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Bion in Boston 2009

Panel: Bion and babies
Introduction to the panel: Virginia Ungar (Buenos Aires)

I am very pleased to participate in this meeting, and especially in this panel,

which brings together in its title two topics that are very dear to me – Bion and babies.
As panel chair, I have the duty to introduce the topic and then invite the panelists to
speak. After the presentations, there will be a dialogue among panel members, followed
by a debate from the floor. As the organizers have explained to us, at the end of the
panel meeting the audience attending each panel will be divided into three groups,
which will move to separate smaller rooms to continue with the discussion.  We will
have staff members on hand to assist in this process. Each discussion group will have
two “leaders” – one of the panelists and one of the attendees.
I have carefully pondered how to introduce this panel, and have come to the
conclusion that when speaking to an audience that knows Bion’s work so well, the last
thing to do would be to summarize his ideas. I will, therefore, draw on my own clinical
experience with children, adolescents, and adults, and on the insights gained from infant
observation. I will seek to show Bion’s influence on each of these fields, regarding both
the way we work and the theoretical and metapsychological framework that supports
these practices.
The word babies itself refers us to early emotional life. Analysts’ theoretical
approach to the question of early psychic development largely determines the model of
the mind that underlies their work. This model, in turn, affects the way they work – their
technique. We know that Bion has made great contributions to the understanding of
early emotional life, starting with his broadening of the Kleinian concept of projective
identification to create the notion of realistic projective identification. Such expansion
masterly includes the external world and its significance for child development. Bion
considers that this mechanism is the most primitive mode of communication between
infants and their environment (the mother). If the mother’s mind has the ability to
receive, contain, and “digest” her baby’s intense anxieties, it will promote linking. One
of the consequences of Bion’s theoretical development was the shift from Klein’s
concept of a good part-object, which had a concrete and physical nature, to a more
functional notion – that of a containing and “thinking” breast.
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The alpha function brings about transformations that are essential for the
development of both thought (the thinking apparatus) and object relations and links. It
is, in sum, what makes us human. One of the aspects of the alpha function is the
mother’s reverie function in the realm of realistic projective identification. Realistic
projective identification will be successful as long as it is suitable (not omnipotently
excessive) and finds a container willing to lodge projected painful feelings.
I am describing here the key concepts that Bion contributed to early
development theories. Next are the container-contained relationship and the permanent
and dynamic oscillation between the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, two
essential elements in the process of learning from experience. In the same way, bringing
together a preconception and the corresponding realization plays a crucial role in
development. As Darío Sor (1984) points out, to progress and transform into concepts,
preconceptions must be confronted with the real, external object – for instance, the
external breast in the case of the preconception on the breast, and the external parents in
the case of the oedipal preconception.
Going back to the question of analytic technique, I would like to dwell here on
an issue that is particularly relevant for therapeutic interventions with babies and their
families and for child analysis as well. I am referring here to Bion’s contention that
when analysts become observers in the privileged instance of the analytic session, they
must abandon memory and desire to promote and facilitate intuition.
When we work with developing beings, we almost always come into contact
with their parents and family. This is the logical procedure, not only for legal reasons,
but also because parents have the right to decide whether or not they like the analyst
who will treat their child, even if they only see the therapist for a consultation. These
initial encounters will provide analysts with information that will help them to ‘draw’ a
particular picture of the child in their mind. This information, however, becomes a lens
that inevitably colors what they hear, see, and feel. I think that we must see this factor as
a kind of “prejudice” that hinders the freedom, the openness analysts need when facing
the unknown with, going back to Bion’s words, “no memory or desire”. This is a
problem both in child analysis and in our work with babies: how can we prevent
information from “saturating” our mind so that we remain open to the events that unfold
in the therapeutic observational field?
I also believe that today, those of us who work with young people suffer
pressures that affect our ability to eschew memory and desire in this pair’s symmetrical
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orientation toward the past (background information) and toward the future. It is this
last vertex that I would like to address briefly. The pressure we suffer stems both from
socioeconomic conditions and from the culture of immediacy we inhabit. Health care
systems set limits to the length of treatment and demand quick results. Schools act in a
similar way – they expect increasing homogeneity among the students, and foster the
academic success that “promises” job placement in a job market that has become
ruthless. Evidence of these changes is the fact that not only have schools, at least in
Buenos Aires, opened classrooms for one-year-olds, but places for children to “play”
from six months old on have also proliferated. Moreover, an early stimulation trend in
the line of “baby Einstein” toys and games has become increasingly popular. It may be
suitable for schools to orient their work in this direction when their aim is to facilitate
children’s academic accomplishments with a view to their professional success later in
life. Nevertheless, the subjective effects of this machinery on the development of young
human beings may be disastrous.

I would like to go back now to infant observation. I have been involved in such a
practice for many years, following Esther Bick’s method. This is a field of experience
that has been greatly influenced by Bion’s thinking. Bion devoted a whole book,
Transformations (Bion, 1965), to explaining the complexity of the function of
observation in psychoanalysis. Based on his ideas, we may differentiate facts, the
experience of such facts, and the transformation of experience into thoughts that may
become increasingly complex. Just as a reminder, the Bick method comprises three
defining steps, namely, observation (weekly one-hour visits to a home during the baby’s
first two years of life), recording (detailed reconstruction of what has been observed
within twelve hours of the observation, including the observer’s emotional reactions),
and group seminars (coordinated seminars lasting an hour and a half, where
observations are discussed).

Each of these steps may be linked to Bion’s ideas. Infant observation inevitably
generates emotional turbulence in the observer. The arrival of a baby into a family
always stirs intense anxiety. According to Bion (Bion, 1970), if the implications of this
event are not evaded, the change it produces is catastrophic, for it disorganizes the
family system that preceded the birth. Observers participate in this state of affairs,
which is particularly acute during the first months of the baby’s life. At the same time,
through baby observation practitioners develop the ability to build models and
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imaginative conjectures that may grant meaning to the early emotional bonds that are
actualized in the transference.

Among the array of concepts associated with observation, perception acquires

particular relevance. Freud posited its judicative nature, and experimental psychology
verified it. Current philosophical trends increasingly reject the idea that perception
ensures direct and observable knowledge of reality. Psychoanalytic theory has always
been concerned with this issue, and has even coined a sensory metaphor to refer to the
problems of psychoanalytic perception. Just as Freud had talked about the analyst’s
“blind spots,” a group of colleagues and I put forward the existence of what we called
“hallucinated spots.” We suggested that analysts should take into account not only what
cannot be seen, but also what is attributed to perception while actually originating in the
psyche. Bion raised this issue when he described the projective aspect of perception in
its transformation into hallucinosis.
If we move on to the second moment of the observation method, that of the
written record, I believe we should take into account Bion’s differentiation between
memory and dream-like memory (Bion, 1970). Bion defines memory as an “experience
related to conscious attempts at recall. These are expressions of the fear that some
element, ‘uncertainties, mysteries, doubts,’ will obtrude” (Bion, 1984, p. 70). 1 Dream-
like memory, in turn, corresponds to psychic reality, and is essential to analytic work. It
is facilitated by the suppression of desire, of memory, and of the attempt to understand.
It is spontaneous rather than actively sought, and emerges unexpectedly, clearly, and
with the semblance of a coherent whole, in the manner of a gestalt. It is essential both
for coming into contact with psychic experience and for the latter to evolve and
transform into psychic growth. It could be a promising component of observers’ mental
state when recording observation experiences, more so than the painstaking use of
voluntary memory.
At this point, observers recall, and must register in writing what they evoke.
From Bion’s perspective, thinking involves tolerating at least two negative qualities: the
exclusion of the world of the unthought, and the ability to accept that thought is both
representation and what has not been represented – the thing-in-itself. When we write
we also relinquish; what we write will never accurately reflect what has been thought
or, in this case, what has been observed. This entire complex process is contained in the
notion of publication. “In its origin,” this notion “may be regarded as little more than
1
Here, Bion is quoting Keats.
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one function of thoughts, namely, making sense-data available to consciousness” (Bion,

1967, p. 118). Yet Bion prefers to reserve it for “operations which convey the data of
the internal world to the external world” (Grinberg et alii, 1977, p. 60).

The third moment of the method, the weekly meeting, is crucial. It renders infant
observation unique. At this time, the various viewpoints or vertices appear. This
instance is fundamental to our being able to learn about the complexity of mental life
from experience. Group work provides us with the opportunity to devote ourselves to
the construction of provisional conjectures-hypotheses that may either be maintained
when a pattern recurs during group work, or discarded in view of new evidence. In
Bion’s terms, these provisional conjectures are defining hypotheses, for they allow us to
connect a series of events by means of a name and thus avoid the dispersion of
experience. In this way, they become a first container.

From Bion’s perspective, the weekly seminar is the privileged moment for the
creation of a work group. We know that according to this author, whenever individuals
get together as a group primitive emotional phenomena take place. He calls these
phenomena group mentality. Basic assumption is the notion that qualifies group
mentality. It is basic precisely because of its primitive nature. At the same time, this
primitive level coexists with the potential for the appearance of a different level of
group functioning – the work group. In this type of group, members have acquired
certain maturity, are in contact with reality, and are capable of tolerating frustration and
of controlling their emotions.

With these ideas as our theoretical background, during our weekly meetings we
can engage in a detailed thinking and working-through process to resist the group’s
tendencies toward acting out. We must not forget that the observers’ childhood self is
painfully stimulated by their confrontation with the mother-baby scene. They may
rapidly feel invaded by feelings associated either with their rivalry with the mother or
with their identification with a displaced sibling or a benevolent grandparent. Fears and
desires connected with themselves as current or potential parents may also emerge.

I don’t want to prolong this introduction any further. My only goal was to situate
Bion’s ideas in relation to our work with children and their families. I hope I have made
clear my belief that Bion’s contributions have been so critical, that it is not possible to
think of babies’ relation with their surroundings without taking into account his concept
of link. This notion implies that in a relationship between subjects and their objects,
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examining what happens between them is more important than looking at each pole
separately. This linking is what may be affected by deficiencies on either pole, thus
opening the way for the emergence of psychopathology.

To conclude, it is worth pointing out that even though certain components of the
reverie function may be extrapolated to the analytic situation, I do not think that such
extrapolation is always justifiable. Yet if we observe babies and their mothers rather
than other links, it is because both from the emotions at play in the dyad during the first
period (L, H, and K) and from our experience of pondering them in all their
vicissitudes, there emerges the configuration of the early transference in the analytic
process. It is in this type of observation that every professional working with children
and their families (be it in health care, education, psychotherapy, or psychoanalysis)
must train. I think that we have yet to appreciate the full scope of application of the
observation method in clinical and prevention practices.

References

Sor, Darío (1984) “Concepción del desarrollo emocional temprano a partir de

formulaciones de W. R. Bion”, in Psicoanálisis, nº 2-3, Buenos Aires, 1984.

Bion, W.R. (1965) Transformations, London, Heinemann. 1965.

Bion, W.R. (1967) Second Thoughts. London: William Heinemann, 1967

Bion, W.R. (1970) Attention and Interpretation. London: Karnac Books, 1984.

Grinberg, Leon et al. (1975) Introduction to the Work of Bion: Groups, Knowledge,
Psychosis, Thought, Transformations, Psychoanalytic Practice . Strath Tay: Clunie
Press