Wilfred Bion and Literary Criticism

Naomi Wynter-Vincent

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000439915
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Wilfred Bion and Literary Criticism introduces the work of the British psychoanalyst, Wilfred Bion (1897–1979), and the immense potential of his ideas for thinking about literature, creative process, and creative writing.

There is now renewed interest in Bion's work following the publication of his Complete Works but the complexities of his theory and his distinctive style can be forbidding. Less well-known than Freud or Lacan, the work of Wilfred Bion nevertheless offers new insights for psychoanalytic literary criticism and creative writing. For newer readers of his work, this book offers an engaging introduction to several of Bion's key ideas, including his theory of thinking (the 'thought without a thinker'), the container/contained relationship, alpha-function; alpha-elements, beta-elements, and bizarre objects; K and -K; the Grid, O, and the caesura. It also offers a way in to Bion's astonishing and challenging experimental work, A Memoir of the Future, and explores the impact of his devastating personal experiences as an officer during the First World War. Each chapter of Wilfred Bion and Literary Criticism draws on one or more specific aspects of Bion's theory in relation to creative texts by Sigmund Freud, Stevie Smith, B.S. Johnson, Mary Butts, Jean Rhys, Nicholas Royle, J.G. Ballard, and Wilfred Bion himself.

The first full-length study to explore the potential of Bion's ideas for literary criticism, Wilfred Bion and Literary Criticism introduces his complex and extensive work for a new audience in an accessible and engaging way, and will be of great interest to scholars of creative writing, literary criticism, and psychoanalysis.

1 Selected facts: introducing the work of Wilfred Bion

DOI: 10.4324/9781003006619-1

I have experience to record, but how to communicate this experience to others I am in doubt; this book explains why.¹

The work of the British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion (1897–1979) is beginning to emerge from a position of relative obscurity, even within clinical psychoanalysis. A number of publications in recent years² suggest that Bion’s oeuvre, in its bewildering entirety, is enjoying renewed interest. In 2014, the first complete edition of his works (comprising sixteen volumes) was published under the general editorship of Chris Mawson. Viewed as a whole, it becomes clear that the scope and breadth of Bion’s writing demands detailed commentary and bears comparison with that other great ‘standard edition’ within the psychoanalytic field, the complete works of Freud.

In this book I will argue that the work of Wilfred Bion offers a rich and valuable resource for thinking about writing (and writing about thinking). While a number of writers have drawn on his work to explore literary themes (see, for example, work by Jacqueline Rose,³ Mary Jacobus,⁴ and Steven Connor⁵), the relative difficulty of his writing, in some places replete with apparently mathematical symbols, and a style that hovers undecidably between clinical detachment and dry humour, has perhaps hindered the wider circulation of his ideas among literary critics and critical theorists. R.D. Hinshelwood has written of Bion that ‘his writings appear gnomic, irritating and intensely stimulating, and this style has been responsible for a tendency to sanctify him while not really understanding him’.⁶ Some of his more approachable texts, such as the collections of his transcribed seminars and lectures, have only been available in print since 2005 (The Italian Seminars and The Tavistock Seminars) or in the past decade (Los Angeles Seminars and Supervision was published in 2013). With the exception of his important early paper ‘Attacks on Linking’, his work has not been anthologised, which is surprising given how concise some of his papers are, although a recent book by Nicola Abel-Hirsch⁷ brings together and provides commentary on 365 Bion quotations (one for each day of the year), and moreover draws our attention to how very quotable Bion is. His two remarkable 1977 essays about the ‘stray’ or ‘wild’ thought, improvised onto a dictaphone and posthumously transcribed by Francesca Bion, have been in print since 1997, but in a minor edition that has not yet succeeded in bringing these gems of his thinking to a wider audience. More recently, one volume of the Complete Works has brought a number of additional essays and his ‘Further Cogitations’ to light, including the provocative essay ‘New and Improved’.

Bion also left a rich collection of autobiographical resources. His war memoir, written immediately after his return from the First World War, was intended to serve belatedly in lieu of unwritten letters to his parents; episodes from this period are revisited and enriched by later accounts that appear in The Long Week-End, which offers a biographical account from birth through to the end of the war. A further autobiography, All My Sins Remembered, picks up the story of Bion’s life from after this period through to the immediate aftermath of his first wife’s death, though the volume has been more happily rounded out with a selection of his letters and illustrations to his second wife Francesca, and their children. The collected volume of his ‘cogitations’, as he called them, provides an extensive theoretical journal offering glimpses into the development of many of his ideas over a number of years. Finally, his strange three-volume ‘novel’, A Memoir of the Future, launched Bion late in life into a wildly creative, experimental kind of autobiography, drawing on personal history, theory, and the exercise of his ‘speculative imagination’.⁸

Part of the reason for Bion’s relative neglect derives, I suspect, from the not unreasonable tendency by commentators to position his work as a footnote to Melanie Klein. Bion entered into analysis with Klein after the period of the ‘Controversial Discussions’ (between the followers of Anna Freud and the followers of Melanie Klein in the 1940s), although he was involved in psychotherapeutic training at the Tavistock Institute from the 1930s. His theoretical approach undoubtedly builds on Melanie Klein’s highly original reading of Freud, and he is usually named in the group of post-war psychoanalysts described as Kleinian and post-Kleinian, alongside others such as Hanna Segal, Betty Joseph, Elliott Jaques, and Esther Bick. Indeed, the central Kleinian concepts of projective identification and the (paranoid-schizoid and depressive) positions are a sine qua non for Bion’s best-known idea, the container-contained relationship.⁹

His clinical specialism in treating psychotic patients also benefitted from Klein’s extension of psychoanalysis to children, for whom new ways of thinking about and practising psychoanalysis were needed. The language of object relations (splitting, part-objects, the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ breast, unconscious ‘phantasy’¹⁰) is strongly evident in his work, although his formal use of ‘Kleinian’ terms comes to be supplemented with new, wholly ‘Bionian’¹¹ concepts, such as alpha-function, beta-elements, and bizarre objects; and existing words and phrases used to new effect, such as the selected fact, transformations, and the caesura. Over time, the recognisable elements of Kleinian theory are also modified in subtle but distinctive ways: the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions become PS ↔ D (drawing attention to the oscillation between the two states, and their continued operation throughout the life span), and where the two positions are further glossed as ‘patience’ and ‘security’, respectively, when applied to the psychoanalyst’s experience of feeling successively bewildered by – and making sense of – the analysand’s material.¹²

While Bion’s work proceeds from his grounding in Kleinian metapsychology, it is Freud’s short 1911 essay, ‘Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning’,¹³ that serves as starting point and inspiration for Bion’s highly original speculations in Learning from Experience, as well as for the labels he gives to the different ‘uses’ of a statement along the vertical axis of the ‘Grid’, his observational tool for the practising analyst, first described in 1963.¹⁴ His recourse to Freud can also give rise to a comparison of Bion with that other ‘inspired bizarre analyst’,¹⁵ Jacques Lacan, whose work, unlike Bion’s, has enjoyed considerable posthumous attention within the world of critical theory and literary and film criticism.

Bion was himself keen to stress that he did not necessarily wish to challenge existing psychoanalytic theories, being chiefly concerned with the refinement of psychoanalytic observation. This modesty on Bion’s part has also, perhaps, contributed to the overlooking of his work beyond the clinical field: he has been seen as a specialist primarily in what at first (and second) sight can appear to be an overly abstracted or technical approach to psychoanalytic work. Although the later seminars and lectures did much to round out that picture, his laconic style of responding to audience questions confirmed his ‘difficulty’ even as he was at pains to dismantle and ironise a position of authority. In this respect, too, he bears comparison with Lacan, who sought to bring into question the presumed authority of the analyst. Unlike his French counterpart, however, it is clear from Bion’s frequently scathing self-commentary that he considered himself to have achieved nothing more than making ‘the best of a bad job’.¹⁶

Wilfred Bion’s life was a remarkably eventful one,¹⁷ marked by a number of traumatic events that included serving in the First World War and losing his first wife very shortly after the birth of their first child, Parthenope. The son of a British civil engineer and a woman of Anglo-Indian heritage, he was born in north-west India in 1897 and spent his infancy there. His childhood memories of India – of brilliant sunlight and searing heat amid the ever-present vigil against wild animals – made a profound of impression on him. At the age of eight, he was abruptly sent away to a public school in England, an experience he found profoundly painful: in his view, he survived the ordeal chiefly by cultivating his skill in sports and developing a personality structure that he later described as a ‘shell’.¹⁸ His interrupted childhood was compounded by the more traumatic interruption of his early adulthood by the First World War. He joined the Royal Tank Regiment in 1916, serving as an officer in Flanders and Ypres until the end of the war; was decorated for his bravery with a DSO (Distinguished Service Order) medal by the British government, and awarded membership of the French Légion d’Honneur. After the war, he read history at the Queen’s College, Oxford, and after graduation briefly entered school teaching (before a false allegation of misconduct prompted his resignation); thereafter he embarked on medical training at University College London in 1924, already intent on pursuing a specialism in psychoanalysis. In the 1930s he studied psychotherapy at the Tavistock Clinic, and began a training analysis in 1938 that was, again, subject to interruption: the onset of the Second World War. During the first part of the 1940s he began the experimental group work (known as the Northfield Experiment) with demobilised and injured soldiers that would form the basis of his first (and, during his lifetime, most successful) book, Experiences in Groups.

His personal life was also marked by false starts and interruptions. After a disastrous love affair and broken engagement with a young woman after the First World War (recounted in All My Sins Remembered), he married Betty Jardine, a successful stage actor. War work took him away from home shortly before she was due to give birth to their first child; he received the good news of Parthenope’s birth while he was away from home, only to learn of his wife’s death a few days...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Citations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Selected facts: introducing the work of Wilfred Bion
• 2 Freud’s ‘excessively intense idea’: the Project for a Scientific Psychology
• 3 Pompey’s thought-worm: Stevie Smith’s Novel on Yellow Paper
• 4 Restoring the lost container: B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates
• 5 With and without Bion: supplementing an uncanny reading of Mary Butts
• 6 Jean Rhys’ bizarre telescope: a Bion-emic/-etic reading of Wide Sargasso Sea
• 7 Efficient psychosis: notes towards a Bionian Ballardian breakdown
• 8 Becoming ray: transformations in Nicholas Royle’s Quilt
• 9 Dream I Tell You: Bion’s A Memoir of the Future
• 10 Is writing (an) alpha-function?
• References
• Index