Bion and Contemporary Psychoanalysis

Reading A Memoir of the Future

Giuseppe Civitarese, Giuseppe Civitarese

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351709286
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

This bookexamines the importance and continued relevance of A Memoir of the Future in understanding and applying Bion's work to contemporary psychoanalysis. Bion continued to innovate throughout his life, but the Memoir has been largely overlooked.

Focusing on A Memoir of the Future is not only of deep interest in terms of the author's biography, or even only in function of a better understanding of his theoretical concepts, butcan alsobe considered, for all intents and purposes, the final chapter of an ingenious creative enterprise While by some it was thought as the evidence of Bion's presumed senility, this book challenges that perspective, arguing that it represents the last challenge he issued to the psychoanalytic Establishment. In each chapter, the authors explore this notion that A Memoir forms an essential part of Bion's theory, and that in it he establishes a new 'aesthetic' psychoanalytic paradigm.

With an international list of distinguished authors, this is a key book for any analysts interested in a comprehensive understanding of Bion's work.

Chapter 1
Why Bion? Why now? Novel forms and the mystical quest

Lissa Weinstein

Introduction

I order my copy of A Memoir of the Future on a Tuesday night last February, having been asked to write something by September. Knowing little about it, I vow, with true superego severity, not to read too much of Bion’s other writings, not to dig into secondary texts or the more directly autobiographical memoirs, but rather to approach the text as one does a patient—without memory or desire. I wonder, is it even possible to forgo the comfort of theory?

‘Beckett-y,’ friend Jamieson tells me. 1000 pages.

Expensive. Even on half.com at eBay, over 100 dollars. I buy it used from someone in the States, not wanting to wait for Karnac to ship from England. To my astonishment, it arrives by the next afternoon, left in a plain brown wrapper, like pornography, in my vestibule. Looking at the package with no return address, the dreamy fog of reverie already clouding the corners of my eyes, I imagine the person who wanted to get rid of it. Quickly. Perhaps it has driven him or her mad. Uncannily unable when people ask, to remember the work’s proper, though paradoxical, title. A Memoir for the Future? Of the Future? The Past of the Future?

I find myself simply calling it ‘The Book,’ after Bruno Schulz’s (1937) story in which a boy remembers, the ‘Authentic,’ a book so magical that the Bible is only a mere ‘clumsy falsification,’ a book whose script ‘unfolds while being read, its boundaries open to all currents and fluctuations.’ Although told by his father that the book is a myth children believe and then forget, the boy knows that it is both ‘a postulate and a goal.’ Finding evidence of its pages in some wrinkled, discarded papers used to wrap meat at the butcher, he understands that within the imperfect fragments he has retrieved, one can still find ‘the faded silvery imprints of the bare feet of angels’ (p. 13).

I decide to engage the Memoir in the manner Schulz advises one to approach the ‘Authentic,’ with ‘imagination and vicarious being’ (p. 14). Recent writing on the constructivist nature of reading (Bruner, 1986; Ferro, 2006; Ogden TH and Ogden BH, 2013; Greene and Duisit, 1980) allow me the leeway to author the Memoir as well as read it, to treat it as ‘scriptable’ as opposed to a ‘lisable’ text (Barthes, 1975) and to absorb its form as well as its content. In this paper, a record of my journey with Bion, reactions to, reveries about, and struggles to ‘be’ with the text are inseparable from my understanding. Given Bion’s equation of fact with feeling in the analytic situation, I imagine that he would have approved, as it mirrors his choice of an artistic rather than an expository format, one in which the sense and rhythms of words and the affects they evoke as well as their dictionary meaning could be contained.

This approach, however, dictated a rather meandering path for a scholarly paper, an emotional response to the Memoir before attaching these reactions to a wider context, in this case an attempt to understand the necessity of a novel format as the way for Bion to express his ideas about O as they differ from Freud’s unconscious. A reversal of sorts, thesis last not first, a paper that will not so much provide answers as attempt to bring a few seemingly disparate literatures into conjunction, in this case a Bahktinian perspective on the novel, postmodern theory, and the search for a mystical and unifying experience. Like Bion, we will start in the middle with intuition and only later find concepts.

There are, undoubtedly, numerous other productive ways to approach this complex and ‘bottomless’ text whose structure mirrors the ultimate unknowability of O, for example, as self-analysis (Harris Williams, 1983), an autobiographical resolution of Bion’s war experiences or as metaphor for a revolutionary effort to shake up the complacency of psychoanalytic theory. However, the focus of my reading will not be on the content of Bion’s self-examination except insofar as it exemplifies his search for a universal discoverable only through examination of the particular; nor will the cogent discussions of analytic morality and technique that flow through the third section receive their due. No attempt will be made to provide a sequential summary of Memoir’s plot or explication of the characters. Instead, my reading will focus primarily on the first section as it is within The Dream that one sees most clearly Bion’s discontent with articulate language and his efforts to traverse the caesura between language and the event. Both the struggle and his disappointment determine Bion’s search for a new expressive form rather than the use of the standard expository presentation common to analytic papers, engendering Memoir’s stylistic and substantive similarities to postmodern fiction. A final section will attempt to understand the renewed interest in Bion and Memoir in particular.

Entering the text

The dream

A brief introduction warns the reader of what is ahead—we will understand some meanings that are ‘obvious, communicated and interpretable according to the rules of grammar and articulate speech’; we will come to understand other things if we try hard to ascertain subtle changes in rhythms, and then there will be ‘modes of thinking to which no known realization has so far been found to approximate’ (MF, p. ix) and so may remain unobserved, like a star that exists far from the purview of our most powerful instruments.

We begin in media res, told only that it is a fictitious account of psychoanalysis including an artificially constructed dream. However, the superior reality of artifice is immediately evoked as we are asked to consider whether a well-drawn fictitious character is not more ‘real’ than the drab and conventional unlived lives that surround us. The question of the authenticity of imagined characters will preoccupy Bion, just as it has Pirandello (1921) and Unamuno (1928) before him; for Bion, the existence of realer-than-real imagined characters will encapsulate his belief in psychic reality. As in Ferro’s (1992a) play on the title of Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, Bion is an author in search of characters that will allow him to articulate his history and trace processes of development. A bidirectional process between author and text, the creation of characters, and their reality will inevitably touch on questions of identity:

Every novel, every work of fiction, every poem when it is live is autobiographical. Every fictional being, every poetic personage whom an author creates helps create the author himself.

(Unamuno, 1928, p. 415)

In truth, Bion is already a character created by his minions. Like Jorge Luis Borges who documents this dissociation in Borges and I (1960), Wilfred Bion is a different being from the public Bion, the recipient of worship and/or hatred and different still from the psychoanalyst Bion, represented in the memoir by P.A. How can he possibly give voice to a disorganized mind, when he is already an icon, reified in the minds of those who look toward him? Only through a fiction, a self-reflexive and self-conscious fiction that allows for the representation of fragments of his identity through numerous characters who can then comment on their own creation.

The whole of this book is so far printed can be regarded as an artificial and elaborate construct. I myself, here introduced into the narrative can be regarded as a construct artificially composed with the aid of such artistic and scientific material as I can command a and manipulated to form a representation of an author whose name appears on the book and now, for the second time, as a character in a work of fiction. Is a convincing portrait? Does it appear to ‘resemble’ reality?

(MF, p. 86)

The memoir will suggest that there is no answer, or to be more precise, no single answer, only an approximation of the truth as the question is explored from numerous vertices.

My reading starts out pleasurably. After all, it is a novel, with dialogue, interaction, and characters in place of topic headings and dried prose. The characters are vivid enough: the maid, Rosemary,¹ with her earthy language and practical wisdom; Roland, the weak and desiccated lord of the manor; and his wife, Alice. Recognizable characters, roles we can identify, emotions easy to name if not understand—jealousy, competition, cruelty. Mimesis providing its comforting mirror of the real. The sound of distant gunfire, an undefined danger, always enticing, signals that the world that the characters have known is about to be shaken. An auspicious beginning, as it so often seems to be in analysis, the resistances still in abeyance as the new, hoped for object is approached.

As the section progresses, there is a complete dissolution of all structures of temporality and space. A dream, but whose dream? Who is awake? Who asleep? Are we in daytime or in darkness only dreaming of light? Which of the characters named exist in the novel’s created external reality and which in our reality? Day–night boundaries abrogated; social positions are quickly reversed; ‘fictional’ characters mingle freely with internal objects and self-representations, as well as the sensibilities and sounds specific to animals and primitive species. The style is a sharp contrast to Freud’s orderly approach to the study of mental phenomena; we are literally ‘in’ someone’s mind. Theoretical concepts, alpha and beta, come alive and mock the reified status of psychoanalytic jargon. As the dream deepens, all boundaries are lost.

[T]he ‘facts’ of daytime and night were defective, mutilated. They were having dreams – mutilated dreams – lacking a dimension like a solid body that casts no shadow in light. The world of reality, facts, was no longer distinguishable from dreams, unconsciousness, night. Thoughts with and thoughts without a thinker replaced a universe where discrimination ruled. Dreams had none of the distinguishing characteristic of mind, feelings, mental representations, formulations. The thinker had no thoughts, the thoughts were without thinkers.

(Ibid., p. 33)

A new character, Paranoid-Schizoid who is not embodied like the others, complains that the language he hears is excruciating, a babble, leaving him unable to distinguish memory from premonition; perhaps in this universe we have suddenly entered, where time and space no longer provide coordinates of meaning, the two perspectives are identical. Is this how words are perceived by the newborn, not quite a self who can receive meaning as we conceive it from a mature perspective, yet still fully responsive to the stimuli around him? The world of a new Depressive Position wonders, ‘What are the rules in this domain of pure thought and how can we ever represent the experiences that take place there … What are the counterparts of disturbances, perturbations, turbulences that are violent, invisible, insensible?’ (p. 51). It is clear Roland states that ‘Time as a concept is as inadequate as topological space to provide a domain for the play of such enormous thoughts as those liberated by freedom from dependence on a thinker’ (p. 70) and from the ‘polarization of “truth and falsehood.’” Communication then becomes a problem of form far more than of repressed content. The task seems almost insurmountable:

If you think the problems that we have to solve can be solved in a framework where ‘things’ happen in time and space, with ideas taken from the vocabulary and grammar invented for the senses, we shall fail. It is not unlike solving the problem of joining nine dots, arranged on a plane to form a cube, with four straight lines. You cannot do this and stay within the pattern of the cube.

(Ibid., p. 188)

The Dream section is nearly incomprehensible, obstinate in its assault on our usual structures of understanding. No matter what time of day I pick up the book, I fall into a dreamless sleep after reading only a few pages and awaken with no memory. Like an analyst with a psychotic patient, I wonder, ‘What did I sign on for? Rudderless, insensible, can’t he explain himself? Is it worth all the work it will take to comprehend this?’ I search for familiar terms to cover the experience, but Bion has undermined that soothing trick:

(More bloody metaphors! Who ever could sort out a mass of verbiage like this?) You could try calling it ‘Paranoid Schizoid’ after–a long way ‘after’–Melanie Klein. Good idea. Good dog paranoid schizoid here, here is a nice piece of jargon for you.

(Ibid., p. 59)

I am beginning to truly understand Freud’s (1915/1955a) statement that ‘Hate, as a relation to objects, is older than love’ (p. 139). Instead of thoughts, I have a visceral sense of being tormented by this bizarre, fragmented universe and an aversion to ever opening this book again.

Bion, now entering the narrative as a character (sometimes called Captain Bion or alternately Myself), suggests that it is a problem of perspective, or from which vertex one is viewing:

The poet or genius can look at the scientist or genius and the revelation, as at the opposite ends of the telescope, are too large and too small to be tolerable or even to be recognizably related. It is felt to be the ‘fault’ of the instrument that brings such different objects together. But it might be the ‘fault’ of the objects for being so different–or is it the human animal that has to ‘use’ its accumulations of facts, that it has not the experience that would enable it to ‘understand’ what it sees, blind or sightful?

(MF, p. 57)

My capacity for tolerating not knowing is sorely tested. As I type my chosen quotes, they return to the impenetrable, their meaning deleted, evading my grasp. I begin to feel the dread of the paper due, the terror of my colleagues’ reactions. I call upon my analytic faith that it will come to me, that something will come to me; it always does, that terror does not last forever. I think of my analyst remarking that everyone writes a bad paper, most people more than one; a writing teacher who tells me that dread is part of every writing experience, you just have to push through it. But what is the purpose of this book? Autobiography? Something else?

This book could be hailed as bearing, in itself, resemblance to its paternity—that it could not be mistaken for someone else’s ‘brain child’. But I may have a different aim; say, that of writing a description of psycho-analysis. To me, that the book bore witness to its mental origins might be an unwelcome irrelevance, a feature additional to the main component of my wish to communicate and your wish to receive.

(Ibid., p. 86)

‘Show, don’t tell,’ the first axiom of every creative writing teacher. If not an answer, the idea of an induced experience at least allows an approach to the material. More than a self-portrait, Bion wants to communicate a mode of thought—the inarticulate, the indescribable. This can only be accomplished through the reader’s (in this case, my) phenomenological experience of the reception of the disorganized, terrified fragments he presents. Through its artificiality, its lack of fidelity to consensual reality, Memoir aims to create a ‘real’ emotional truth. As incomprehension is at the core of analysis, Bion also wants to convey the practice of psychoanalysis, to immerse the reader in its ‘feel, rather than write (another) a paper about psychoanalysis, whose reified terms have lost their life and now function to provide a defense against knowing.

Unable to actively impose a structure I already understood on the material, with little option, I allow a state of passive (or is it active?) receptivity and find myself responding less to content or symbolic meaning, but resonating with fragments, tempos, rhythms, shapes, thoughts without a thinker. After a while, islands of sensibility emerge from the flood. Recurring themes become recognizable, sections repeat accruing new meaning and form rudimentary patterns: the near ubiquitous inclusion of something and its opposite made identical except for their position along a continuum, repeated references to Plato’s cave, the concern with the real versus the imagined/created, the difficulty linking one way of thinking to another, the inherent paradox of language—that once communicated, thought is no longer ‘alive,’ but ossified, hence the need for constant new beginnings, new vantage points once something has been grasped, how every seeming solution brings us to the start of a new problem, the same questions asked again, each time beginning from a new vantage point. If the text does not quite make ‘sense,’ at least my sense of dread retreats.

I allow myself the freedom of incomprehension that I tolerate when approaching an experimental novel; only this time, it is a novel whose other reality is a way of thinking and not, for example, as in Henry James ‘Jolly Corner,’ a ghostly world where the self that his current life has eclipsed co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Why Bion? Why now? Novel forms and the mystical quest
• 2 ‘Psycho-analysis, I believe’ in Wonderland: reading and literature in A Memoir of the Future
• 3 Bion and the apes: the bridging problem of A Memoir of the Future
• 4 Memoir of the Future and memoir of the numinous
• 5 A Memoir of the Future and the defence against knowledge
• 6 Bion’s razor: reading A Memoir of the Future
• 7 Memories of the future, realisations in the present. The oneiric destiny of pre-conceptions that turn up in the minds of dreamers
• 8 The ineffable
• 9 Psychoanalysis ‘at the mind’s limits’: trauma, history and paronomasia as ‘a flower of speech’ in A Memoir of the Future
• 10 The ‘Memoir’ experienced from the standpoint of contemporary art: a chronicle of a death foretold
• 11 Reflections on ‘nonsense’ in A Memoir of the Future
• References
• Index