. Norman’s description of Tim captures a toddler carrying with him the experience of these early months. Norman senses that Tim’s response to his consult- ing room betrays a fear of being physically entrapped and a confusion between inside and outside spaces; Tim seemed to perceive the cupboard space as inside, and the room as outside. This confusion and
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terror could be stray thoughts from the inaccessible state of mind, remnants of somatic memories of distress in the dry womb and in the mechanical incubator. Through Tim’s work with Norman, Tim began to venture out of his autistic shell to explore his mother’s body. She became recognised as a source for love and as an emotional container. Inside and outside became more realistically and usefully configured; most impor- tantly, interior space became recognised.
One could posit that Tim was unable to perceive and to use his mother as a container while interior spaces remained contaminated for him by their association with an experience of dying. As long as they remained menacing spaces, Tim needed to shut both himself and the personal and impersonal world down and one dimensionalize them. Tim employed autistic devices to maintain this collapsed space, and to soothe and control his terror. In doing so, he deprived himself of the containing space he needed to grow emotionally. If the child cannot recognise interior spaces, he cannot see a mother capable of holding things inside herself; he cannot project anxieties into her in reality or phantasy. From his extensive work with autistic children, Donald Meltzer understands that these children attend to surfaces and disre- gard inner spaces; it is as if the world has no pockets. Bion writes that when containing drastically fails, an infant can experience space as ‘an immensity so great that . . . it cannot be represented at all’ and so there is an ‘explosive projection’ so ‘violent and . . . accompanied by such immense fear hereafter referred to as psychotic fear that the patient may express it by sudden and complete silence (as if to go to an extreme as far from a devastating explosion as possible)’ (1970). In this quote, Bion addresses failures in the containing function of the environment as causal for autistic manoeuvres.
Reverie as love For Bion, an essential maternal task is thinking. This thinking is complex. It requires a capacity to bear the infant’s projected affects and through the bearing, detoxify them and make sense of them. It is a thinking process that employs reverie, a kind of dreaming state, to comprehend the projection. Bion, referring to the mother, writes ‘. . . leaving aside the physical channels of communication, my impression is that her love is expressed through reverie’ (1962). This capacity for reverie may be a necessary mind state for us as analysts to comprehend archaic levels of our patients’ minds.
Bion’s particular interest in the failures of individuals to think may result from his work with psychotic individuaIs and his attempt to make
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sense of their communications; perhaps his early proclivity to question and wonder fuels his search. Whatever the sources, his investigations give us tools for approaching probleinatic areas in oiir patients that are not registered in ordinary language. His psychology attends to different matters from Freud’s. Though he always cites his enormous debt to Freud, his theory attends more to the archaic and fractured aspects of the mind.
Freud’s model of mind is an instinctual, meaning-making mind. In Freud’s model, there can be conflict regarding the meaning and that conflict may lead to defences that obscure the original meanings. But meaning is retrievable via associations through the links of language. Bion is looking at emotional experience which has not been contained enough to be framed in the language of affect, image, or words; emotional experience that so overwhelms the psyche that the psyche attempts to destroy the very function of psyche.
Bion devises categories to study these failures in representing and thinking. These categories reflect Bion’s understanding of the elements that contribute to thinking or that break down or prohibit that capacity. Beta elements as a category captures the idea of experience which is too overwhelming to be tolerated enough to register. Alpha elements can transmute the beta, but that transformation requires another to provide a safe harbour and a reinterpretation of the experience. For Bion, the mother’s mind is as essential as her arms, if not more so. Emotional comprehension is necessary for thinking to begin.
Bion’s theory of development is rooted in the mother-infant matrix as they are engaged in thinking: the infant in the earliest kind of thinking, projective identification, and the mother in her more sophisticated kind, one where emotions and cognition and experience co-join. Bion’s model of mind and development relies on communication; he is less interested in discharge. Cominunication is essential in his developmental scheme, despite his recognition of the difficulties one mind has in comprehend- ing another.
It is the mother’s capacity to provide her thinking mind for the infant’s projections of incomprehensible, or indigestible, or intolerable experi- ence that allows for the transformation of this experience into image and memory; in this process the child develops the capacity both for alpha function and containing. Bion’s understanding that not all experience is held in mind alters our technique in our psychoanalpc consulting rooms. Free association cannot be effective where linking of experience is severed and where the concrete exists without access to the symbolic. The following quote from his ‘Attacks on thinking’ powerfully conveys
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the importance Bion places on the process of projective identification and the mother’s receiving of it. He writes:
Projective identification makes it possible for him to investigate his own feelings in a personality powerful enough to contain them. Denial of the use of this mechanism, either by the refusal of the mother to serve as a repository for the infant’s feelings, or by the hatred and envy of the patient who cannot allow the mother to exercise this function, leads to a destruction of the link between infant and breast and conse- quently to a severe disorder of the impulse to be curious on which all learning depends. The way is therefore prepared for a severe arrest of development. Furthermore, thanks to the denial of the main method open to the infant for dealing with his too powerful emotions, the conduct of emotional life, in any case a severe problem, becomes intol- erable. Feelings of hatred are dn-ected against all emotions, including hate itself and against external reality which stimulates them. It is a short step against hatred of emotions to hatred of life itself (1967).
This brings me back to my consulting rooin and my work with the patient described above, who communicates to me from different levels of the inind a11 in the saine session. At moments I need to be able to experience the impact of her communication, to see and feel it in order to think beyond the words or I will miss something she desperately needs us to know about. At other moments, and these moments are increasing, our work is about reflection and interpretation. In the reported session, she was feeling intensely damaged and both incapable of being loved and of loving. My seeming lack of objection to her temporary interruption may have been intolerable in her present emotional state, and the catalyst for her shift in level of experience and communication. Though she is often struggling with her hatred of links, our work over time has provided her with a greater trust in the link of projective identification. Her eviction of her self hatred into me did not destroy my capacity to be a container nor ultimately iny capacity to think. The fact that I could receive her distress and begin to decode it was central to our work. She and I have only begun this passage to understanding. Bion’s ideas on how thinking develops in the infant serves a s a paradigm for helping me help my patient learn to think.
Atknow ledgernent I woz~lcl like to thunk Kuren Pronerjbr her carefid thinking which so enhanced my own.
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References Bion, Francesca (ed.) (1980) Bion in New York and Sao Paulo, Perthshire:
Clunie Press. Bion, W.R. (1967) Second Thoughts: Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis,
London: Karnac (including ‘A Theory of Thinking’ and ‘Attacks on Linking’).
Bion, W.R. (1962) Learning from experience, London: Karnac. Bion, W.R. (1990) Brazilian Lectures, London: Karnac. Bion, W.R. (1992, 1994) Cogitations, London: Karnac. Bion, W.R. (1982, 1985,1991) The Lung Week-End 1897-1919 Part of a Lqe,
Bion, W.R. (1985) All M y Sins Remembered, Another Part ( f a Lqe and The
Bion, W.R. (1977) Taming Wild Thoughts, London: Karnac. Bion, W.R. (1965) Tran$omnations, London: Karnac. Bion, W.R. (1970) Attention and interpretation, London: Karnac. Bion, W.R. (1989) Two Papers: The Grid and Caesura, London: Karnac. Bollas, Christopher (1987) The Shadow of the Object, Psychoanalysis of the
Britton, Ronald (1992) ‘Keeping Things in Mind,’ in Clinical Lectures on
Issacs, Susan (1948) ‘The Nature and Function of Phantasy’, reprinted in
Meltzer, Donald (1978) The Kleinian Development, Clunie Press. Meltzer, Donald, Brenner, John, Hoxter, Shirley, Weddell, Doreen, and
Wittenberg, Isca (1975) Explorations in Autism: A Psychoanalytical Study.
Norman, Johan (2001) ‘The psychoanalyst and the baby: a new look at work with infints’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 82, Pt. 1.
Ogden, Thomas (1986, 1990) The Matrix of the Mind, Object Relations and Psychoanalytic Dialogue, New York: Aronson.
Ogden, Thomas (1989) The Primitive Edge qf Experience, New York: Aronson.
Spitz, Rene (1965) The First Year of Lqe: A Psychoanalytic Study of Nornull and Deviant Development .f Object Relations, N Y IUP.
Winnicott, D.W. (1958, 1978) ‘Primary Maternal Preoccupation’ in Through Pediatrics to P.sychoanalysis, London: Hogarth Press.
London: Karnac.
Other Side of Genius, Family Letters, Abingdon: Fleetwood Press.
Unthought Known, New York: Columbia.
Klein d7 Bion, ed. Anderson, Robin, London: Routledge.
Klein et al, Deve1opment.s in Psychoanalysis ( 1952).
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