WILFRED BION: HIS LIFE AND WORKS eighteen ninety-seven to nineteen seventy-nine (Part 1)

WILFRED BION: HIS LIFE AND WORKS eighteen ninety-seven to nineteen seventy-nine WILFRED BION HIS LIFE AND WORKS eighteen ninety-seven to nineteen seventy-nine

This is the first full biography and the first comprehensive exposition of the most interesting and arguably the most influential figure in recent psychoanalysis. It is particularly welcome, since Bion's ideas are often found to be difficult of access. There is no substitute for immersing oneself in his writings, but an introduction is surely a useful beginning, something which no one has hitherto undertaken with respect to the complete works.

Bléandonu takes us through Bion's personal and intellectual explorations and gives clear expositions of his key concepts, including work groups and basic assumption groups; psychotic processes; the grid; epistemology; catastrophic change; abandonment of memory and desire; the mystic; ultimate truth. Finally, he guides the reader through the fantasy writings in the Memoir of the Future, the masterpiece that is Bion's autobiography and his final writings, including the posthumous Cogitations. The book is a tour de force.

FOREWORD

Bion's writing often intimidates; therefore we have a surprising hesitancy over interpreting his views. Only Leon Grinberg (with colleagues) and Donald Meltzer have gone into print in any prominent way. And that is in spite of Bion's enigmatic and ambiguous way of writing; it calls for interpretative secondary sources to develop it. The many ideas which he deliberately leaves half-formulated, the evocative and limping style of his fiction-writing (if it is fiction), and the often humorous kind of gestural asides to clinical material would seem to invite being filled up with flesh and blood and passion. And indeed they do. It is what Bion intended; he wanted to work his readers so that they produced their own responses, their own hard learning, instead of his. But the task that he seems to require of his readers is so personal and idiosyncratic that there is a sense of being in the closet with him in a private contemplation. It feels unseemly to fill out the ideas in one's own way for public consumption.

What Gerard Bleandonu has created is a sense of the corpus of Bion's work as a whole, and he has set it in an episodic sketch derived from Bion's autobiographical experience of his own life. We can see here just how much Bion's oeuvre transcends Freud and Klein before him, and the work of subsequent Kleinians after him. And this is because Bion was interested in the tangential task of the meaning of psychoanalysis itself in our culture, and especially within a philosophical tradition. Bleandonu has done us an important service in steering a way through the philosophical interests that influenced Bion, and the sources that he drew on. Bion the philosopher comes through strongly; he was a theory-builder, and only on the way a therapeutic psychoanalyst. That estimation contrasts with the overview we have cultivated, as practising psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, in order to exploit Bion's ideas in therapy. His work as a whole is balanced between the two, but leaves us bemused; too philosophical to draw together a clinical school of psychoanalysis, too clinical to make an impact on philosophers as he truly wished. Bleandonu manages to sit astride the two.

The book is structured simply: an initial review of Bion's childhood; a review of his work on groups, and during World War Two; the period of his work on psychotic patients; an epistemological phase; and a final and brief section on the late 'fictional' trilogy. The first section is tantalizingly sketchy, though evocative, as in fact are Bion's autobiographical texts. One day a fully researched biography will mould into a perceptible form those hesitant links we barely glimpse here: the one that peeps out occasionally from his Indian upbringing with his ayah; his psychoanalytic mysticism that involved abolishing memory and desire (surely inspired by his roots in the East); and his later entry into the nineteen seventies culture of Los Angeles where he would once gain have encountered oriental religion and mysticism.

I suppose all biography linking formative influences and the later professional achievements is risky, especially when written for psychoanalysts; and especially, perhaps, about a psychoanalyst. Perhaps Bleandonu is right to leave that mostly aside - and to leave us to fill in our own surmises, just as Bion would have done. For this book stays with the achievement. The section on groups informs us of the relation between basic assumptions and the ideas of J.A. Hadfield, Bion's first therapist. Bion as a 'Hadfieldian' before he was a Kleinian is intriguing and important; but we are again left with all the questions open for us to fill in - what was all this social psychology that was around at the time for the Army and its psychiatrists to use? What really is the status now of these early ideas on groups after the redrawing of group life in Bion's return to groups in nineteen seventy, a much more psychoanalytic (and Bionian!) approach?

Bleandonu's discourse on Bion's ideas about psychosis rivets us to the texts; that grid is laid out carefully and explained meticulously, perhaps more explicitly than Bion does himself. How the idea of links, and attacks on them, emerges as the great nuclear idea for the rest of Bion's working life is given proper importance. Our nose, however, rarely lifts from the grindstone and we seldom have a moment to survey the surrounding context of work going on elsewhere; we have to call a check on our sense that Bion's developing ideas were a hermetically sealed process, without influence from outside. This intellectual biography follows Bion himself towards suppressing debate on the influences that pressed on him. For Bion appeared to present himself as being in isolation, generating his ideas de novo in a process of spontaneous generation; a guru linked in with 'truth' in a way that ordinary mortals are not. We know this to be untrue; psychoanalysts especially know it. Yet reputations are still made, and biographies written and sold on the basis of it.

The next section of the book does, in contrast, give more context. This, perhaps the most important section, describes Bion's attempt to create an extensive psychoanalytic epistemology. Here the background of logical positivism and British analytical philosophy is sketched in, and one gets the feeling that this is Bleandonu's greatest interest in Bion. It gave me, for the first time, a picture of Bion's vast ambition as a philosopher - as opposed to his identity as a psychoanalyst who had stumbled into philosophical territory, which is the way I might previously have described it to myself. This topic of Bion the epistemologist is surely a subject that longs for as extended an exploration as Bion the psychoanalyst.

The final section, unfortunately but not necessarily cursory, deals synoptically with the fictionalized version of psychoanalysis in Bion's trilogy of 'novels'. I suspect that Bleandonu has reacted as I do to them - with an irritation at their numbing density and wanton confusion. There must be a resistance to tackling them at the end of such an exhausting exposition of the previous phases of Bion's life. I can sympathize with this. After the challenging journey of Bion's professional and philosophical work, to take on something as remote as Joyce's Ulysses - and not written with half the wit, style or conviction - makes the reader wilt, let alone the biographer.

Most people take parts of Bion and develop their own views; then work, clinically or philosophically, with what they have produced from the bit they have taken away. In contrast, Gérard Bleandonu has made an extraordinarily inclusive attempt to cover the ground from the early work on groups (and even before), to the very last work on the fictionalization of psychoanalytic theory. It is, in a relatively short book, and with a glittering clarity of style, an impressive achievement.

Bleandonu's coverage is comprehensive and as valid as any, though the manuscript is written as if it were a definitive reading, which it cannot be. With such a standardizing text, Bleandonu has been faced with the paradox of making an exegesis of a work that trembles only for interpretation. His choice was between defining and explaining in the style of a standard secondary source, or free associating as Bion would have demanded. He has managed, as far as I believe it is possible, to take the side of straight exposition, of the 'telling it as it is' point of view. And a didactic text will be of great relief to many people (many students) who have struggled with Bion. But a Foreword is possibly the right place for a warning: do not be beguiled by Bleandonu's straightforward writing. After you have finished here go back to some of the real thing. Until then you can really know nothing of Bion. We could have asked Bleandonu to contest the ideas more, we could have asked him to cloak the ideas in their surrounding psychoanalytic debate, raging through the nineteen forties to the sixties. Had Bleandonu discussed the possible alternative readings that could be made, that might have been made, then the impression of a definitive text would have been mellowed. But then we would have had solid academic porridge; we would have lost all the tantalizing, foggy potentiality of Bion - just the quality which attracts us and infuriates us, which limits Bion's work, but which extends our own imaginations.

Perhaps this reading is better for coming from the Continent, where philosophical occupations are more present in the culture and in professional life. In Bleandonu's presentation Bion sought for a grand and unifying theory of everything. Or is that just a continental reading of Bion in continental terms? Nevertheless, this is the first really good and comprehensive guide through the oscillating components of Bion's soaring intellectual and professional achievement, and his agonized and restless soul.

Even so, there is a curious quality to reading about a British psychoanalyst through a French-speaking author. It feels as though one of our own has been repatriated, rather like Bion's own return to this country to die, after his exile in Los Angeles. One can only regret the timidity of us British not being the first to make the effort to lay off the taboo of the sacred texts. This book is surely a formidable achievement; equally surely it forms the grounding for the next effort that will inevitably be made to ensnare such a free spirit.